Are video games art? It’s a question that has dogged players, developers, and critics for decades, and even now, it’s one without an easy answer.
This cultural dustup was at its most brutal in 2010, after film critic Roger Ebert declared that “video games can never be art” in an opinion piece on his website. It was a familiar drumbeat from Ebert, but this round of vitriol was in reaction to a TED Talk delivered by Kellee Santiago, a developer who was working on the then-upcoming Journey at thatgamecompany. While praising Santiago as “bright, confident, [and] persuasive,” everyone’s favorite film critic ultimately objected to every one of her arguments, sparking a huge backlash of counter-opinions in the gaming press.
After several months of sniping, the two warring factions reached a truce (or at the very least, a ceasefire) in July when Ebert invited everyone to “play on [his] lawn” and admitted that games could be art. It was a nice gesture, but it didn’t entirely put the question to bed, and it’s something we’re still talking about today. Want proof? Look no further than the recent HBO adaptation of The Last of Us and the argument that it contains “the greatest story that has ever been told in video games.” Many people agree… and many people absolutely do not.
But Ebert’s reaction was just a preview to the main event. So let’s jump to November 2012, when the Museum of Modern Art acquired a collection of 14 games to form the core of their Applied Design exhibit (which would open in 2013), and seemed to settle the question once and for all.
At the time, MoMA prized interactivity in the selection of titles for its inaugural excursion into games. This focus on gameplay and movement was evident in their list of acquisitions, which included the pellet-munching of Pac-Man (1980), the block-stacking of Tetris (1984), the clump-collecting of Katamari Damacy (2004), the portal-hopping of Portal (2007), and thatgamecompany’s own Flow (2006):
The games are selected as outstanding examples of interaction design—a field that MoMA has already explored and collected extensively, and one of the most important and oft-discussed expressions of contemporary design creativity. Our criteria, therefore, emphasize not only the visual quality and aesthetic experience of each game, but also the many other aspects—from the elegance of the code to the design of the player’s behavior—that pertain to interaction design.
Museum of Modern Art – Applied Design (2012 Acquisitions)
- Pac-Man (1980)
- Tetris (1984)
- Another World (1991)
- Myst (1993)
- SimCity 2000 (1994)
- Vib-Ribbon (1999)
- The Sims (2000)
- Katamari Damacy (2004)
- Eve Online (2003)
- Dwarf Fortress (2006)
- Flow (2006)
- Portal (2007)
- Passage (2008)
- Canabalt (2009)
Taking a page from a then-new feature on Steam, the exhibit’s curators even included a wishlist of games they’d like to acquire in the future.
Sure enough, a year later, MoMA expanded the Applied Design installation to include five more games (and one console) from the 1970s and 1980s, all of which helped define our early notions of what a video game could be. Ralph Baer’s revolutionary work on the Magnavox Odyssey (1972) was now part of the collection, as well as foundational games such as Pong (1972) and Space Invaders (1978). A final spot was reserved for Mojang’s Minecraft (2011), which had officially launched just a few months earlier, and was already inspiring a new generation of players and developers alike:
Ralph Baer’s Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game system and a masterpiece of engineering and industrial design, introduced electronic games to the American public. In the same year, a young and ambitious Nolan Bushnell founded Atari (where, by the way, an equally young and at least equally ambitious man named Steve Jobs first found employment). Atari rapidly became the most famous video game company in the world, and in an amazingly fertile period produced one seminal work after another. Concurrently, the already rich arcade culture of Japan was turned on its head with the release of Taito’s Space Invaders, a game that so captivated the Japanese public it led to a temporary nationwide shortage of 100-yen coins. When Space Invaders finally made it to the US, it conquered the arcade industry. The last work on our list is Mojang’s Minecraft, a fascinating game that combines multiple genres into one sprawling, unpredictable, and utterly addictive masterpiece.
Museum of Modern Art – Applied Design (2013 Acquisitions)
- Magnavox Odyssey (1972)
- Pong (1972)
- Space Invaders (1978)
- Asteroids (1979)
- Tempest (1981)
- Yar’s Revenge (1982)
- Minecraft (2011)
While many people applauded these additions to MoMA’s collection (John Maeda of Wired said that “Are games art?” wasn’t the question, but rather, “Which videogames make the cut?”), others weren’t so kind.
Liel Leibovitz of The New Republic praised the “transformative” power of games, but argued that the underlying “code” was ultimately meaningless in a museum setting without a player holding the controller. The Guardian‘s Jonathan Jones went even further and wailed about the “overly serious and reverent praise” that games receive from some “fake gamers” in the art world. This editorial so angered Paola Antonelli, MoMA’s Senior Curator of Architecture and Design, that she fired back with a TED Talk (“Why I brought Pac-Man to MoMA”) of her own.
Things were quiet after this rather public back-and-forth and MoMA continued their work with video games, quietly adding two new games to their holdings. Capcom’s Street Fighter II was acquired for A Collection of Ideas, a 2014 exhibit about interactivity that also featured “the Google Maps Pin,” and the museum added Nokia Snake (1997) in 2015 through an anonymous donation:
This installation focuses on works designed during the last few decades that have been acquired by the Museum not only because they met aesthetic and functional standards that are worthy of our collection, but also because they introduce new categories of investigation and new design forms. The galleries feature clusters of acquisitions that tackle, for instance, the relationship between design and violence; new expressions of organic design in response to environmental and societal disruptions; and the increasing importance of interaction design, as seen in eight video games new to the collection.
Museum of Modern Art – Other Additions
- Street Fighter II: The World Warrior (1991)
Represented By: Hyper Street Fighter II: The Anniversary Edition (2003) - Nokia Snake (1997)
In 2016, Tim Mulkerin of Paste Magazine reached out to a few of MoMA’s curators for a two-part update on how their thinking about games had evolved since the opening of the Applied Design exhibit (Part One) and how video games might fit into the museum’s plans for the future (Part Two):
In order to understand the state of videogame acquisitions at MoMA four years after their initial announcement and the resulting backlash, I spoke with two employees from the Architecture and Design department: Michelle Millar Fisher, curatorial assistant, and Paul Galloway, collections specialist. I asked about what it was like to be in the middle of a furious debate over the artistic merit of videogames, about MoMA’s somewhat nebulous (but evolving) stance on violent content, and what it means to be in a position of power when it comes to determining what MoMA will and won’t bring into the collection.
In 2022, the Museum of Modern Art unearthed some of the games from the Applied Design and A Collection of Ideas exhibits for a new installation. Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive Design was designed to explore the ways in which people connect with the world around them, both digitally through their devices and in person with other people. The exhibit added 12 new titles to MoMA’s holding, including Flower (2009), Journey (2012), and Papers Please (2013).
And just like the Google Maps Pin in A Collection of Ideas, games shared a space with some rather unusual new items in the gallery. In addition to two more titles from thatgamecompany’s catalog, MoMA used the exhibit as an opportunity to announce their acquisition of the at sign and the power symbol, contextualizing the history and ubiquity of both interactive icons for visitors:
As our devices like to remind us, we spend a huge portion of our lives in digital worlds. The interfaces we use to access them—from Zoom to FaceTime, WhatsApp to Discord, Roblox to Fortnite—are visual and tactile manifestations of code that both connect and separate us, and shape the way we behave and perceive others. Yet like other ubiquitous tools, interfaces are seldom recognized as design. This exhibition brings together notable examples of interaction design, a field that considers the points of contact between objects—whether machines, apps, or entire infrastructures—and people.
Museum of Modern Art –
Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive Design
- NetHack (1987)
- Inside (2006)
- Flower (2009)
- Journey (2012)
- Papers Please (2013)
- The Stanley Parable (2013)
- Monument Valley (2014)
- Never Alone (2014)
- This War of Mine (2014)
- Everything is Going to be OK (2017)
- Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy (2017)
- Return of the Obra Dinn (2018)
Never Alone opened in September 2022 and closed just a few weeks ago in July 2023, and naturally, a new round of media attention greeted th eexhibit’s run (including pieces from tech-focused outlets like Ars Technica and Inverse, as well as art critiques from The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Architect’s Newspaper). This time around, the editorials and opinion pages are mostly in support of what MoMA is doing, and critics are thrilled that the museum is inspiring curators at other institutions to explore the possibility of adding interactive exhibits to their normally-quiet halls.
So are video games art? Even with the positive response to the Never Alone exhibit, that question will probably never be answered to the satisfaction of everyone. But the Museum of Modern Art has made a huge effort to welcome games onto their gallery walls and I’m very interested to see what they do next.