Digitalarti Mag's blog

If you are in Paris in the coming months and wish to play videogames on historical game consoles, have fun and get better acquainted with game culture, then there is one destination for you: Museogames. It is an exhibition dedicated to video games organized by the Musée des Arts et Métiers (Museum of Arts and Crafts) at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM) in Paris.

Museogames is the first such exhibition shown in a national museum in France. It focuses on the history of videogames with an emphasis on the hardware used to play them. The focus of the museum itself is the history of technology, including a display of the many apparatuses it has gathered over time. Opened to the public in 1802, the museum was conceived after the French Revolution as a place to learn about how to operate machines, and to improve oneself for the sake of national industry. It was also a kind of encyclopedia of objects intended to serve as inspiration for inventors, researchers... In keeping with this tradition, the museum's videogames exhibition traces the development of video games with a wide range of game consoles, from the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972 to the Microsoft XBox and Nintendo Gamecube in 2001. No contemporary games are part of the exhibition.

Museogames transforms all the visitors into gamers. The central focus of the exhibition offers visitors the possibility to play on the consoles that the exhibited games were originally played on, with their screens, joysticks and other gaming interfaces. The choice was made by the exhibition's team to have the original consoles in order to simulate the same kind of experiences that were enjoyed at a time when these consoles were used daily and the coin-operated arcade game machines, also featured in the exhibition, were installed in shops. A few personal computers, in particular from the 1980s, are also on display: an Apple IIE, an Atari 520 STF, a Commodore Amiga 500... This seems a little surprising as many gamers all around the world use only their personal computer to play videogames, instead of a game console. Games themselves are different according to the hardware they are designed to be played with, but this is not an aspect Museogames explores. The main room of the exhibition features a huge table displaying game consoles and computers, in the order of their public releases. On each machine, the visitor/gamer can play one game (sometimes a few but generally one) that has been chosen to exemplify the console, based on its specificities, popularity and availability. Gamers play on the console screens, but the video output is also projected on the wall, in order that the visitors who aren't playing enjoy a glimpse of the gameplay of those games. At the back of the exhibition, there is a small room packed with classic arcade games.

During some periods, the exhibition is so packed that the tickets specify allocated time slots to limit the time that visitors spend playing.

In general, the museum displays its artefacts behind glass, and the game consoles in its collection cannot be played, except for the purposes of research and longterm preservation. One solution for a playable exhibition would have been to use emulators on current machines - that is, software that duplicates the function of one system on another system. Instead, the museum has chosen to collabo-rate with MO5, an association dedicated to the preservation of computers and videogame hardware. Named after the name of a computer made by Thomson in 1984, MO5 has been gathering around 30000 items related to videogames and its history, from consoles to games, from magazines to user manuals, since its creation in 1996. Their website contains two databases of games and hardware that are being developed thanks to MO5 members, and includes many contributions in the form of comments from gamers. MO5 also partnerns with institutions by providing hardware for exhibitions and advising the French national library on the acquisition of games for its collection.

The consoles are not the only part of the history of videogames: a timeline, displayed here and there in the exhibition space and also viewable online, gives some pointers on the development of videogames, from the machines to the theory behind them to historical events related to computer culture. It serves to contextualise videogames within a wider scientific and cultural frame. On the exhibition's webiste, this timeline is extended with texts by the curators and a wide range of experts. A lexicon also aids the visitor in understanding the scope of gaming practices, even if Museogames explores only a few threads.

Aside from the opportunity to play past games that have influenced different generations, Museogames gives insights into game production and game culture through interviews with experts in these fields. The interviews approach how the games are actually conceived and programmed by interviewing game designers and producers. Another section of the interviews explores the way game interact with contemporary culture, from cinema to digital artand street art. The final part has experts trying to grasp the issues of the uses of games: who plays the games, how games influence society, and so forth.

The interest for videogames by cultural and scientific bodies is rather recent in France, and its acceptance by a national museum is a sign that, beside geeks and gamers, video games are a significant aspect of today's cultural practices. The historical point of view of Museogames is one possible way to show video games in an exhibition setting. Museogames is certainly not the first exhibition internationally that addresses video games and their production, aesthetics, and their impact on contemporary culture, etc. One such exhibition was Game On in 2002, created at the Barbican in London, which continues to tour internationally since then. The exhibition looked at videogames with an emphasis on games past and present.

Museogames was created by an interdisciplinary team. Three curators worked together: Pierre Giner, an artist and teacher at the Ecole Supérieure des Arts Appliqués Duperré ("Superior School of Applied Arts Duperré"), who also created the scenography of the exhibition; Stéphane Natkin, a teacher at CNAM and the director of the École nationale du jeu et des médias interactifs numériques (ENJMIN, "National School of Game and Interactive Digital Media) and Loïc Petitgirard, an assistant professor at CNAM and technique historian. Also in the team were Annick Rivoire and Mathias Cena from Poptronics (an online media dedicated to digital cultures) who worked on the interviews and other content for Museogames. The exhibition has been a big success and should be opened until next April, an extra five months from the original end date. The museum is working on a version of the catalogue for iPad, to experiment with electronic forms other than the website. Such a project would gather all the content of the exhibition, and also expand on it: a 3D view of the exhibition space, historical videogames playable thanks to the use of emulators, extra historical information, interviews, and other contributions by experts.

While retrogaming could be seen as one of the main themes of the exhibition, the accompanying texts, interviews and videos (such as the Neighborhood video on life spent playing the game The Sims by Alain Della Negra and Kaori Kinoshita) push Museogames into a more contemporary place, where videogames are explored as a contemporary cultural object beyond nostalgia and preconceptions.

ANNE LAFORET

THANKS TO KATHARINE NEIL FOR THE CORRECTIONS.

FURTHER INFORMATION:

< http://www.museogames.com > < http://www.mo5.com > < http://www.poptronics.fr >

Published in the Digitalarti Mag #4.

Digitalarti Mag, the international digital art and innovation magazine.

Read the magazine for free online. 

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