Developed by the Barbican Museum in London, Game On examines videogames from the game design process, to the culture among gamers and beyond. Visitors can experience the past forty years of electronic gaming, play over 100 games on their original hardware and using the software that would have been used at the time.

The Game On exhibit has been seen by more than 1 million people and has toured venues such as London’s Science Museum, Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry and, most recently, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne, Australia. Future venues include the State Library of Queensland, Australia.

Video games have been entertaining people for decades but in a move some may see as surprising, now museums and libraries are preserving and celebrating them as cultural artefacts. Still, there are only a handful of other significant public collections of games and gaming hardware in the world, such as those at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, Berlin’s Computer Games Museum and the Computer History Museum in San Francisco.

Stanford University’s Henry Lowood is one of the few experts working to preserve video games and their culture. “Since the late 20th century, cultural history includes digital game culture,” Professor Lowood says. “It is not only the case that the history of this medium will be lost if we do not preserve the history of digital games, but also that we will not be able to provide a complete cultural history of this period.”

In reference to a recent article in the Sydney Morning Heral, as posted on Stanford Humanities Lab weblog.

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This entry was posted on zaterdag, augustus 9th, 2008 at 4:49 pm and is filed under Design, Exhibition, Heritage, Museum, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.