99. Museums in Video Games

The Computer Games Museum in Berlin knows that its visitors want to play games, so it lets them. The artifacts are fully-playable video games, from early arcade classics like PacMac to modern console and PC games, all with original hardware and controllers. By putting video games in a museum space, the Computer Games Museum invites visitors to become players.

But, players can become visitors too. Video games have been inviting players into museum spaces for decades. In the mid 1990s, interaction designer Joe Kalicki remembers playing PacMan in another museum – only this one was inside a video game. In Namco Museum, players navigated a 3D museum space to access the games, elevating them to a high-culture setting.

Since then, museums and their cultural shorthands have been a part of the video game landscape, implicitly inviting their players-turned-visitors to think critically about museums in the process.

In this episode, Kalicki presents mainstream and indie examples of video games with museums inside them: from Animal Crossing’s village museum to Museum of Memories, which provides a virtual place for objects of sentimental value, to Occupy White Walls where players construct a museum, fill it with art – then invite others to come inside.

Image: The Computer Games Museum in Berlin by Marcin Wichary (CC BY 2.0)

Topics and Notes

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:15 Computerspielemuseum Berlin
• 01:23 Joe Kalicki
• 02:06 Namco Museum
• 03:42 Digital Museum Spaces Elevating Video Games
• 04:26 Museum of Memories by Kate Smith
• 05:25 Occupy White Walls
• 07:18 Discovery Tour for Assassin's Creed Origins
• 10:11 Animal Crossing
• 11:29 Video Game Engines In Museums
• 12:44 Joe Kalicki’s new podcast, Panoply
• 13:13 Museum Archipelago's 100th Episode Party 🎉
• 13:44 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

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Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 99. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.

The Computer Games Museum in Berlin knows that its visitors want to play games. The central interpretive throughline, called Milestones, presents a timeline of the rapid development of the video game industry through 50 individual games: from Spacewar!, developed in 1962 at MIT to the latest console and PC games.

But nearby, tucked into corners and side rooms, visitors are invited to play many of these games on their original hardware with original controllers.

The museum even goes so far as to emulate the space...