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How the Museum of the Moving Image Is Getting Games Right

Finally, a museum isn't treating video games as a novelty.
Image: Ben Helmer/MMI

I spent a recent weekend trudging through snow, ice, and Greek restaurants to once again attend IndieCade East. The International Festival of Independent Games, as it's known, doesn’t have an award show, but instead includes talks and lectures from (and for) the jet-setting indie-auteur lecture docket. Now in its second year here in New York City, it's an ideal moment to reflect on how ICE is fitting into Astoria’s Museum of the Moving Image.

The Museum of the Moving Image isn't the first and only museum to've embrace games, but it's likely the most hospitable home videogames have encountered in the cultural spheres of fine art and film. The museum has increasingly been our medium’s closest institutional ally for over three decades, with a great collection of early arcade cabinets and home consoles on permanent display, not to mention a slate of gaming related events and workshops, partnerships with NYU’s GameCenter, Katherine Isbister’s Game Innovation Lab, as well as exhibits from my friends at Babycastles.

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Over the last three years, the museum has actively shown videogames through its temporary exhibits. It does so better than anyone else, as I pointed out after last year’s inaugural videogame collection at MoMA in the Applied Design exhibition. Last year MMI had a fantastic exhibit on Spacewar!, the very first digitally distributed game, which felt well balanced as both a historical showcase and as a celebration of its modern influences through an arcade that featured its descendants, a diverse collection including Asteroids and Space Invaders with the likes of Super Mario Galaxy and Osmos.

This year’s IndieCade East had an exceptional and diverse group of speakers, keynotes, panels, and workshops, all selected by conference chairs Kevin Cancienne and Margaret Robertson. It represented a wide variety of topics and interests, both from game devs working in New York, and from all over the country and abroad. Many of my colleagues whom I admire most, some of whom I consider friends, occupied the festival’s dual track programming.

A few highlights:

  • Phoenix Perry and her fellow Code Liberation Foundation activists, Catt Small, Nina Freeman, and Jane Friedhoff outlined the horrible, historic misogny that marketers created to pigeonhole early gaming adverts as strictly the domain of men, its alienating effects on their relationship to videogames, and their incredible efforts to bring more women back into the world of coding and game development by offering free classes in programming to women around the city, followed by two free coding workshops for the women in attendance on Sunday;
  • Shawn Allen and his wife, Diana Santiago’s very humorous and heartwarming dialog on their work on Allen’s indie title Treachery in Beatdown City and its effects on their relationship and family dynamics, and;
  • Auriea Harvey’s survey of her creative collaborations with her partner as they went from early Internet artists in the early 2000s to creators of powerful work as Tale of Tales (some of which is on display upstairs at the Indie Essentials show)

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But the standout lecture was Carnegie Mellon’s Paolo Pedericini (of MolleIndustria fame), who gave a brilliant talk by proxy, “Videogames and the Spirit of Capitalism.” Due to snowed-out travel conditions, Pedericini’s talk somehow became more powerful in video essay form (see: below). Pedericini carved out the subversive implementation of capitalistic ideas in nearly every corner of videogame history, along with the more obvious uses in gamification, casual gaming, and resource management games (which he brilliantly pointed out to include the first person shooter as a management of time, space, and assumedly, angles).

He did this with the exception of several “notgames” pioneered by Harvey’s aforementioned Tale of Tales, Ed Key an David Kanaga’s Proteus, and Richard Hoffmeier’s CartLife. After this, he calls for a new aesthetic movement in living mechanics, beautifully described by Pedericini as games whose “strategies are to be discovered: poetic wrenches have to be thrown in the works; gears and valves have to grow hair, start pulsing and breathing; algorithms must learn to tell stories and scream in pain.”

But don't just take my word for it:

Sony and other vendors were on hand to display their latest wares. Sony’s made well-known their aggressive campaign to bring indie devs to their platforms, and an updated build of Sportsfriends was on display alongside many others. The highlight of Sony’s collection continues to be Hohokum, a game I was able to see at last year's Game Developer's Conference from Wild Rumpus contributors Ricky Haggett and Richard Hogg.

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Haggett, leader of London’s Honeyslug studio, has brought the illustrious stylings of Hogg in this bizarre, beautiful game about exploration that uses playful, dreamy mechanics, not unlike a 2D version of Namco/Keita Takahashi’s Noby Noby Boy. it puts the player into a hub world filled with non-lineated interactive diaramas, all in sync with a lush soundtrack from UK electronic music label Ghostly International. Hohokum is slated for release this year on all current Playstation platforms.

Currently on display at the museum is Indie Essentials, curated in collaboration with IndieCade’s chair members. While this show’s title might be more of a catchy tagline than the curation’s true focus, the show actually lets you interface with the games in a way that didn’t feel obtuse—a sharp contrast to MoMA’s collection. That feels great for games built around mechanics, like the superb Spelunky. However, some of these games are somewhat meaningless to play in the context of being at a museum—a small dose from the sprawling epics. Take Kentucky Route Zero or Minecraft; both cannot really impart their majesty in a quick play session.

I had hoped a highlight reel of these games would accompany the games to show viewers exactly why these games are so essential. For Kentucky Route Zero, that would be Jake Elliott’s masterful transformation of game cinematography, a word typically used in the more traditional sense of the word: by being techniques borrowed from film.

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Arguably, that word was previously meant to describe games with authorial cinematography that the player has no (or limited) participation in, as in the cutscene-heavy work of Hideo Kojima or Rockstar Games’ Rod Edge. Elliott himself described his work as heavily influenced by experimental theatre and film at his talk during last year’s GDC. Kentucky Route Zero’s triumphant aesthetic is something better left to be experienced at home at your own pace—it is an interactive fiction whose beautiful art direction evokes some sort of cinematic magic realism unlocked by the player themselves. It's something truly unlike most games today.

You can’t get this from a hurried setting of the MMI gallery.

Playing through MINECRAFT at Indie Essentials. Image: Ben Helmer/MMI.

Minecraft’s beauty, for its part, comes from its simplicity and vibrant player community, something suspiciously absent in the randomly generated biome, freshly installed and launched with zero investment in the map, that was on display when I viewed the show.

Beyond Markuss Pearson and his team at Mojang, who created the game, Minecraft was skyrocketed into the sensation that it is by its players: The YouTube artist who created the virtual computer or a 1:1 scale model of the Starship Enterprise, or the modders who’ve made the game their own complex thing are missing. The game is left to be impenetrable to the general audience, who’s only contact with Minecraft, likely by way of local news features, focus solely on the sudden commercial behemoth it has become, the wave of local news stories about the game or its infiltration into merchandising by way of many popular retail outlets.

I fear Minecraft won’t be read with any real explanation as to why it resonates so powerfully with its players. Video accompaniments would have been more welcome than the large projector that displays it—or better yet, commissioned Minecrafteurs to create something specifically for the exhibit.

Indie Essentials is still a worthy crash-course introduction to what indie games have been doing. The show, which runs through March 2, was an excellent backdrop to last weekend’s festival, who’s plethora of lectures and talks you can now check out here. For now, it appears games have found comfortable refuge in the Museum of the Moving Image.