Critic’s Notebook: A Museum’s Games Are Not on Pedestals

The defining feature of video games is interaction, the three-way conversation among designer, machine and player. “Applied Design,” a new installation at the Museum of Modern Art — and an important one because it is the first time the museum has displayed the 14 video games it acquired in November — attempts to isolate this relationship. The games on view, from Pac-Man to Canabalt, are naked, without their packaging or other nostalgic trappings. There are no arcade cabinets on view, no outmoded consoles or computers to gawk at.

Instead, each game is austerely contained on a screen set against a gray wall, with a joystick or other controller resting on a spare platform beneath it. The installation is “an experiment to isolate the experience of the interaction itself,” said Paola Antonelli, the senior curator of the museum’s department of architecture and design, comparing her decontextualized approach with Philip Johnson’s in his 1934 “Machine Art” exhibition at MoMA, which set things like propeller blades against white museum walls.

This philosophy is markedly different from the one that motivated the Museum of the Moving Image’s “Spacewar!” show, which closed Sunday. That exhibition, which presented a more focused argument, refused to separate the interactive experience of playing a game from the object it first appeared in. An iPad game would be played on an iPad, and Space Invaders and its ilk were on view, and playable, in their original stand-up cabinets.

MoMA’s installation is also less didactic, and more modest, than the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s show “The Art of Video Games,” now visiting the EMP Museum in Seattle. Chris Melissinos, who organized that exhibition, wanted to make a case for the evolution of video games as a new art form that combined older forms like painting, sculpture and storytelling. So he relied on text and images, as well as video footage of gameplay and interviews with important designers, at the expense of interaction with the medium itself. Only five games are playable at “The Art of Video Games,” although one of them, Myst, is included at MoMA in an unplayable version.

Like the movies, video games can include elements drawn from older media — plot, character, animation, music, illustration, dialogue, even descriptive and expository writing — without being ruled by them. A video game can include very little that we regard as essential to motion pictures and videos and still be identifiable as a game. (Will Wright’s SimCity 2000, part of the MoMA installation, is a fine example.) Similarly, much of what we associate with nondigital games — competition, scoring, victory, defeat — can be removed from a video game without rendering the form unrecognizable.

But remove interactivity, the ability of the player to communicate with the machine (and by extension the designer), and you no longer have a video game. That’s why it’s disappointing that only 9 of the 14 games included in “Applied Design” are playable: Pac-Man, Tetris, Another World, Vib-Ribbon, Katamari Damacy, Portal, flOw, Passage and Canabalt. The other five — Myst, SimCity 2000, The Sims, EVE Online and Dwarf Fortress — are displayed as video demonstrations. (There is, perhaps, an excessive aversion to combat and violence in these selections, as well as the more than 20 others — Street Fighter II notwithstanding — that Ms. Antonelli has said she would like to add to the collection.)

Games that require deep commitments of time, or years of cooperation with other human players, can’t be captured in a museum setting, Ms. Antonelli suggested. But playing the falling-block puzzle Tetris on a three-minute timer, as it is presented here, doesn’t exactly allow for a visitor to commune fully with that game either. Nor does picking up a story-driven game like Portal or Another World in midgame, with the ability to restart from the beginning disabled.

More important, “Applied Design” is not merely an installation about video games. Most of the objects that aren’t games emphasize function in a way that clashes with the games’ dedication to recreation as its own virtue. An earthquake-proof table, a mobile homeless shelter made of gold polyester, a hybrid energy source that looks like ivy, not to mention chairs and lamps and even the @ symbol — these are elegant solutions to the problems the world presents.

But playing an emulation of the original black-and-white Tetris, made entirely from the characters on a computer keyboard (the walls consist of exclamation points and greater-than and less-than signs; the blocks are built from brackets) solves nothing other than boredom.

“This kind of indifference to direct functionalism that video games have is what makes them dear to me,” Ms. Antonelli said. “They are pure experience.”

Not all games resist function. Like any medium, games can be used to persuade and educate. But perhaps it’s time to devote a permanent space — it could be small and provisional, like this one — solely for MoMA visitors to interact with games as an exciting, unpredictable, purposeless mode of pleasure.

“Applied Design” is on view through January at the Museum of Modern Art; (212) 708-9400, moma.org.

Museums Engage Children With Digital Programs

Every year, the program, “Virtual World Institute: Cretaceous Seas,” for children ages 11 to 14, fills up quickly.

One attendee in last summer’s program, Tammuz Frankel, a 12-year-old student at Hunter College High School, said, “From a very young age, I have been interested in paleontology, but I don’t know much about prehistoric seas. I wanted to learn more about this little-known part of the Mesozoic Era.”

The program has been so successful that the museum has since added two more August seminars on different topics.

The natural history museum is not alone in seeking innovative ways to engage children and families in the museum-going experience. The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and others have also been active.

Because digital platforms are relevant and accessible, they are familiar to “digital natives,” young people who have grown up with technology, said Rebecca Edwards, education specialist for family audiences at the Getty. One advantage of digital games is that many visitors already have smartphones. And the games let museums offer a broader menu for youngsters without requiring more staff members, like tour leaders, or printed materials, although creating the games is not an inexpensive challenge.

Not all museums are enamored with technology, however. Some are hesitant to encourage families to bring on the iPhones. For example, next summer the Philadelphia Museum of Art is planning five simultaneous exhibits oriented to families, including an interactive watercolor project inspired by the award-winning artist and author Jerry Pinkney as well as an environment using fancy dress costumes from the early 20th century for children in a setting designed by the artist Candy Depew. “There is a small amount of technology, but that is not the focus of what we do with kids,” said Emily Schreiner, associate curator of education for family and community learning at the museum.

“Technology is kind of a contentious issue,” she said. “Adults are not always comfortable with their kids being on iPhones. What we want them to take away from the museum is an opportunity to slow down, look closely and spend time as a family.”

Already the museum has a monthly series of “Stroller Tours” for parents and caregivers that lets them spend time together looking at art. “We have found them to be extremely successful,” Ms. Schreiner said. “We find that our visitors come back, become members and feel welcomed into the museum.”

Nevertheless, technology is a component of many programs.

For example, the Getty has a new youth-oriented application for smartphones through a game it calls Switch, in which an evil genie has wreaked havoc at the museum. The paintings in an app are not the exact duplicates of the paintings on the wall, so players must find the differences. The challenge is to correct details in a copy of the museum painting on the iPhone so that it matches the actual image.

In the first test, there were a series of details including the absence of a brooch in an oil painting of Leonilla, Princess of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn, by Franz Xaver Winterhalter. The player has to figure out and correct what is inaccurate.

The game consists of four paintings, a deliberately small number to keep the game from feeling repetitive and to encourage youngsters to go on to other things at the museum.

The Getty has also created an audio tour in which animals in various works of art talk about themselves.

Since admission to the museum is free, the games are not intended to increase revenue, although more visitors are certainly a benefit. “What these do is provide parents a way for their children to focus on art that perhaps they could not have done themselves,” said Ms. Edwards of the Getty.

In another game strategy, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has introduced “Murder at the Met,” a game for any smartphone that children can download and then use to search for the person who murdered “Madame X,” the woman in John Singer Sargent’s portrait. They must check out statues, paintings and objects throughout the American wing, following clues to the murderer and the witnesses. Though the museum does not aggressively publicize the game, children can find it on the museum’s Web site.