No Paraphernalia, No Nostalgia: Decoding MoMA’s New Video Game Galleries

Abstract

Raiford Guins is an Associate Professor of Culture and Technology at Stony Brook University. His research on the history of video games seeks to draw closer relationships with the fields of Design History and Design Culture. In his most recent book, Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife (MIT Press, 2014), he investigates the emerging strategies of collecting and displaying video games within museums as well as the role that artifacts play in the documentation of game history. In this interview by Matt Ferranto, Guins shares his thoughts on the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) video game exhibition.

Keywords:

• video games in museums
• game design
• coin-op arcade
• cabinets
• MoMA
• game preservation
• emulation

Notes

1. For this interview I last visited MoMA in November 2014. I recently returned in early Spring 2015 as part of my “Video Games in Museums” course that I teach at Stony Brook University. The current games exhibit is different from the sketch presented here. The exhibit is half the size and the games are only on display along the small corridor outside of the elevator. In addition, the red walls that readers see in the images that accompany this piece have been re-painted (predictably) white. All of my comments in this interview refer to the previous state of the exhibit although many of the concerns/questions raised certainly carry over.

2. Ryman, D. 2014. “Five Minutes with Raiford Guins,” March 5. http://mitpress.mit.edu/blog/five-minutes-raiford-guins/; Guins, R. 2014. Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

3. Latour, B. and Lowe, A. 2011. “The Migration of the Aura or How to Explore the Original through Its Facsimiles,” in Switching Codes, ed. Thomas Bartscherer and Roderick Coover. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 275–98.

4. Preserving Virtual Worlds was funded by the Library of Congress’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. Its mission was to investigate the challenges that digital games and interactive fiction pose to long-term preservation. Preserving Virtual Worlds 2 was funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services with a goal of studying the significant properties of games to help develop best practices for preservation.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matt Ferranto

Matt Ferranto is an Assistant Professor of Art at Westchester Community College in New York, where he also serves as Director of the Fine Arts Gallery. He earned an M.F.A. in sculpture and an M.A. in art history from Purchase College in 2000, and a B.S. from Willamette University in 1989. He is Managing Editor of Design and Culture. [email protected]