As the Art of Video Games Exhibit in D.C. ends, I decided to write a little bit about my experience there.

I was very excited to check out the exhibit, as I’ve been claiming for a few years that video games are at the level of art. I was fairly impressed with the initial room, which featured some sketches of concept art and a little bit about how the exhibit came to be.

The next room featured gigantic screens and simplified controllers to play games like Pac-Man, Myst, and Super Mario. It was quite heartening to see very young kids in line. Then I took a closer look: there were about four seven-year-olds in front of me in the Super Mario line. Two of them were playing the exact same game on their DSs, and one was playing the older Mario Bros. on his GameBoy Advance. I guess a good game is fun no matter what the graphics look like.

The next part of the exhibit was a bit of a disappointment to me. They set up multiple stations going through the different eras of gaming (8-bit era, next-gen, etc.). These stations were little booths with telephones. Museum goers would hit the button of the game he or she wanted to hear about, then put the phone to their ear and watch the mini-video about the game. There were at least eight stations, and four games per station.

I really don’t think they should have tried to cram informational videos about thirty-two games into one sitting…it felt more like I should have been watching a documentary than standing with a phone in my hand while five year olds stood impatiently by or ran screaming past.

[UPDATE: Chris Melissinos, Guest Curator for The Art of Video Games, has let us know that “the last room had twenty systems and eighty games, not thirty-two games.]

Don’t get me wrong, I am so happy that this exhibit existed. The game industry is moving in the right direction when the Smithsonian can agree that it has merit as an art form. On the other hand, I don’t think this was the right medium to express the art of video games.

Gaming is an interactive form, and I feel the exhibit tried to capture that with its method of showing videos when you clicked a button. However, I would have much rather seen actual video game art. More screenshots, still images, costume/character design, maybe a physical script from Mass Effect 2, etc. This entire exhibit felt like it could have just been a little documentary movie on Discovery. I didn’t have to leave the house for this.

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What did you think about the exhibit?