Is it art? Videogames are coming to MoMa.

amc.com

Videogames, fourteen of them anyway, will be added to the Design wing of the Museum of Modern Art.  Curator,  Paola Antonelli, blogged yesterday “[Not only are they art] but they are also design, and a design approach is what we chose for this new foray into this universe."

 The 14 titles already in the permanent exhibit are Pac-Man, Tetris, Another World, Myst, SimCity 2000, vib-ribbon, The Sims, Katamari Damacy, EVE Online, Dwarf Fortress, Portal, flOw, Passage, and Canabalt. There are also plans to add 26 additional games to its collection, including Spacewar!, Pong, Snake, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, M.U.L.E., Super Mario Bros, The Legend of Zelda (Yay, Link!), Street Fighter II, Chrono Trigger, Animal Crossing, and Minecraft.

 “Because of the tight filter we apply to any category of objects in MoMA's collection, our selection does not include some immensely popular video games that might have seemed like no-brainers to video game historians," wrote Antonelli.

 The video games were chosen using four main criteria: The behavior designers prompt from the players, aesthetics, time spent in the game, and space, which is described as “an architecture that is planned, designed, and constructed according to a precise program, sometimes pushing technology to its limits in order to create brand new degrees of expressive and spatial freedom.”

The exhibit will be ready for the public to view in March of 2013.  They will be "interactive experiences" or if the game is compact enough the patrons will be able to play them in their entirety.

In 2010 Roger Ebert, the esteemed entertainment critic,  wrote and essay called "Why video games can't be art."  I guess now they can!

Source: Slate.com