Do We Need a Video Game Museum?

Do we need a video game museum?

Millions of schoolchildren across the United States have one resounding answer: “YES.”

Not that school boards nationwide will break their legs tripping over themselves to fund trips to said museum, which is a shame, because video games are an ideal showcase for humanity’s multiple talents.

Hardcore game collector Joe Santulli has a nomadic Video Game Museum that makes appearances at big events such as E3 and displays every step gaming has taken, from Pong to the Wii. Schlepping a museum’s worth of game artifacts around the country takes a considerable amount of pocket change, however, and Santulli has started a Kickstarter page to raise the $30,000 needed to give the Video Game Museum a permanent home.

The very idea of a video game museum is sure to elicit scorn from gaming’s critics. “Video games don’t have a history!” they might snort. Fact is, video games do have a history. A rich, interesting, and extremely fast-moving history. And that’s just one reason why we need to see gaming immortalized in a big, preferably not somber, building.

Video games are a fairly new pastime compared to movies, sports, and certainly compared to literature, but like the aforementioned pastimes, it has thrived thanks to the contributions from men and women from around the world. What we enjoy today are the products of thousands of artists, programmers, and storytellers, including men and women (Miyamoto, Wright, Meier, Carol Shaw) who occasionally whoosh (or whoosed) outside of the industry’s walls, take in a whole new viewpoint, and gift us with the products of their imagination, from orderly city-building, to fantasy worlds the rest of us could never even dream of.

Games are unique in that a single title encapsulates humanity’s creative potential and its talent for manipulating numbers. A game needs art. It needs music, a story, a motive, and characters, even if those characters are as simple as the game pieces from Tetris (Long live the I-block! Down with the Z-block!). And, of course, a game needs an engine to run on.

A game also needs a console, which must be built from the ground up. A console must also look attractive enough to convince the buyer that he or she is buying a whole sculpted package, and not just a bundle of wires and metal guts. The 8-bit NES alone is attached to dozens of stories about how a specific console design can sell a game system to a wary public.

In a single video game and its console, we have art. We have music composition, storytelling, and complex math equations. We have the joys of problem-solving, exploration, and communication. All of which is more than worthy of being preserved for future generations to gawp at.

About Nadia Oxford
Nadia is a freelance writer living in Toronto. She played her first game at four, decided games were awesome, and has maintained her position since. She writes for 1UP.com, Slide to Play, GamePro and other publications, and is About.com’s Guide to the Nintendo DS.

Be Sociable, Share!

•