Come on, let’s play together! I invite you to join me on time travel and on an adventure through museum interiors filled with beeping, buzzing, and flashing interactive exhibits. Take the controller in your hands and immerse yourself in the game. You can wander freely to admire cases teeming with early video game consoles, home computers, and handheld games, or spend some time at the arcade hall full of vintage machines with classics like Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Frogger, Donkey Kong and Street Fighter. You can also jump back to someone’s childhood bedroom to try out their first Amiga 500 or Commodore 64 computer and into the living room where the family used to gather around the NES to play Super Mario Bros. or maybe The Legend of Zelda. Let’s explore and discover the history of video games put on (the) display.
The interest in video game exhibitions has been steadily increasing in recent years, as has the number of newly opened specialized museums such as the OXO Video Game Museum in Málaga and Madrid or the Computer and Gaming Museum in Vienna. Game studies were primarily associated with issues concerning the video game collection and preservation. Currently, there is growing interest in the general understanding of the history and practice of video game exhibitions, although it remains fragmented among various practitioners and researchers from different academic fields.
My main goal is to document the origins, history, and evolution of video game and computer museums in a comprehensive way, map these museums, and describe their strategies of heritagization and choices of narratives on video game history.
Hence my interest in the subject, which incorporates my previous academic and professional experiences and studies in history, development of digital concepts, and multimedia design. My PhD focus lies on the investigation of video game collections in computer and video game museums across Europe. My research ambition is to contribute to overall knowledge about practices and their evolution since the first initiatives started in the 1980s in cultural and museum institutions dedicated to the acquisition, preservation, display, and interpretation of these digital heritage artifacts. My main goal is to document the origins, history, and evolution of video game and computer museums in a comprehensive way, map these museums, and describe their strategies of heritagization and choices of narratives on video game history.
The field of video game studies is advancing, leading to increased expectations for exhibitions and prompting current transformation in museums towards more specialized, inclusive, and insightful selection of displayed themes regarding the history and culture of video games. However, video game collecting and long-term preservation choices, along with conservation constraints, influence exhibition possibilities and might shape future trends in museums. Keeping this in mind, museum practitioners strive to overcome the limitations of video game presentations on display through creative solutions and curatorial models, aiming to expand the diversity of exhibits beyond established playable games and traditional canon.
Nevertheless, turning video games into museum artifacts is not a simple task, as years of museum trials and long-standing discussions among various researchers show. We must also consider the relatively brief and dynamic evolution of this museum type, which has resulted in the rapid transformation or decline of permanent exhibitions and, in some cases, entire museums in their established form (e. g. the BINARIUM German Museum of Digital Culture in Dortmund). Additionally, a multitude of small and local initiatives, each with limited outreach, is scattered throughout Europe, requiring a meticulous investigation.
That motivates me to wander through time and space to different video game and computer museums to document their history, development, and cultural significance. I believe that my work can help researchers and museum practitioners in exploring the future of video game museums through a creative and informed approach, drawing from past endeavours. I also dream that one day my work can benefit ongoing initiatives, particularly the smaller ones with limited scope, by enhancing public awareness and interest about them.
Whenever you travel, try to look beyond the popular attractions and visit museums as well as permanent or temporary exhibitions dedicated to video games. I guarantee that you will discover some real gems, ranging from public institutions to private and amateur initiatives. My absolute favorites are the Finnish Museum of Games in Tampere and the Center for Comics and Interactive Narrative EC1 in Łódź. Despite some occasional roughness, they are created with passion, enthusiasm, and appreciation for the medium. This gives those places an incredible atmosphere and provides visitors with an authentic, hands-on experience as well as an entertaining opportunity to learn and better understand the importance of video games in our digital and cultural life and heritage.
Ewa Swietlik received a PBA in Digital Concept Development from the Business Academy Aarhus, an MSc in IT – Communication and Organization from the University of Southern Denmark and an MA in History from the University of Warsaw. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) at the University of Luxembourg, working on her project titled “Exhibiting video games and their history. Approaches, evolutions, and issues of video game museums in Europe”.
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