The V&A’s new exhibition, Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt, opens its doors tomorrow, and having visited the south west London museum earlier this week for a preview I can tell you this: if you’ve any interest in examining the artistry of this medium, or enlightening yourself or others as to what makes it exciting and so full of possibility, this is nothing short of essential. I walked out light-headed, stepping out into the grey light of a Knightsbridge early afternoon dizzy from it all.
There are three strands to the exhibition – as might well be self-evident from its title – with rooms dedicated to the potential of video games to touch upon social and political issues, another that shines a light on the communities that surround games and the playful two-way interaction between those parties, while of course there’s an opportunity to play yourself in a room of surprising, pleasingly offbeat games (quite pointedly, there’s no room for Pac-Man here) and an opportunity to play the brilliant Enviro Bear 2000 via a cabinet crafted from an unloved old Mitsubishi Galant.
The section that touched me the most, though, was the one you’ll first come across as you enter the exhibition. Collected under the title of Design, it’s a run of small galleries, each dedicated to a particular game and each giving an unprecedented insight into the process behind each one. It’s a fascinating privilege, and even as someone lucky enough to have stepped foot inside many of the world’s greatest video game studios it provided a perspective more revealing than any quick tour of an office floor ever could.
Source: Eurogamer The V&A's new exhibition offers an unprecedented look into the creation of video games