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MoMA Adds Video Games to Its Collection

Pac-Man was included in an exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum earlier this year.Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times Pac-Man was included in an exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum earlier this year.

If you have been disparaging video games â€" or, perhaps, trying to wean yourself from an addiction to them â€" it's time to think again. Video games are now high culture, with the imprimatur of the Museum of Modern Art, which announced on Thursday that it has acquired the first 14 titles in a planned collection of about 40 games. These constitute a new category among the museum's collections, and will be on display in the Philip Johnson Galleries starting in March. (An exhibition devoted to video games will open in December at the Museum of the Moving Image, and another exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, closed in September.)

“Are video games art?” Paola Antonelli, senior curator in the museum's department of architecture and design, asked in a post on the museum's web page. “They sure are, but they are also design, and a design approach is what we chose for this new foray into this universe. The games are selected as outstanding examples of interaction design - a field that MoMA has already explored and collected extensively, and one of the most important and oft-discussed expressions of contemporary design creativity.”

The games, Ms. Antonelli wrote, would be selected according to the same criteria the museum uses for other collections, including “historical and cultural relevance, aesthetic expression, functional and structural soundness, innovative approaches to technology and behavior, and a successful sy nthesis of materials and techniques.”

The first items in the museum's new collection are Pac-Man (1980), Tetris (1984), Another World (1991), Myst (1993), SimCity 2000 (1994), vib-ribbon (1999), The Sims (2000), Katamari Damacy (2004), EVE Online (2003), Dwarf Fortress (2006), Portal (2007), flOw (2006), Passage (2008) and Canabalt (2009).

The museum's wish list for future acquisitions runs from the early Spacewar! (1962), through Minecraft (2011). The initial 14 games are to be installed in an exhibition in the museum's Philip Johnson Galleries in March.