List of video games in the Museum of Modern Art

In 2006, the Museum of Modern Art began a movement to include forms of contemporary design beyond traditional media, starting with acquiring digital fonts and later moving on to video games.^[1] While institutions such as the Smithsonian American Art Museum have displayed video games in exhibitions, the MoMA was one of the first art museums to acquire them for its own permanent collection, a process which requires obtaining the legal rights to indefinitely emulate and exhibit the games from their developers and publishers.^[2] Prior to the start of MoMA's video game collection, the MoMA also had exhibited a limited number of video games in its design galleries; some of these titles would go on to be acquired by the museum, namely Dwarf Fortress, Passage, and Katamari Damacy.^[3][4][5]

The MoMA initially set criteria for video games to determine their eligibility for being added to their permanent collection, primarily considering four central interaction design traits: behavior, aesthetics, space, and time.^[6] An additional significant requirement was "no gratuitous violence",^[7] resulting in the exclusion of popular or landmark video games such as the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead series.^[8][9][10] Though the MoMA is interested in acquiring a game's hardware and interface, the proprietary source code is considered the most valued. According to Antonelli, "when we cannot acquire the code, we acquire simulations, emulations, the cartridge, the hardware. But what we're interested in showing is the interaction by itself."^[11] As a result, notable missing titles from MoMA's collection include unemulatable video games on obsolete hardware such as Spacewar!, abandonware with missing source code or unknown legal rights such as Zork, and games from developers the MoMA has been unable to reach an agreement with such as Nintendo's Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros.^[12][13]

The Museum of Modern Art acquired what could be considered its first video game on October 8, 2008: Feng Mengbo's Long March: Restart (2008),^[12][14] an homage to side-scrolling video games from the 1980s which depicts the Long March during the Chinese Civil War. In exhibitions, the interactive installation is displayed on a digital wall spanning 80 feet long and uses a wireless game controller for visitors to play.^[15] However, Long March: Restart was created as an art exhibition piece, unlike the titles in MoMA's video game collection.^[16]

In November 2012, the MoMA announced the acquisitions of their first fourteen video game titles, with plans to expand the collection to up to forty games over time.^[6][17] The announcement stirred up controversy, as some critics argued video games are not considered art and therefore might not have a place in an art gallery.^[18][19] The initial line-up of video games was featured in the 2013–2014 exhibition Applied Design.^[20]

The exhibit, curated by Paola Antonelli, is modeled after Philip Johnson’s 1934 exhibition Machine Art, in which pieces of machinery such as propeller blades were displayed in a minimalist fashion to lay focus on their mechanical design. This set-up would create a "strange distance, this shock, that made people realize how gorgeous formally, and also important functionally, design pieces were," which, according to Antonelli, is the desired effect of the exhibition.^[8] In order to minimize factors such as nostalgia, video games were displayed in a minimalist fashion where only a screen and controlling-device were visible on an otherwise blank wall.^[22] The MoMA also took cautious care of traffic flow within the exhibit, placing games that were likely to be heavily played (such as Pac-Man) near entrances and exits. In addition, games that would require a larger amount of time to play either had a shortened demo version developed for them or were displayed via screenshots or video montages.^[1][23] The principles of this exhibition set-up would be used in future MoMA exhibitions featuring video games.^[2]

The acquisition of six more video games, as well as a video game console, was announced in June 2013.^[24] These additions leaned heavily towards the classic era of arcade machines and 8-bit consoles, during which developers pioneered design principles that built the foundation of modern video games. According to MoMA collection specialist Paul Galloway, many early, "seemingly simple games remain as vital and compelling today as they were" during the 1970s and 80s. Ralph H. Baer's Magnavox Odyssey console was added due to its role as the first commercial home video game console as well as being considered both "a masterpiece of engineering and industrial design".^[25]

Three additional titles were added to MoMA's collection in the following years, including Biophilia, the MoMA's first acquired mobile app.^[26][27] Furthermore, video games were featured in two more of MoMA's exhibitions: A Collection of Ideas (2014–2015) and This Is for Everyone (2015–2016).^[28][29]

In 2021, an additional twelve video games were acquired, primarily consisting of recent indie games created by individuals or small development teams.^[30] The entirety of MoMA's video game collection was included in the 2022–2023 exhibition Never Alone, which also marked ten years since the MoMA began acquiring video games.^[13]

• Applied Design (March 2, 2013 to January 20, 2014)^[20]
• A Collection of Ideas (February 15, 2014 to January 11, 2015)^[52]
• This Is for Everyone: Design Experiments for the Common Good (February 14, 2015 to January 18, 2016)^[29]
• Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive Design (September 10, 2022 to July 16, 2023)^[53]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to video games in the MoMA.

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