Playing Together
A still from Never Alone (Kisima Inŋitchuŋa) (2014) by Upper One Games, E-Line Media, and Ishmael Angaluuk Hope (image: The Museum of Modern Art / E-Line Media).
One of my first experiences of communal video games was aged nine, waiting in vain for a bunch of older boys to give me a turn the playstation controller. The game was Grand Theft Auto III, released in 2001 by Rockstar Games, and the boys all agreed that my age and gender made me unsuitable to be trusted with a game of such freeform violent potential. But I begged until they let me join them in mugging a virtual granny or hijacking a pixelated bus just to recklessly crash it in a police chase minutes later.
While Grand Theft Auto and its sandbox of infinite criminal rampages may have made a lasting impression on me as a young digital native, you won’t find a copy of its source code in the archives of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Since her arrival at the institution in 1994, senior curator Paola Antonelli has dedicated much of her time at the museum’s Department of Art and Design to seeking out and preserving contemporary forms of digital design – including video games. But she has kept a strict moral code when curating the virtual code the museum chooses to preserve in painstaking detail.
“We don't have Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption,” Antonelli tells me. “Games that have been tremendously successful, but where the violence is amoral or immoral.” We are speaking over Zoom about Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive Design, the new exhibition she has co-curated with self-described “partner in crime” collection specialist Paul Galloway. While they collect and preserve exemplary pieces of video game design with the dedication and thrill of executing a heist, the pair have been very clear from the start that games that put the player behind the scope of a gun are not within the institutions remit.
“It speaks to the fact that video games, especially during the pandemic, have become platforms to be with other people.”
Instead, their focus is on understanding video games as the ultimate piece of interactive design, where player and designer meet again and again through a continuously evolving set of inputs. You are never truly alone in a video game, imply the curators, because even as a single player you exist in a world that has the designer’s fingerprints all over it, guided or sometimes frustrated by a narrative structure that has been created with you in mind. The exhibition is named for Kisima Inŋitchuŋa, or Never Alone, a game from indigenous-owned developer Upper One Games. Switching between an Iñupiaq girl and her arctic fox companion, players navigate an atmospheric puzzle platform game world based on an oral tradition and the passing on of intergenerational wisdom, rather than defeating enemies to score points.
The exhibition’s name has taken on new significance after successive lockdowns in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. “It speaks to the fact that video games, especially during the pandemic, have become platforms to be with other people,” explains Antonelli. “Especially for teenagers and younger people that couldn't go to school. It was a way not to be alone and everything that goes with it.”
Never Alone is not the first time that some of the 36 video games now held in the MoMA permanent collection have been displayed in its galleries, but it is perhaps its most comprehensive. Arranged in three sections – Input, Designer, and Player – the exhibition intends to open visitors eyes to how we connect through interactive design such as video games, apps and websites. Physical objects on display date back to 1960s and early computer terminals, along with pieces from the MoMA collection of video games.
Disegno spoke with Antonelli to discuss both the exhibition – and the extensive yet still relatively unusual museological archive that it draws upon. An edited version of that conversation can be read below.
Pac-Man (1980) by Toru Iwatani (image: The Museum of Modern Art / BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment Inc.).
Disegno How the idea for Never Alone at the MoMA came about?
Paola Antonelli It's not only this exhibition, it's really [about] the collection. MoMA proceeds glacially – or considerately, however you want to say it – but whenever we realise that we don't know enough about something, we create a research group or a committee. Back in 2006, I organised a private symposium with experts to think of what the future of what used to be the collection of graphic design should be. MoMA was founded in 1929 and had design [in its collections] from the beginning, mostly industrial design objects, furniture, then graphics was basically posters and then a few LP covers and [other] ephemera. We've come a long way. Now there is so much more and graphic design has become communication design. This committee was formed and included [design curator and writer] Emily King, [visual culture writer] Rick Poyner, [filmmaker and designer] Hillman Curtis, and [art director] Steven Heller. We started discussing what new typologies and categories of design should become part of the MoMA collection.
Disegno And this is where the idea of including video games came from?
Paola Amongst these categories were film titles and visualisation in information design, and we also put video games in that category. We started working on all these different categories beginning with information design, and interaction design and video games were next. Around 2010 we formed another committee about video games, composed of several game designers, gamers, and people inside MoMA. We started drafting what the criteria should be, because we wanted to acquire video games not as art, not as film, not as animation or illustration, but rather as interaction design. We started drafting the protocols for acquisition, what to acquire and how. We also started thinking of how to display them, and how to show them in the gallery. Then we started acquiring the games in 2012. We started with 14, then slowly but surely now we are at 36.
“We wanted to acquire video games not as art, not as film, not as animation or illustration, but rather as interaction design.”
Disegno That's so interesting, this idea of not seeing video games as a subcategory of art, but as interactive design. Could you speak more about that?
Paola Interactive design is such an integral part of our life. I consider it my job as a curator not to tell people what's good and what's bad, or to be an arbiter of elegance, but rather to stimulate people's critical sense and awareness of the design around us so that they can be more powerful citizens, they can have more agency. I also believe in the motto that MoMA coined many years ago, which is that the museum is about the “art in our time”. With that in mind, I started looking at interaction design a long time ago, because every time we pick up our phone, every time we try to get to get money out of an ATM, we interact with interactive design. Every time we communicate with machines especially, but also with other objects, we use interactive design, so we need to know what's good, and what's bad about it.
Disegno Although games are interactive because they have to be played into being, I’d always thought of them as discrete objects.
Paola In a way, video games can be the purest form of interaction design, because the function almost does not exist. The function is just to shape your behaviour and make you react to the machine or to the designer of the game. In order to look at interaction design there are some criteria that are the immutable criteria of design, which is form and function. The way you express, as a designer, a function and the way you make all of the means at your disposal move towards that function is one of the ways to think of design. Of course, because video games are dynamic, time and space are also important categories. Those are categories of architecture, so beautiful interactive design calls all forms of design into play. But then the criterion that usually is excluded, or at least overlooked in many other forms of design, is behaviour. Interactive design is a design of behaviours. You might say that furniture design is a design of behaviours, but in the case of video games that's much more noticeable. That also calls into play a certain ethical stance. If the design of interaction is a design of behaviour, the video games that become part of the collection of MoMA – since MoMA tends to abide by this ideal of modern that is also quite constructive and positivistic – it goes without saying that there are some video games whose behavioural design is not really one that we want to have in the collection.
“In a way, video games can be the purest form of interaction design, because the function is just to shape your behaviour.”
Disegno What kinds of games were those, the more violent shooter kinds?
Paola Antonelli When we talk about violence, there was a very interesting conversation that we have with the committee and it's ongoing. In the collection there are games like Street Fighter II, which features martial arts, or This War of Mine, which is a war game but seen not from the viewpoint of a soldier shooting at the enemy, but rather a civilian trying to survive in a city under siege, which is hauntingly timely. But we don't have Grand Theft Auto (GTA), for instance, or Red Dead Redemption, games that have been tremendously successful, but where the violence is amoral or immoral. You can imagine why the conversation is ongoing, because the decision on what is moral in this day and age is so complicated. So we proceed as we go. That's one of the beautiful things about this kind of acquisition and this kind of collection – there are no more absolutes. It used to be that in the past, when you acquired something at MoMA, it was an absolute, the best modern chair, the most important modernist architecture. Now, instead, there are so many nuances, and so many different angles to look at things that even this idea of morality, which is my idea and [MoMa curator] Paul Galloway might change in the future. I'm not sure that shooting up pimps and prostitutes will ever become morally acceptable behaviour, but who knows, things might change.
This War of Mine (2014) by 11 bit studios (image: The Museum of Modern Art / 11 bit studios).
Disegno Was that quite a contested point when you decided to not go for any violent games in the collection?
Paola It was quite unanimous. You know, that's why Pac Man was born. It it was a way to appeal [to gamers without violence]. I believe that you need to have a very strong viewpoint as a curator. So if your viewpoint is, I'm going to follow this idea of morality, people around you say, okay just declare it, so that people know what they're looking at. The discussion was very rich, but there were not really too many positions against it. People said, "think about it in the future, because it's weird not to have GTA", but I said, "this is not a popularity contest". There are some games that are in the collection that are very indie. There are museums that document history, art history, social history. It could be the Smithsonian that collects artefacts, the documents society, or there might be a more acquisitive game museums, or museums of the moving image, where of course GTA should be part of this history of video games. But in our case, we're really looking at a different idea of design.
“One of the missions of the museum is to preserve objects, and code is as fragile as porcelain. Or even more fragile, because it becomes obsolete.”
Disegno How does MoMA acquire a video game? What does that process look like?
Paola It's super interesting and I love this story. Of course, you could go out and buy the game. But one of the missions of the museum is to preserve objects, and code is as fragile as porcelain. Or even more fragile, because it becomes obsolete, because operating systems change, because old games are on floppy discs that disappeared under the bed of some designer or were lost in a fire. So you can't just go and buy the game, whether it's on a tether or whether it's downloaded, because you don't know how long it's gonna last. Just think of [the now obsolete Adobe] Flash. I have some websites that I worked for months on that now are invisible. So what we do when we acquire a video game is we try to get the source code, which is not always feasible, because source code is incredibly precious. It's almost like the formula for Coca Cola. Some game designers gave us the source code no problem, because they're smaller designers and they are happy that MoMA is going to take that responsibility.
Disegno Is it more complicated than acquiring a painting, where the object and the intellectual property are the same thing?
Paola The lawyers at MoMA also have a big role in the acquisitions because they negotiate the changes to the end-user licence agreements (EULA) that are necessary to have an object in the MoMA collection. Because the EULA says in 99 per cent of cases that the company can revoke the licence at any moment, and of course we cannot [agree to it] it at MoMA because we're supposed to preserve the objects once we have them in the collection. We also agree not to let people play the games in the collection online, so they can [only] play them in the galleries. It's a mutual protection, and it's the protection of the game itself.
Disegno And what happens if you can’t get the original code?
Paola In some cases, we don't, so the next best available option is to try to get an emulation, possibly by the designer by the producer. That's as close and as transferable and translatable as possible. What's also important is that we acquire a relationship with the company or with the designer. We have been able to build really great relationships with Sony and Microsoft, and that enables us to continue speaking in the future with them. Sometimes video game companies get bought, for instance, Maxis, which has the rights for SimCity and the Sims, was bought by the giant Electronic Arts. We have great digital conservators at MoMA, and we acquire the hardware that goes with it, even though we don't show it as much. We film people playing with it, we record the sound, and if we can we also record an in-depth interview with the programmer, so that we are aware of what they were thinking of when they designed it. The version of Tetris that we have is an emulation of the original Tetris done by the original designer Sergei Pajitnov. Whereas for games like Passage by Jason Rohrer, we have the source code. So it really varies. For a game like a massive multiplayer online game like EVE Online, we have made connections with the EVE Online community and they have recorded a day in the life of EVE Online.
“The more concise and evocative the code, the more elegant it is. It’s like a mixture of mathematics and poetry.”
Disegno There's a really interesting line in the exhibition test text about how sometimes you pick a game for acquisition for the elegance of the code. How can you judge code like that?
Paola You would have to be a programmer. I know enough of programming, and I trust people [who know more]. In the collection we have a distellamap [a visual representation of executable code] of Pac Man by Ben Fry. It's a visualisation of the programming code that shows you when the code say go back [and creates] these beautiful loops, and you can see the code there and the beauty. Otherwise, I know how to code just a little, but it's almost like poetry. The more concise and evocative the code, the more elegant it is. It’s like a mixture of mathematics and poetry. While I hope that one day I'll be able to actually read code, I feel its beauty right now.
SimCity 2000 (1993) by Will Wright, Maxis Inc, and Electronic Arts (image: The Museum of Modern Art / Electronic Arts).
Disegno In the exhibition you name the video game designer as a designer, whereas typically when you say that title people think of someone who designs furniture, or tangible objects. Do you think people will increasingly see the programmer or developer as designers?
Paola It's fascinating, because it was always very natural to me. I studied architecture in Milan at a time where design was very encompassing, it was an umbrella that embraced many different scales from the spoon to the city, as they used to say. I've always felt that code is akin to wood or brick, it's just a different material. But intellectually and conceptually, an act of design is a way to achieve a goal using the means at your disposal in the most elegant way possible. The Tamagotchi, to me, is a great design, even though it has one of the most absurd functions you can think of. From that viewpoint, to me design is physical or digital, it doesn't really matter. I budget on the basis and in the context that is stipulated in this kind of design contract. You're right, because sometimes I find people are still not really getting what interaction design is, so I have to use examples like the ATM or I used to use the MetroCard machine in New York. I don't even know if it's generational. Certainly there are digital natives who don't have any problem understanding that, but sometimes it's really conceptual. There’s this artist Lynn Hershman Leeson, she's in her 80s, and she’s so comfortable with anything. At the Biennale in Venice she also had this AI project. So I guess it's something internal, whether you can picture yourself and feel yourself in a digital space, the moment you realise that that is design.
Words India Block
Images courtesy of MoMA
Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive Design is on until 16 July 2023 at MoMA, New York, USA.