Why we care about videogames

Videogames have always been a key part of our programming, but they aren’t always as visible as our film and contemporary art activities. With a number of other staff, I wrote a version of this manifesto in 2018 when ACMI was undertaking the design research for its redevelopment and expansion for the museum’s 2021 reopening. Now it is time for a little refresh and tweak. In 2024, videogames are even more important to your museum of screen culture – just as they are more influential in our culture as a whole.

When ACMI opened in 2002, videogames were already considered a key interest for the museum. From 2003–2008 ACMI had a specialist Games Lab with a dedicated games curator, which allowed ACMI to host small videogaming exhibitions ranging from explorations of Sonic the Hedgehog to historical retrospectives. With the opening of the long-running Screen Worlds in 2009 games had a lighter presence in the historical part of the exhibition, combined with an open plan Games Lab-lite with a slow turnover of titles aimed at a general family audience. Ever popular, the Games Lab helped parents and teachers feel confident that videogames belonged alongside historic film and TV. Screen Worlds closed in 2019 for ACMI’s expansion.

After hosting the Barbican’s enormous retrospective Game On exhibition in 2008, ACMI developed its own videogames exhibition in 2012, Game Masters, which travelled the world until 2021 visiting almost every continent. Three Best of the International Games Festival exhibitions were presented in our small Gallery 3 space in 2009, 2011 and 2012, and in 2016 the Code Breakers: Women In Games exhibition, formed the beginnings of a new series of critical conversations around videogames and the games industry. Throughout its history ACMI has also been championing videogame literacy through school education and general public talks, forums, conferences, competitions, performances, workshops, master classes and a range of other activities.

Less well known is that ACMI has also been collecting videogames for a long time. We house, preserve and care for significant holdings of Australian titles from the 1980s and 1990s, which were accessioned and researched as part of two Australian Research Council projects with Swinburne University of Technology and RMIT University. These two Play it Again research projects documented the stories behind the creation of Australian and New Zealand games, preserved their design documents and physical media, and ACMI worked with academics to develop new ways of making these games playable for future generations using a number of experimental emulation technologies. This research has led to significant interest in software preservation and the skills and techniques developed through this work have also influenced our time-based media and software art collections .

In 2021 a new centrepiece exhibition The Story of the Moving Image opened with videogames spread throughout it – as well as a dedicated Games Lab Presented by Big Ant Studios. From the Cuphead zoetrope to the design materials of various games that change in and out of the Moving Worlds section of the exhibition, to a nostalgic wall of old game controllers, the 1980s arcade games, and the ever-changing pods of playable contemporary games, videogames are right at the centre of your new ACMI.

Upstairs, in ACMI X, our industry incubator and co-working space, there are new Melbourne made videogames being made. From the blockbuster indie hit Cult of the Lamb (2022) to a plethora of new unreleased titles supported by VicScreen and Screen Australia, as well as the student winners of the annual ACMI  + RMIT Games Prize. ACMI X is where makers and game designers are often spotted developing the next indie success story. And each quarter you’ll find ACMI + RMIT Audience Lab running in our public spaces, where you can play-test games that are still in development and help local creators make their games more robust and easier to play.

So why do we care so much about videogames?

During ACMI’s major renewal project, we though a lot about what we exhibit and what we present, as a key step in how our newly redesigned museum could enable us to do more. In May 2018 a small group of videogame-interested staff across ACMI co-authored this manifesto which has helped guide where we are heading. I’ve made a few adjustments in the intervening years, because time moves fast in software and culture.

At ACMI we believe:

• videogames are an artform that demands celebration, preservation, exploration, and critique in a national museum
• videogames are an important part of contemporary media and art, a mainstream leisure pursuit and part of modern consumer culture
• videogames are an increasingly diverse form of contemporary media and art
• videogames explore elaborate, sophisticated and complex ideas, concepts and themes
• that, like film and other moving image art forms, the craft and design of videogames and their attendant systems, interactions, and interactivity are at the core of our institutional remit
• players benefit from ACMI actively supporting and developing a critical culture around videogames
• non-players, like non-cinephiles, develop their curiosity for games from exposure to our curatorial choices, and the opportunity to experience videogames in a museum context
• some videogames need to be played to be understood
• some videogames need to be understood to be played
• some videogames help us experience and play the world through different perspectives
• videogames literacy is a part of a suite of necessary literacies to participate fully in contemporary culture
• ACMI has a central role in supporting families in making more informed media choices with regard to all forms of moving image, including videogames
• ACMI has a central role in developing and supporting teachers and students in critical and creative discovery of videogames
• ACMI has a central role in supporting the local industry and the tertiary institutions that are a talent pipeline to that industry
• ACMI has a central role in supporting a diversity of makers and increasing the diversity of the local industry
• ACMI has a central role is shaping a local culture around videogames and players that is enthusiastically supportive of all forms of diversity and open to critical analysis
• that this artform should be written as ‘videogames’ not ‘video games’. At this point in their critical maturity, ‘videogames’ are now able to be formally (and semantically) distinguished from ‘video games’ as they are not a subcategory of games, and some of the most interesting videogames show little or none of the competitive characteristics that define games more generally.

– Seb Chan is ACMI’s Director & CEO. He grew up with a Commodore 64, used to write for several videogaming publications in the 1990s and is currently the most avid player of videogames on ACMI’s Senior Leadership team. Before joining ACMI he did new work in collecting and preserving software at Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in the early 2010s and is interested in finding ways for museums to present contemporary media cultures into the distant future.

This manifesto was first published on the ACMI website on 8 October 2018. It was updated on 15 August 2024.