These video games can be works of art

SFMOMA pop-up exhibition highlights 6 of them

The upcoming video game “Everything” is an existential exploration of how life is for every part of the universe, from an amoeba to an entire planet.

That’s one reason the game is one of six featured in a popup exhibit from noon to 8 p.m. Thursday at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, timed to coincide with the annual Game Developers Conference across the street.

The one-day exhibit, part of PlaySFMOMA, acknowledges that video games have emerged as modern cultural touchstones, out-gunning even the movie industry in revenue and audience, said Erica Gangsei, the museum’s head of interpretive media.

Yet museums in general still treat video games as children’s toys.

“There is an evolving ideal that games are an expressive medium in their own right, the same way that in the 1960s, you had special galleries that were just for photography,” she said. “We’re trying to provide a space that’s a real counterpoint to what’s happening at (the Game Developers Confer-

ence) and provide something that expands people’s ideas of what a game could be.”

“Everything” was described by Los Angeles animator and artist David OReilly as a work of art designed to make players change their perspective about the world around them.

The game is far more pastoral than the latest first-person shooters and role-playing games being demonstrated at the Moscone Convention Center, where the Game Developers Conference moved into its third day. The conference’s expo floor opened Wednesday, with more than 400 exhibitors spread throughout the center.

OReilly, whose film and TV credits include “Her” and “South Park,” wanted to do something different by exploring how everything in the universe is connected.

Players can turn themselves into anything “from the very tiny things that are familiar to us to gigantic things,” OReilly said. “You’ll be able to select things bigger or smaller than you. So if you’re a horse and you see a tree, you hit a button and you’ll be able to become that tree. You can go bigger again and be the land that tree is on. Then the planet the land is on. Then you can be the galaxy the planet is on.”

Like an oil painting or sculpture, OReilly hopes “Everything” leaves its players “thinking about the world differently. What I’m trying to create is not a distraction from the world. Really, I’m trying to engage with it deeply and talk about what’s going on.”

The game also redefines the term winning, the museum’s Gangsei said. “You can just be an elephant and that in itself is winning,” she said.

“Everything” will be released first for PlayStation 4, although no date has been set, and later for PC and Mac.

Michael Macor / The Chronicle Gamer-artist David OReilly with his arcade game “Everything,” one of those featured at a temporary SFMOMA exhibit.

Michael Macor / The Chronicle David OReilly says that in “Everything,” players can turn themselves into anything “from the very tiny things that are familiar to us to gigantic things.”