DON’T TOUCH

The question of interactivity came up early on in the process of designing the exhibition: it is, after all, the most integral aspect of videogames as a whole. “There are a lot of reasons why it’s very complicated to show interactive works within a exhibition,” Marie Foulston says. “There’s a limited amount of people that can engage with them, there’s a literacy that people have to have to use game controllers, and also there’s the desire for people to be able to want to interact with that work.” Pernilla Ohrstedt adds: “We’re wanting people to connect with the design story behind it, so we’ve been careful to think about which moments we allow people to get closer and interact, and the moments where we want people to experience a part of the creation of the game on a cinematic or immersive scale.” It was quickly agreed that visitors should not be expected to grapple with Bloodborne, Vadim Charles says: “It was more about how to present the difficulty of playing, so we just decided to just show a compilation of lots of people dying!” For Foulston, it was important that the exhibition didn’t simply reproduce the games, but “allow people to do something that’s more than playing those games, that’s taking them beyond those games. We wanted to, I guess, buck the trend of previous exhibitions just purely relying on that.”