Taking it seriously

The V&A breaks new ground by considering video games in the context of design, but fails to highlight Dundee’s games industry

Video games now frequently outrank movies as the highest grossing entertainment products in the world and are played by almost a quarter of the world’s population, yet they are rarely considered in the context of design. This disparity forms the premise of the V&A exhibition (shown in London last year)

one of the first museum shows to look at video games from a perspective other than their historical development.

The major part of the exhibition showcases eight games developed in the last 15 years which reveal the new directions being explored, from Journey, with its focus on emotion and collaboration rather than combat, to The Graveyard, in which

the “player” is an elderly lady taking a walk through a graveyard, which its Belgian creators ardently claim is “not a game” but “new media art”.

Top-selling games are also included, from The Last of Us, in which a hunter and his ward navigate a stunningly realised post-apocalyptic America, to Japanese gothic slasher Bloodborne (so difficult it has spawned a raft of homespun Youtube tutorials on how to master it), and Splatoon, Nintendo’s family-friendly shooting game in which teams of players win territory by splatting it (and each other) with coloured ink.

Also showcased is the work of solo designer Jenny Jiao Hsia, whose phone games explore issues of food and body image, plus Kentucky Route Zero, a magic-realist tale which focuses on the inner life of its characters and takes inspiration from William Faulkner and Rene Magritte among many others, and No Man’s Sky, which uses algorithms to devise more than 18 quintilian worlds which create themselves as your spaceship visits them (please don’t ask me how).

Better signposting from game to game would help: “It’s not called ‘Ellie and Jo-elle’, dad,” I heard one weary teenage voice exclaim. But the background material presented does, when taken together, build up a picture of what games design is (it has been described as combining “everything that’s hard about building a bridge with everything that’s hard about composing an opera”). We see pencil sketches and storyboards, scripts and colour palettes, Journey’s designers running up and down sand dunes, and a full choir and orchestra performing Bloodborne’s dramatic soundtrack.

After the eight games, there is a Disruptor’s Room which asks tough

Videogames: Design/play/ Disrupt

V&A Dundee

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Tramway, Glasgow questions of games: do they objectify women? Glorify gun culture? Why is the games industry still dominated not only by men but by white men? A fascinating section on banned games offers a glimpse of projects such as Phone Story, a satirical game showing the conditions in which smartphones are made which found itself quickly banned from Apple’s app store.

The final sections explore the inventive ways people interact with games, from the Minecrafters who built their own Ikea store to esports aficionados who pack stadiums in China to cheer on their teams. The last room is an “arcade” in which viewers can try a range of DIY games showcased at club nights such as those organised by Edinburgh-based We Throw Switches.

Taken as a whole, the show is rarely less than impressive and the curators show an awareness that too much analysis will destroy the heart of the matter: that games are first and foremost about entertainment. Games fans are likely to encounter a few things they didn’t know, while novices will find a new and rather fascinating world being opened up.

However, we non-gamers would also appreciate a greater degree of

Games fans are likely to encounter a few things they didn’t know, while novices will find a new world being opened up