New York City's Museum of Modern Art is a cultural institution, one that gathers the most important examples of artwork of our time, and presents them to the public, to enlighten and to educate.
There you will find such landmark pieces as The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh, Campbell's Soup Cans by Andy Warhol, and The Dance by Henri Matisse. But very soon, you'll also get to experience Tetris by Alexey Pajitnov, The Sims by Will Wright, and Canabalt by Adam Saltsman.
Just announced by MoMA themselves is the forthcoming addition of 12 games to their collection, which will be installed in museum's Philip Johnson Galleries this upcoming March. In addition to the titles already mentioned, one can also expect Pac-Man, Another World, Myst, SimCity 2000, Vib Ribbon, Katamari Damacy, EVE Online, Dwarf Fortress, Portal, flOw, and Passage.
This isn't the first time in which video games has appeared in such an environment. The Smithsonian American Art Museum recently produced an exhibit called The Art of Video Games.
MoMA also states that more are to come in the future. A list of future selections can be seen here, along with the reason why said games have been chosen. An excerpt:
"Are video games art? They sure are, but they are also design, and a design approach is what we chose for this new foray into this universe. The games are selected as outstanding examples of interaction design—a field that MoMA has already explored and collected extensively, and one of the most important and oft-discussed expressions of contemporary design creativity.
Our criteria, therefore, emphasize not only the visual quality and aesthetic experience of each game, but also the many other aspects—from the elegance of the code to the design of the player’s behavior—that pertain to interaction design. In order to develop an even stronger curatorial stance, over the past year and a half we have sought the advice of scholars, digital conservation and legal experts, historians, and critics, all of whom helped us refine not only the criteria and the wish list, but also the issues of acquisition, display, and conservation of digital artifacts that are made even more complex by the games’ interactive nature.
This acquisition allows the Museum to study, preserve, and exhibit video games as part of its Architecture and Design collection."
