All Hell Broke Loose - Why MoMA Is Exhibiting Tetris and Pac-Man

By Bo Moore

Last November, the Museum of Modern Art said that it had acquired 14 videogames, adding working copies and the source code of games like Tetris and The Sims to its collection. The collection’s curator was not prepared for what happened next.

“All hell broke loose.”

In a TED talk released yesterday, MoMA senior curator of architecture and design Paola Antonelli discussed the decision, explaining the importance of interaction design.

“I really do believe that design is the highest form of creative expression,” Antonelli said in the talk.

“I want people to understand that design is so much more than cute chairs, that it is first and foremost everything that is around us in our life.”

Antonelli began bringing examples of interaction design to MoMA several years ago with acquisitions such as Martin Wattenberg’s “Thinking Machine,” the Sugar interface from the One Laptop Per Child initiative, and Philip Worthington’s “Shadow Monsters.”

But videogames proved more controversial. Some argued that games were not art and as such should not be in the MoMA, while others said that videogames could not be art because they are something else: code.

Antonelli said she believes that is the wrong argument: “There’s this whole problem of design being often misunderstood for art,” she says, “or the idea that designers would like to be called artists. No. Designers aspire to be really great designers.”


In the MoMA, the games collection is displayed in a minimalist fashion, modeled after Philip Johnson’s 1934 exhibition “Machine Art,” in which he displayed propeller blades and other pieces of machinery on white pedestals and white walls.

“He created this strange distance, this shock, that made people realize how gorgeous formally, and also important functionally, design pieces were.” Antonelli says. “I would like to do the same with video games.”

In choosing which games to acquire, Antonelli and the MoMA worked with videogame designers and academics on four basic criteria: Behavior, Space, Aesthetics, and Time.

The team had to decide where to draw the line on violent videogames. “It’s considered that in design and in the design collection,” Antonelli said, “what you see is what you get. So when you see a gun, it’s an instrument for killing in the design collection. If it’s in the art collection, it might be a critique of the killing instrument.”

Following those principles, the team included games such as Portal, where you shoot walls to create paths, and Street Fighter II “because martial arts are good,” but excluded games such as Grand Theft Auto III.

Other games picked for the initial batch included Pac-Man, Katamari Damacy, EVE Online and Canabalt. MoMA plans to acquire more in the coming years.

Antonelli likens the process of acquiring a videogame to her aspiration to acquire a Boeing 747 that would at the same time be a part of the MoMA collection while continuing to fly, or the recent acquisition of the @ symbol, which is both in the museum while remaining public domain.

The end goal is to acquire the game’s original source code, which can be quite difficult to pry away from secretive gamemakers. If that’s not possible at first, Antonelli at least wants to wedge her foot in the door.

“We’re going to stay with them forever,” she said. “They’re not going to get rid of us. And one day, we’ll get that code.”