Videogames and the public museum. Six months behind the scenes

Over the past four decades, and especially within the last 15 years, videogames have emerged as a recurrent and increasingly prominent fixture in the exhibitions, collections, and programming of public museums. Despite their pervasive presence in cultural institutions, however, the situation of videogames within the museum remains poorly interrogated. Why are museums apparently so interested in videogames? How do videogames fit within the work and organisation of museums? And how do the established practices and ideologies of the public museum shape videogame displays in turn? Developed from a six-month ethnographic field study behind the scenes at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in 2018, this research documents the final stretch of the multi-year development cycle of a blockbuster exhibition of videogames. Following the day-to-day work of the exhibition’s curators and coordinators, the thesis examines the museum’s backstage to understand how videogames – as a relatively unfamiliar medium, technology, and culture – fit into the established professional practices that comprise contemporary museum work. Beyond this granular perspective, the research connects the tensions encountered throughout the exhibition’s development with broader museological concerns, suggesting that although videogames themselves are relatively unprecedented within cultural institutions, the frictions that emerge from their display are not. By examining what museums want from this new exhibition subject, the research uses videogames as an analytical lens through which to examine the position of the museum within its cultural economy. This thesis articulates how the gradual stripping of state funding from the public museum compels an institutional logic geared towards high visitation targets, which accordingly results in an inflexible system of exhibition production which poorly serves subjects as materially and culturally complex as videogames. The primary assertion of this thesis is that videogames trouble museums. They resist the entrenched material practices that comprise the task of exhibition-making, and confound its traditional modes of display. The unfamiliarity of the medium of videogames – the strangeness of its materiality, communities, and cultures of production – results in an incompatibility that requires significant and sustained effort to overcome. The research conveys a vision of the public museum as a multifarious institution whose activities are mediated through a complex assemblage of professional, cultural, and commercial interests. Through this, the videogame exhibition is positioned as a contested terrain: a site in which the heterogeneous desires of curators, museum directorate, and the videogame industry (among many others) collide.