99. Museums in Video Games
Welcome to Museum Archipelago in Your Inbox, which does exactly what it says on the tin. Museum Archipelago, your audio guide to the rocky landscape of museums, is hosted by me, Ian Elsner.
The Computer Games Museum in Berlin knows that its visitors want to play games, so it lets them. The artifacts are fully-playable video games, from early arcade classics like PacMac to modern console and PC games, all with original hardware and controllers. By putting video games in a museum space, the Computer Games Museum invites visitors to become players.
But players can become visitors too. Video games have been inviting players into museum spaces for decades. In the mid 1990s, interaction designer Joe Kalicki remembers playing PacMan in another museum – only this one was inside a video game. In Namco Museum, players navigated a 3D museum space to access the games, elevating them to a high-culture setting.
Since then, museums and their cultural shorthands have been a part of the video game landscape, implicitly inviting their players-turned-visitors to think critically about museums in the process.
In this episode, Kalicki presents mainstream and indie examples of video games with museums inside them: from Animal Crossing’s village museum to Museum of Memories, which provides a virtual place for objects of sentimental value, to Occupy White Walls, where players construct a museum, fill it with art – then invite others to come inside.
🎉 Museum Archipelago's 100th Episode Party 🎉
The next episode of Museum Archipelago is episode 100.
This milestone has me feeling a lot. Mostly gratitude for you for listening.
To celebrate, I want to hear from you! Click this link to submit your voice memos by Aug. 22 so they can be incorporated into this very special centennial episode!
Press: Museum Archipelago Interviewed on Grid 🗞️
Museum Archipelago was featured on Grid.news to discuss the Museum of the Moving Image exhibit called Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen and the wider implications of the levels of trust museums still enjoy.
Archipelago at the Movies🍿Topkapi (1964)
Elizabeth is a thief - she says so herself in the first scene - and she's planning to steal the Sultans's Dagger from the Topkapi museum in Istanbul. But to pull off the heist, and avoid touching the alarmed floor of the museum, Elizabeth and her suave ex-lover must first assemble a team.
If anything in 1964's Topkapi feels familiar to other museum heist movies we've reviewed, it's probably because those museum heist movies were imitating Topkapi.
Today, Rebecca Reibstein and I going back to the original. This is Topkapi.