In the grand entrance of the Victoria & Albert Museum, beneath a looming dome with ancient statues visible through nearby arches, a programmer/DJ is busy live-coding a glitchy electronic music set. Either side of her, large LED displays show streams of code and strobing pixellated images as the bass pounds. She’s part of a group named London Live Coding, an experimental collective that makes music by writing and manipulating audio programs. It is loud, disorientating and brilliant, and I can’t help wondering what Queen Victoria and her husband would have made of it.
The set is part of the museum’s long-running Friday Late evening series, a collaboration with the London Games Festival. It showcased a range of independent video games and immersive interactive experiences, focusing on the link between play and performance. Visitors were given a map and left to wander the halls, corridors and galleries looking for installations. You could play the Bafta-winning comedy game Thank Goodness You’re Here! on a giant screen beneath a 13th-century spiral staircase. You could wander down the darkened Prince Consort’s gallery and find groups of giggling pals playing the hilarious erotic physics puzzler Sex With Friends, in which ragdoll-like characters have to be guided into (consensual) sexual encounters – much to the amusement of spectators.
For co-curator Susie Buchan, this sense of theatre was important. “I was really interested in how playing a game within a gallery setting, particularly when it’s on a large scale and you have an audience, turns the players into performers of sorts,” she says. “A highlight for me was seeing the camaraderie of the audience playing Sex With Friends. You would not expect a group of people in the V&A on a Friday night shouting sex positions at a screen to feel so weirdly wholesome.”
This isn’t the V&A’s first exploration of games culture – the museum has put on a range of themed events over the past decade and in 2018 ran a beautiful exhibition, Design/Play/Disrupt, curated by Marie Foulston and Kristian Volsing. But there has been a hiatus recently and Volsing, now a senior curator, was keen to bring games and play back into the building. “It’s incredibly important to present and critique video games as a major, serious part of our culture, and putting them in a museum context does exactly that, with an emphasis on a communal experience. It fundamentally changes the way we encounter these artefacts, by asking visitors to consider them alongside historic valuable items, and to share these experiences and encounters with other members of the public.”
Another vital element of the event was its focus on participation and shared creativity. Comedian and writer Jamie Brew got a whole crowd to join in with his performance project, Robot Karaoke, which uses an algorithm to generate new lyrics to classic pop songs by implementing a range of unlikely textual data sets. A highlight was when the whole room were singing along to Dancing Queen with lyrics drawn from negative reviews posted on Glassdoor. In the learning centre, artist Fredde Lanka was helping participants create their own video game fanzines. I loved Jana Romanova’s lite-LARP experience The Line is the Game, in which participants were given a role to play before joining an unruly queue in character for as long as they wanted in the corridor just beyond the sculpture gallery.
The author and game designer Holly Gramazio has curated dozens of video game events at museums and galleries all over the world, including the much-missed Now Play This festival of experimental games at Somerset House. She sees the interplay of gallery experience, gaming and performing as a key element of presenting video games in these environments. “There’s something special about the way that both video games and exhibitions draw on so many other different modes of expression,” she says. “[They] often have at their heart the experience of someone moving through some sort of space and responding to it. It makes exhibitions a very expressive and complex way of sharing games and their contexts and histories with an audience.”
In April, the London Games Festival will bring experiences like this to venues throughout the city. It’s heartening that there are similar events taking place around the world. Buchan recommends the Overkill festival in the Netherlands and A MAZE in Berlin; everyone I spoke to mentioned the New York-based art games collective Babycastles. The Game Arts International Network keeps a list of art organisations active in games events and installations. Veteran event curator and game designer V Buckenham, who was involved in the evening’s Car Boot Casino installation – a collection of new card-based bluffing games – sees these spaces as a virtuous circle: players get to envisage games in a different way, while non-gamers may have their expectations about the medium challenged, and developers get a lot out of it too: “There’s an inherent excitement in running your stupid game about sausages next to a hand-carved mantelpiece that’s hundreds of years old. Or improvising algorave music and visuals under a Chihuly [sculpture].”
It is far too easy right now to view video games through the lens of the industry – to obsess over the billions being made by Fortnite and Roblox, to dwell on the shifting power structures, the buyouts, the brand extensions. To spend a couple of hours viewing games in unfamiliar contexts, placed between renaissance paintings and baroque silverware, is a chance to read them in new ways but also to understand that they belong to culture as much as commerce.
“Video games can bridge the gap between the past of the museum’s collections and the present,” says Volsing. “You can certainly relate the inspiration of real historic materials on display to how they have been reimagined in a digital world. And navigating the five levels and seven miles of galleries around the V&A is so much like an open-world game!”
