Do video games belong in museums?

While the presence of video games in museums is not a particularly recent phenomenon, it has undeniably intensified in recent years to the point where the very idea of exhibiting video games now seems more or less accepted. And yet, as demonstrated in 2023 by the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille and the Centre Pompidou-Metz^[1], even prestigious museum settings are not always conducive to video games. In Lille, where the teams from Spiders and Ankama were given carte blanche as part of an “Open Museum” initiative, the videos, installations, and interactive devices designed by the two studios to showcase their worlds had as much difficulty integrating into the museum’s spaces as they did engaging with its collections, and video games seemed more like intruders than guests at the Palais des Beaux-Arts. A few weeks later, the Centre Pompidou-Metz took a radically different approach with its exhibition Worldbuilding, which featured only artists whose works reproduce, subvert or subvert the codes and aesthetics of video games. It was, in fact, an exhibition of contemporary art, and an exciting one at that, but one in which video games were considered merely raw material whose true aesthetic potential could only be revealed by an artist. Despite their very different approaches, neither of these two institutions valued or took into consideration what makes mainstream video games so interesting and unique: while the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille tried with good intentions but failed, the Centre Pompidou-Metz simply did not want to address the subject.

These two examples reveal the essence of the problems that video games pose for art museums, which often struggle to come to terms with the playful, popular, and commercial dimensions of the medium, even when they are large institutions that a priori have the necessary resources and genuine expertise in exhibition design. One might therefore be tempted to say, as game designer Olivier Lejade and philosopher Mathieu Triclot noted more than ten years ago, “that video games cannot be exhibited, or at least cannot be exhibited well.”^[2] And yet, there have never been as many exhibition projects and, above all, museums dedicated to the medium as there are today: the Nintendo Museum in Kyoto has obviously been the most talked about in recent months, following its inauguration in October 2024, but other establishments have opened their doors since then, such as the Video Games Museum in Heraklion, which welcomed its first visitor last January. The hypothetical French video game museum – the nebulous “Odyssée project” – is expected to be completed by 2028. But are specialized museums an adequate response to the challenges that video games seem to pose for traditional museums? Is the museum setting even suitable for video games? Can such a recent and complex medium fit into the mold of a centuries-old institution, whose structure and functioning were originally designed for works with less fluid contours? In other words, do video games have a place in museums, and should we still be trying to bring them there?

The heritage and museum status of video games

Video games have been gaining legitimacy and heritage status for over twenty years now. Initially amateur^[3] and community-based^[4], this process has gradually become institutionalized, with more and more players joining the movement: today, in France, video games are supported politically and financially by the public authorities^[5], they are also recognized in cinema^[6], in the mainstream press^[7] and at university^[8], while game designers are awarded prestigious orders^[9] and the professional status of e-sports players is legally recognized^[10]. The entry of video games into museums is both a driving force and a consequence of this rise in legitimacy. It is a driving force because museums are places where values are displayed^[11] and help define the boundaries of heritage by playing a political role of consecration since their inception^[12]. And consequence because “the status of museum piece is the final phase in the biography of things”^[13], with the museum institution situated at the very end of the chain of cultural intermediaries. Museums therefore send a strong message by embracing video games, symbolically propelling them into the sphere of legitimate culture the moment they welcome them within their walls.

In France, the first major milestones in video game exhibitions were set in Paris in the early 2010s, with events such as Play It Yourself (Centre Pompidou, 2011) and Joue le Jeu (Gaîté Lyrique, 2012), which explored the aesthetic scope of the medium, while others, such as MuseoGames (Musée des Arts et Métiers, 2010–2011) and Game Story (Grand Palais, 2011–2012), sought to trace its technological and commercial history. Video games then found their way into other Parisian cultural institutions in the years that followed^[14], but today they are no longer confined to the capital’s museums, as illustrated last year by exhibitions organized in Tourcoing, Bordeaux, and Nancy. But while video games are being welcomed into institutions of increasingly diverse sizes, types, and locations, the way they are exhibited has changed little. This can certainly be attributed to Game On, the first major exhibition devoted to the history of video games, held in 2002 at the Barbican Centre in London, whose international success^[15] had a lasting impact on the vision of what a video game exhibition should be. The principle at the heart of Game On is that of a visitor experience structured around a chronological and technological timeline, along which working consoles and computers from the period are displayed and made available to visitors. In short, the important thing is that games from each generation are present, that these games can be played, and that they can be played on their original devices. While this approach was the foundation of MuseoGames and Game Story more than ten years ago, today many video game exhibitions still rely on one or more of these three principles, which nevertheless face a number of challenges.

Historical exhibitions: a biased approach

Whether in France or elsewhere, those who design video game exhibitions often choose the historical narrative described by researcher Marion Coville: “The games selected are presented in chronological order, in linear spaces. Visitors wander along a timeline punctuated by objects that bear witness to a specific era. It is the technical evolution, marked by key stages and figures, that is narrated in these exhibitions.”^[16] Wanting to cover the entire history of the medium in this way is a laudable project, but one that is particularly difficult to carry out, not least because video games have an asset that could be described as embarrassing: their status as commercial objects. Unlike a painting, for example, which is a unique work, a video game is produced in thousands or even millions of copies, if not simply available online in its dematerialized form. The advantage, of course, is that unlike a painting, which cannot be in several places at once, the same game can be preserved and presented simultaneously in different museums. On the other hand, and this is where it gets tricky, it also means that an exhibition that wants to cover the history of video games as a whole could theoretically present every game that has ever existed. Since such exhaustiveness is obviously unfeasible, the question that arises for curators is one of choice: how to define a limited but coherent body of games?

The criterion used is generally that of notoriety: the titles selected are mostly considered unanimously to be “cult” games, well known to gamers and sometimes even to non-gamers. However, this approach is not without its problems. On the one hand, retrospective exhibitions tend to be very similar, as they often present the same “classics.” On the other hand, these games are mostly bestsellers. By summarizing the history of the medium to that of its commercial successes—i.e., games that respond to certain logics of standardization and uniformity—many of these exhibitions offer a biased and partial view of what video games are, leaving entire sections of video game creation in the shadows in favor of titles and licenses that already enjoy considerable critical acclaim.

The other major problem with this chrono-technological approach is that it tends to impose an evolutionary reading of the history of video games, thereby reinforcing the idea that, over time, consoles can only become more powerful and games more beautiful, more detailed, richer, and longer. While the industry does indeed show a propensity for one-upmanship, this is a subject that is almost never mentioned, let alone questioned, in exhibitions, even though it is one of the main causes of the crisis currently facing video games, with creative dead ends, disastrous working conditions, and massive layoffs. Any exhibition, whether permanent or temporary, that chooses to approach video games through the prism of their history and technical progress should imperatively highlight how this dynamic of “always more” has affected—and continues to affect—the fate of the medium, its companies, and its workers. But it must be said that, until now, this subject has been overlooked by most exhibitions, as it was by Game On.

The impasse of the original experience

It is rare for a video game exhibition to refrain from presenting the machines, media, and peripherals that make games possible: these electronic relics give video games a materiality and remind visitors of the reality of the technical device that gives birth to images and enables interactivity. But the presence of consoles, controllers, and game cartridges is also part of the expectations of the most nostalgic gamers, especially if the exhibition focuses on retro games. Their absence could therefore create disappointment, and this is often a risk that curators are not willing to take. This is why in most video game exhibitions, and especially in almost all museums dedicated to the medium, computer equipment—possibly accompanied by a few elements of paratext^[17]—is displayed in showcases, just like the art objects in the Louvre or the British Museum. By drawing on the imagery of traditional art museums, the display case allows the consoles and peripherals it houses to be sanctified: it transforms artifacts whose initial value is purely instrumental into objects of admiration.

However, old consoles and computers are not only present in exhibitions to give video games a physical presence: it is also on these devices that the games on display are generally played, and visitors are free to try them out. This primacy given to vintage machines, which is almost a rule in video game exhibitions, is a direct legacy of practices originating in the collector community, for whom a retro game must be played on its original hardware, a sine qua non condition for an authentic gaming experience^[18]. But this quest for the original experience through the use of vintage machines, media, and peripherals is actually a dead end. Why is this?

First, it is important to remember that video games cannot be reduced to their material conditions. A video game is a “spatial system”^[19] that includes not only the computer and audiovisual equipment that enables it to function, but also the place and, more broadly, the historical, political, economic, and social context in which it is played. Some museums and exhibitions take this situational dimension of the video game experience into account by surrounding consoles with decorative elements and furniture from the same period as the games on display^[20]: it is not uncommon for visitors to be able to play Pong in a 1970s living room or Super Mario Bros. in an 1980s teenager’s bedroom. But as picturesque as they may be, these “period rooms” unfortunately cannot recreate the sociocultural context of an era, nor can they translate, let alone communicate, the thoughts or emotions of the players of the time. Italian academic Federico Giordano points out, for example, that playing Nuclear War when it was released in 1989—in the midst of the Cold War and just three years after the Chernobyl disaster—must have had a very strong emotional and psychological impact, but one that cannot be fully grasped 35 years later, even when discovering the game on Amiga^[21]. Similarly, playing Asteroids or Donkey Kong today on their original arcade machines does not allow us to relive the particular forms of social interaction that developed around these games in the arcades of the 1970s and 1980s, particularly because the location and attendance of these venues were determined by commercial, urban planning, and segregationist factors specific to that era.^[22]

It also seems obvious that gamers today do not have the same experience or perception of video games as they did forty, thirty, or even twenty years ago: their expectations^[23] have changed along with the medium. We have knowledge and references that the first audience for retro games did not have, and it is impossible for us not to view these old games through a historical lens, to not see the archetypes of more recent titles, and to not compare, even unconsciously, the graphics or gameplay of one game with another. Playing Metroid or Phantasy Star in 2025 may be fun and informative, but it is unrealistic to think that we can recreate the cognitive configuration of the players who discovered these games when they were first released. This knowledge of the medium specific to a given period inevitably influences the appreciation of a game at the time of its release: it is fundamental to the very idea of the original experience, and therefore represents an additional stumbling block for those who wish to preserve an “authentic” gaming experience.

Finally, this quest for the original experience through the preservation and use of vintage equipment represents a headlong rush to escape the sad reality of obsolescence. First of all, game media deteriorate, and they deteriorate quickly. Although we still lack a little perspective, experts nevertheless estimate that the lifespan of silicon chip cartridges, like that of CDs and DVDs, does not exceed a few decades^[24]. For their part, gaming devices—consoles and computers—also suffer damage over time: they are fragile instruments whose components age and are all the more irreplaceable because they often involve proprietary technologies. Even though institutions such as the National Videogame Museum in Sheffield, England, and associations such as MO5 in France are working hard to preserve and restore this old equipment, it will inevitably stop working within a few years. Not to mention that allowing these devices to be freely accessed as part of an exhibition completely contradicts efforts to keep them in working order, as their intensive use by visitors can only accelerate their deterioration^[25].

For all these reasons, preserving the original gaming experience as the sole purpose of conserving video game heritage is not only unviable, but also of questionable value. Making games available on their original consoles should therefore not be the default option for an exhibition or museum dedicated to video games. But is it really desirable to be able to play games in a museum?

Exhibiting is not playing

Any kind of playful activity usually arouses concern or mistrust when it takes place in a museum^[26], but in the specific case of video game exhibitions, being able to play the games on display is central to the expectations of the public, the concerns of the curators, and therefore the expographic proposals. In theory, this central place given to the act of playing is ideal, as it allows the interactive nature of video games to be both taken into account and highlighted: in other words, visitors to the exhibition can not only play, but they also see people playing. In practice, however, this decision to leave games playable has several drawbacks that call into question its relevance.

The temporal dimension of video gaming is inherent to the problem that video games and exhibitions pose for each other: the time a visitor spends playing is both too short and too long. Too short, first of all, because the commercially available games made available to the public in most exhibitions can only be tried out for a few minutes, which in the vast majority of cases is obviously not enough to understand and appreciate them. More importantly, this extremely short period of time is also not enough to learn how to play the games on display, since interacting with a video game requires a certain degree of technical skill that can only be acquired through regular practice over a long period of time. An exhibition whose main attraction is the opportunity to play games will inevitably appeal primarily to experienced gamers, leaving aside those who do not play video games, or play very little, and who therefore lack the confidence to play in public^[27], and the video game capital^[28] necessary to operate the devices and interpret the audiovisual information conveyed by the games. While it is important to recognize the ability of playable games to create occasional connections between visitors^[29], making gaming the focus of a video game exhibition remains highly exclusionary.

While it is clear that the actual playing time in an exhibition is far too short, not only to enjoy the games but even more so to learn how to play them, this same playing time can also be considered excessively long: since video game exhibitions necessarily attract more visitors than they can accommodate, waiting times quickly become an issue, leading to a deterioration of the visitor experience originally intended by the curators. As a result, even gaming sessions lasting only a few minutes will have a significant impact on visitor flows, the pace of their visit, and the occupancy of the various exhibition spaces, especially if the exhibition offers a chronological itinerary that encourages visitors to experience the games in a specific order^[30].

Finally, viewing video games solely through the lens of hands-on experience tends to suggest that interaction alone is a source of understanding. However, just as observing a painting or sculpture is not enough to understand it or appreciate its originality, playing a video game is not enough to grasp its full significance^[31]. Video games, like any other form of creation, do not speak for themselves. Simply putting a controller in the hands of exhibition visitors does not mean that they will suddenly become aware of everything that video games represent from a historical, economic, social, or artistic point of view. And this is where the paradox of exhibitions such as Game On, MuseoGames and Game Story emerges, which emphasize—particularly in their communication—the cultural and heritage dimensions of video games, even though the visitor experience they offer boils down to the act of playing^[32].

Moving beyond Game On

As a traveling exhibition, Game On made history by bringing video games to a large number of museums around the world, establishing itself as a model to follow. Currently, there are very few exhibitions, and even fewer museums, specifically dedicated to video games that deviate from the formula pioneered by the Barbican Centre: whether it be the National Videogame Museum in Frisco in the United States, the Computerspielemuseum in Berlin, the Video Games Museum in Heraklion, the GAMM Museum in Rome or the Nationaal Videogame Museum in Zoetermeer in the Netherlands, all these institutions have opted for a historical narrative, with old consoles on display in glass cases and games available to play. The same is true in France, where even today video game exhibitions owe a great deal to Game On, as illustrated very recently by the new version of Game Story in Versailles, whose stated ambition – reflected in its exhibition design – was to trace the history of video games in its entirety, based on the technological evolution of consoles, while allowing visitors to play a selection of games designated as essential. The future Musée Odyssée, a project that is less heritage-oriented than commercial^[33] and whose future is still uncertain^[34], also seems to be moving in this direction: its founder wants to celebrate the productions of leading publishers such as Nintendo and “make as many consoles and equipment as possible available to the public,” all in spaces that recreate “the atmospheres of different eras.”^[35] In short, nothing seems to have changed since the early 2010s: the Odyssey project – like the Game Story in Versailles – embraces the legacy of Game On without any critical distance, even though we now have the necessary hindsight to question this model of exhibition designed as a “nostalgic expression,”^[36] which is lacking in substance and flawed in form.

But highlighting the flaws of the dominant expographic model does not necessarily mean that video games have no place in museums, far from it. Cultural in the anthropological sense of the term^[37], video games are now at the foundation of shared imaginaries for millions of people, at the heart of countless social networks, and flourish in a range of practices whose diversity stems partly from the variety of genres, platforms, and conditions of use they offer, and partly from the different ways in which players appropriate them. As a result, the medium regularly spills over into areas such as sports, fashion, and the visual arts. But video games are also deeply political objects, which through their images, narratives, and mechanics offer a certain view of the world, often validating—and sometimes criticizing—its dominant logics. For all these reasons, video games deserve to be studied, documented, and preserved in order to question the present, past, and future issues surrounding their creation and practices. With this in mind, video games have a place in museums, but it seems necessary to move away from what Game On has offered in order to explore new avenues and take into account all facets of the medium.

Preserving video games: conserving games… and playability

Before even considering the different ways in which video games can be exhibited, the question of conservation must first be addressed when considering the preservation of video game heritage through its acquisition by museums. What should we preserve from video games, and more importantly, what can we preserve? Until now, in most cases, enthusiasts and institutions alike have sought to preserve video games as functional technological objects by collecting, restoring, and maintaining computer systems. As we have seen, seeking to recreate a supposedly authentic gaming experience through the preservation and use of vintage consoles is not a fully convincing conservation strategy. However, it remains essential to continue the pioneering work carried out by collectors and associations—such as MO5, WDA, ACONIT, RGC, and Musée Replay in France—which have gradually specialized in preserving this equipment and have positioned themselves as key partners for traditional museums wishing to open their doors to video games^[38]. Furthermore, enthusiasts and associations are generally not content with simply keeping old consoles and peripherals in working order: a number of them also collect extensive documentation, which is essential today for understanding the conception, design, and marketing of these devices… and will be indispensable in the future for continuing to study how this equipment works once it has become unusable.

Faced with this inevitability of obsolescence and the rapid abandonment of physical media^[39], electronic backup is unfortunately not enough, and the need for systematic emulation is becoming increasingly clear. In a nutshell, the computer process of emulation preserves the software dimension of video games by freeing them from floppy disks, cartridges, CDs, consoles, and computers that are bound to malfunction, thereby ensuring more sustainable access to older games. However, the process is not without its drawbacks, notably because it obscures the specific characteristics of the original hardware environment^[40] and neglects paratextual elements^[41]. Emulated games can also suffer from varying degrees of distortion: they often display slight differences in terms of rendering or execution speed, and sometimes suffer from audio-video synchronization issues or display errors. Emulation is therefore not a miracle solution, but it generally guarantees access to the content of a game in a more sustainable way than a fragile physical medium, which is subject to imminent and inevitable digital degradation. And as researcher Henry Lowood points out, in any media field, a distinction must be made between the preservation of technology and the preservation of content: while it may be interesting in some cases to have access to the original technology or medium, the content remains the priority^[42]. Lowood certainly recognizes the undeniable difference between playing on the original hardware and playing on an emulator, but he asks, “Is this difference essential for scientific research?” In most cases, when the object of the research is the content of the game, there is good reason to believe that it is not.

Initially driven by communities of enthusiasts, who deserve credit for the colossal retro-engineering work they have done and continue to do, emulation is slowly becoming institutionalized: entities as diverse as the Software Preservation Society, the Game Preservation Society, and the Strong National Museum of Play, for example, systematically make digital copies of the games they include in their collections^[43]. This is also the approach taken by the Bibliothèque nationale de France, which opted for “a strategy of virtualizing both media and reading machines”^[44] in the early 2000s, with a view to preventive conservation: while it favors making the originals available whenever possible, it only allows its most fragile games to be viewed using an emulator.

This widespread emulation in the institutional sphere must continue and intensify. Ideally, the final stage of preservation through emulation would take the form of a digital game library, allowing everyone to access old video games that are no longer available on the market but have been legally preserved and digitized by museums and heritage institutions. In a way, these institutions would be setting up a video game equivalent of Gallica^[45]. In fact, this service is already offered by the considerable “open video game archive”^[46] that is made up of community emulation sites, which list and offer thousands of dematerialized games for download in the form of ROM (Read-Only Memory). However, the semi-legal status of these sites is undeniably a major problem that calls into question their long-term viability, as they could be taken offline at any time if publishers suddenly threaten to take legal action against them. Although it is likely that new amateur emulation sites will always appear to replace those that disappear, it is important that sustainable and legal initiatives are put in place, even if industry players will certainly do everything in their power to prevent such projects from succeeding.

Finally, as Benjamin Barbier, a lecturer and researcher at Sorbonne Paris Nord University, points out, “preserving the game medium and ensuring that it can still be played are two fundamental aspects of the video game heritage preservation process, but these alone cannot preserve the culture that has developed around video games.”^[47] The many researchers who share this view today are therefore proposing a paradigm shift and considering video game preservation as a practice, rather than simply as an object. In short, they favor preserving playability over preserving the game itself. What does this mean? As British academic James Newman explains, playability is the act of playing, but the act of playing is not limited to the sequence of commands executed by the player during the game: playing a video game is an activity that is historically, socially, and culturally situated, which fits into and makes sense within a complex network of other interconnected social and cultural practices^[48]. This touches on the intangible dimension of video games, which manifests itself in everything that is not apparent through the simple functioning of the software: the places and times of play, playing skills, strategic expertise, body language, social interactions within and outside the game… In short, everything that characterizes the act of playing as a contextualized experience. As mentioned earlier, this experience cannot be relived, but it can be documented, among other things by archiving professional and commercial paratext, but also and above all by collecting content created by the community of players, such as let’s plays, video tutorials, recordings of competitive games, documentaries^[49], speedruns^[50], superplays, machinimas^[51] and mods, as well as walkthroughs, stories^[52], wikis, forums, podcasts, fan art and fan fiction. From a conservation perspective, only these artifacts are capable of “dethroning”^[53] the video game object to highlight the various uses, practices, and social regimes to which this object has given rise: they are traces of the activity of players, witnesses to the immaterial dimension of video games, “archives of playability”^[54].

For Newman, and for many others^[55], preserving these archives is a major challenge for the preservation of video games, but also for game studies, which cannot be satisfied with a conservation project that merely guarantees that the games will work properly, whether on the original hardware or on an emulator. Being able to play an old game today tells us very little about the experience that players had when it was first released^[56], and the growing importance of online features is unlikely to help matters. It is difficult not to see the futility of, for example, preserving playable versions of World of Warcraft, Fortnite, or DayZ after their servers are shut down: what could their depopulated worlds possibly convey about the activities of their communities? Nothing. And that is why saving playability archives is absolutely crucial for the future of research.

The various traces of players’ gaming activity are generally grouped together in what Benjamin Barbier describes as “deposits,” and in the context of contemporary video gaming, the most important of these deposits are YouTube, Twitch, Reddit, Fandom, Nexus Mods, DeviantArt, and ArtStation. In other words, the current repositories of playability archives are essentially giant private platforms whose goal is not to help preserve video games but to make a profit: the protection of their economic interests will therefore always take priority over the preservation of the content they host, not to mention the fact that they may one day be shut down or sold, and that all or part of their data could potentially disappear in the process. There is therefore a real urgency to ensure the longevity of the traces of playability from these sources^[58].

But while more and more museums and associations dedicated to video games are incorporating paratextual elements, design documents, and commercial archives from studios into their collections^[59], very few of these institutions seem to be concerned with playability archives^[60]. This apparent lack of interest is deeply regrettable, but it is not particularly surprising. Not only are most video game museums relatively new institutions, but they are also generally private initiatives, often run by enthusiasts or collectors who have developed real expertise in the medium but have no formal training in museology, conservation, or mediation. the issues of legitimacy and respectability are therefore considerable for these institutions, which is why, in my opinion, they usually seek to imitate fine art museums, whose organization and operation are centered around the materiality of the works. In other words, since traditional museums focus on objects, video game museums tend to do the same, accumulating consoles, peripherals, and game media in their reserves, but neglecting the archives of playability and thus the contingent and immaterial dimensions of video games. And even if these institutions wanted to preserve playability, presenting it to the public would still be a problem because, unlike a console, it is difficult to display in a glass case…

Exhibiting video games: an approach that needs to be reinvented

This brings us back to the subject of exhibitions. In theory, provided it has the will and the financial and technical means, a museum dedicated to video games would be perfectly capable of preserving hardware and software, collecting paratext and safeguarding playability archives. Museums can, in principle, preserve video game heritage, but what can they convey? Is the exhibition process suited to video games? Here, we need to qualify the comments made by Olivier Lejade and Mathieu Triclot quoted at the beginning of this article: it is not so much that video games are difficult to exhibit, but rather that they are often poorly exhibited. What solutions can be considered to remedy this?

The place given to the act of playing in video game exhibitions is undoubtedly the first parameter that needs to be examined. As philosopher and author Elsa Boyer sums it up, “video games cannot be exhibited by simply transposing the massive relationships between the player, the audiovisual data, and the console that are common in the private use of video games or in living room and festival formats. An exhibition project must take into account the transition of video games from one place to another, avoiding the imposition of playable consoles as the only option”^[61]. In other words, museums cannot and should not recreate the gaming circumstances of the domestic sphere, which are incompatible with the specific constraints of an exhibition. The ill-considered relocation of the video game object—and its practice—from the home to the museum represents a real dead end for exhibition design. Museums could therefore start by freeing themselves from industry-produced software and devices in order to offer alternative, unique play practices that are specific to the museum context and impossible to reproduce elsewhere except in another exhibition. This is, after all, the role of a museum, which should be a place of extraordinary experiences—in the etymological sense of the term—that stand out from everyday life and disrupt visitors’ habits^[62]. Furthermore, modifying commercially available games or equipment, or even deviating from them completely, can be an opportunity for exhibition curators to offer their audiences more accessible playful experiences, for example by offering different types of peripherals for the same device. However, too few institutions are attempting to modify or transform video games to adapt them to both the specific context of the exhibition and the different profiles of their visitors, not to mention the fact that when they do make this choice—as the Cité des Sciences did in 2013–2014 with Jeu exhibition and the different profiles of their visitors. Furthermore, when they do make this choice—as the Cité des Sciences did in 2013–2014 with Jeu vidéo l’expo—it is often poorly received by the gaming public, who, faced with unfamiliar images or unusual equipment, find it difficult to showcase their expertise during their visit^[63]. Thus, in order to move beyond the model initiated by Game On, museum professionals – and more broadly, all those involved in promoting video game heritage – must not only question their exhibition practices, but also change their audience’s perceptions and expectations of video game exhibitions.

Another potential avenue would be to consider exhibitions that are partially or even entirely unplayable: breaking free from the strictly interactive dimension of video games can make it possible to explore certain aspects that are difficult to perceive or understand through hands-on experimentation alone. What ideas and representations do video games convey through their narratives, themes, or gameplay? What are the different creative processes behind their design? Under what geographical, historical, economic, and social conditions are these games developed, marketed, and played? What relationships do video games have with cinema, literature, or the fine arts? How can the ecological impact of video games be measured, managed, and controlled? For several researchers, these questions can only be addressed in the context of a museum or exhibition by giving up—at least partially—the idea of making the games available, while adopting an exhibition design centered around the notion of fragments^[64]. The idea here is to take inspiration from archaeological museums, which display objects of very diverse natures that are generally incomplete, but whose gathering in the same room or display case allows visitors to get an idea of what a building or civilization that disappeared centuries ago might have looked like. Applied to video game exhibitions, this archaeological approach can be used to reconstruct both the creation and the situated practice of a game: from this perspective, offering visitors press articles, television archives, player accounts, game recordings, developer interviews, design documents, or user manuals is much more interesting than simply allowing them to play the games.

Beyond the questions raised by making games available, it is essential to consider the criteria for selecting them. In this sense, the subject and angle of the exhibition, which determine the corpus of games on display, are also key issues. Permanent or temporary exhibitions that produce an apologetic and technocentric history of video games by listing bestsellers have many blind spots, which calls into question the principle of the retrospective. It cannot be emphasized enough that museums—and exhibitions—are not neutral: they are normative and political institutions^[65] which, through the objects they display, the way they display them, and the statements they make about them, participate in the development of a canon^[66], whether artistic, historical, or—in the case at hand—video game-related. As devices for cultural validation and memory recording, museums not only help shape our conception of video games when they exhibit them, but they also make themselves partly responsible for the games we will remember in the future, and for how we will perceive them, because, as museologist Serge Chaumier points out, ” museums are frames that, by framing, condition the gaze and make us forget what is outside the frame.”^[67] The (over)valorization of a small portion of video games as heritage can therefore only be achieved at the expense of rendering many others invisible^[68]. It is therefore important that exhibition curators and museum managers address this issue and begin to move away from retro games, establish tighter chronological boundaries, take into account new centers of creation, and consider thematic approaches. There are many avenues to explore. Without completely rejecting the way in which most major video game exhibitions have been conceived to date, a re-examination of the criteria used to select their content could, in the future, shift the focus away from arcade games, big licenses, and triple-A games to highlight productions from outside the Western and Japanese spheres, but also to promote independent, alternative, experimental, queer, and socially engaged games, which can now be presented at festivals such as A MAZE but still struggle to find their way into museums.

Current experiments and future prospects

These reflections outline a new field of experimentation for museums, which is not entirely new, however: over the past decade or so, several institutions have taken up these issues to analyze and gradually reinvent their approach to video games. While some museums specifically dedicated to the medium are tentatively beginning to move away from retrogaming and take an interest in the archives of playability, such as the National Videogame Museum in Sheffield^[69], for example, it seems that it is mainly non-specialized museums that are renewing the museum approach to video games.

From the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle^[70] to the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels^[71], via the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie in Paris^[72], the Karlsruhe Center for Art and Media[73] and the Australian Center for the Moving Image in Melbourne[74], more and more art and science museums are incorporating video games into their permanent collections, dedicating a separate exhibition space to them. While some of these initiatives are in line with Game On, such as Power Up, the video game space at the Science Museum in London^[75], many others offer games that are short, recent or contemporary, and which also stray – to varying degrees – from the beaten track of the market. This dual desire for originality and modernity reflects, on the one hand, these institutions’ intention to present video games as a living culture rather than a fixed heritage, and on the other hand, their desire to highlight their artistic, social, and political significance. Other traditional museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art^[76] in New York or, to a lesser extent, the Musée du Quai Branly^[77] in Paris, take the opposite approach and prefer to showcase video games on an ad hoc basis as part of temporary themed exhibitions, thus bringing them closer to other types of works and documents rather than confining them to spaces that are closed off to other forms of creation. Although sometimes clumsy in their discourse or exhibition design, these proposals nevertheless contribute to breaking down the barriers around video games and allow us to question their place and role in culture, and not just as culture, thus responding to the epistemological recommendations of researcher Adrienne Shaw^[78]. This seems to be the direction taken by the Philharmonie de Paris with its future exhibition dedicated to video game music, which it promises to bring into dialogue with contemporary musical creation^[79].

A major turning point in this new appreciation of video games by museums, the exhibition Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt organized in London by the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in 2018-2019 has, in my opinion, established itself as a new model to follow by completely breaking away from the expographic legacy of Game On. Firstly, Marie Foulston, the exhibition’s curator, chose to focus on contemporary creation and to abandon both the retrospective approach and old equipment and retro games in order to design a thematic journey that sought to reflect what it meant to create and play video games in the 2000s and 2010s. Secondly, Design/Play/Disrupt offered a virtually unplayable visit based mainly on the presentation and interconnection of documents, thus breaking with the traditional hands-on approach to games, and rightly so: giving free access to titles such as Bloodborne, Kentucky Route Zero, League of Legend, and EVE Online—all present in one form or another in the exhibition—would have been of little interest. The only playable games were amateur, alternative, and experimental games (Enviro-Bear, QWOP, Line Wobbler, Hit Me, etc.) which go against industry standards, but above all were designed from the outset to be played in public during short sessions, with a design and simple controls that allow “visitors to complete a full game in a few minutes, and novices not to be discouraged by a device designed for experienced players.”^[80] The place given to gaming within the exhibition was therefore carefully thought out. Finally, thirdly, the V&A sought to highlight the eminently political nature of video games by addressing issues that are absolutely crucial but generally overlooked in exhibitions, such as the predominance of imperialist and militarist imaginaries, the weight of gender and racial stereotypes, and the hegemony of Western codes of representation. These three approaches—thematic focus, limited and thoughtful playability, and consideration of the political nature of video games—form the basis of an innovative expographic approach through which Marie Foulston and the V&A have shown that it is possible, within a museum setting, to approach video games in all their complexity and with the seriousness they deserve. And that is why, in my opinion, the Design/Play/Disrupt proposal should be the conceptual starting point for any future temporary exhibition project on video games.

While in France today, the Musée Odyssée project and the recent Game Story exhibition reveal a certain lack of interest in current issues surrounding the conservation and exhibition of video games, internationally, the lines are shifting: museums and cultural institutions more generally are starting to talk about video games in a different way, whether by exhibiting them differently or by exhibiting new ones. The changes observed do not need to be drastic to be significant: the simple decision by the National Museum of Scotland to slightly adapt the turnkey solution of Game On by adding a small section dedicated to contemporary Scottish creation is, in my opinion, entirely representative of the dynamics currently emerging^[81]. However, the future of these dynamics remains very unclear, and it is difficult to predict the physical and digital forms that video game heritage sites will take in the coming years, because while video games have their place in museums, they do not only have their place in museums. It is entirely possible, for example, that new types of venues or events will one day emerge to address the challenges posed by the preservation and, above all, the transmission of video games. But in the museum field, a dual trend seems to be emerging, with, on the one hand, a diversification of players offering new types of permanent or temporary exhibitions, as we have just seen, and, on the other hand, the emergence of an apparently sincere interest on the part of the industry in the museumization of video games.

Apparently sincere because, let’s be clear, console manufacturers and the major publishers on the market are in fact showing total indifference, if not outright rejection, towards the preservation of video games. As James Newman points out, video games are an industry whose functioning, growth, and communication are largely based on denigrating their own past, which represents a loss of revenue for them. This is why we often lament the lack of backward compatibility between consoles from the same manufacturer, that publishers prefer to release compilations or remakes of old titles rather than facilitate access to the original versions^[83], or that they shut down the servers of certain games, either because they do not generate enough traffic and therefore revenue^[84], or to force players to migrate to their sequels^[85]. And when it’s not the servers that are shut down, it’s the games themselves that are simply withdrawn from sale, as was the case last winter with NASCAR games^[86] and the classic versions of the first two Warcraft games^[87]. The industry is therefore completely neglecting its heritage, but it is also trying to prevent anyone from preserving it: any initiative to safeguard heritage that appears to pose even the slightest economic threat can trigger a wide range of reactions, from suspicious indifference to the most severe retaliation. This was demonstrated a few months ago by the US-based Video Game History Foundation, which has been campaigning for years to add an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act so that libraries can offer researchers remote access to games in their collections that are no longer available for purchase in the country. This project, whose scientific necessity and heritage value are indisputable, was rejected by the US Copyright Office, whose verdict was accompanied by a statement from the Entertainment Software Association – the US equivalent of SELL and SNJV – saying in essence that it would never support remote access to games that are no longer commercially available, even for research purposes^[90]. If further proof were needed of publishers’ contempt for the preservation of video game heritage, here it is. Finally, I would like to conclude this brief review by pointing out that the studio closures and waves of layoffs that have hit the video game industry over the past two years are only increasing and accelerating the loss of knowledge, expertise, and documentation in an environment that is already not very attentive to these issues under normal circumstances.

The conclusion is clear: preserving video game heritage is not on the agenda of publishers and manufacturers, who think in the short term with growth and profitability as their only imperatives, and the situation is not about to change. This is why it is essential to take a critical look at the industry’s heritage ambitions, because while it has no direct economic interest in preserving video games in a concrete and effective way, it has everything to gain from them being perceived as objects of heritage and culture: let us remember that in France, the cultural recognition of video games is at the very foundation of the political and financial support that the public authorities grant to the sector^[92]. The preservation and museum promotion of video games also have important symbolic implications for manufacturers, and it is undoubtedly no coincidence that companies such as Microsoft, Epic Games, and Nintendo have at one time or another sponsored Game On, or that since the early 2010s, SELL and SNJV have consistently been among the supporters of the largest French exhibitions dedicated to the medium: These partnerships obviously allow the major players in the industry to settle certain intellectual property issues with museums, but they also provide an opportunity for them to nuance their commercial motivations in the eyes of the general public, while retaining a certain right of oversight over what is said about video games in these exhibitions.

Recently, there has been an intensification of this heritage dynamic in the industry, which is increasingly using exhibitions as a communication tool: examples include the Nintendo Museum in Kyoto and Behind The Game, the exhibition organized by Ubisoft and held at the Gaîté Lyrique in Paris in 2018-2019. In both cases, the aim is clearly less to preserve video games than to promote the company, its history, and its products. And it is undoubtedly this same effect of symbolic valorization through exhibition that is sought by the many publishers who contact the Science Museum in London to ask it to include their games in the Power Up selection^[93], even though this section of the museum has only just opened its doors. As for the ambitious Embracer Games Archive project, launched in 2021, it is difficult to believe that this is a purely altruistic initiative: Lars Wingefors’ company is far from being a non-profit organization, and it is not customary for publishers and holding companies to finance costly operations without expecting a return on their investment. According to Professor Darren Wershler, a media history specialist at Concordia University in Montreal, the Embracer Games Archive has a dual strategic interest for the Swedish firm, as it allows it to build a respectable brand image while at the same time creating a repertoire of potentially lucrative but forgotten older titles, whose intellectual property could therefore be acquired at low cost if the opportunity arose^[94]. And it is true that it is difficult to imagine a company like Embracer – known for closing its studios almost as quickly as it buys them – continuing to spend millions on this archive project for decades without ever seeking to profit from it…

Preserving video games means collecting and preserving the material and documents necessary to make them accessible and, above all, understandable, in order to analyze and critique their representations, discourses, history, creative processes, and practices. However, these issues are completely at odds with the interests of the industry, which, while always quick to present video games as educational objects or a “total art form,” is not keen to see the harmful socio-economic impacts of its activities and productions brought to light. This is why, while it is highly likely that publishers and manufacturers will increasingly invest in museums and heritage sites for promotional purposes in the future, they will almost certainly continue to prevent or hinder any video game preservation projects that escape their control. I believe that we must now dismiss the idea that the industry will genuinely come to realize the value of its heritage and take a positive stance towards it. We must assume that video game preservation will happen without the industry’s involvement, if not against it.

^[1] The Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille organized an “Open Museum Jeu Vidéo” (April 13–September 25, 2023), and the Centre Pompidou-Metz presented the exhibition Worldbuilding (June 10, 2023–January 10, 2024).

^[2] Olivier Lejade and Mathieu Triclot, “Du jeu au musée, du musée au livre” (From games to museums, from museums to books), in La Fabrique des Jeux Vidéo (The Making of Video Games), O. Lejade and M. Triclot (eds.), Paris, La Martinière, 2013, n. p.

^[3] In the context of this article, the term “amateur” is not meant to be pejorative in any way: it is used here in a positive sense that does not imply a lack of expertise on the part of the person so designated, but merely indicates their non-professional status.

^[4] Benjamin Barbier, “Jeux vidéo et patrimoine : une conservation amateur ?” (Video games and heritage: amateur conservation?), Hybrid, 2014, no. 1 [Online].

^[5] On this issue, see Hovig Ter Minassian, “Les jeux vidéo : un patrimoine culturel ?” (Video games: cultural heritage?), Géographie et cultures, 2012, no. 82, pp. 121-139; and Marion Coville, “Formuler le jeu vidéo comme un ‘bien culturel’. French public policy and cultural recognition of video games,” in Penser (avec) la culture vidéoludique, S. Krichane, I. Pante, and Y. Rochat (eds.), Liège, PUL, 2022 [Online].

^[6] One example is the recent film Eat the Night (2024), directed by Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel, in which video gaming plays a central role.

^[7] These include the video game sections of Le Monde and Libération, among others.

^[8] Sarah Meunier, “Les recherches sur le jeu vidéo en France. Émergence et enjeux” (Research on video games in France: Emergence and challenges), Revue d’anthropologie des connaissances, 2017, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 379-396.

^[9] Michel Ancel, Frédérick Raynal, and Shigeru Miyamoto were awarded the insignia of Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2006. The following year, the same decoration was awarded to Peter Molyneux and David Cage. The latter has also been a Knight of the Legion of Honor since 2014.

^[10] Law for a Digital Republic (October 7, 2016), Title III, Chapter II, Section 4, Articles 101 and 102.

^[11] Serge Chaumier, Altermuséologie: manifeste expologique sur les tendances et le devenir de l’exposition, Paris, Hermann, 2018, p. 83.

^[12] François Mairesse, “Musée,” in Dictionnaire de muséologie, F. Mairesse (ed.), Paris, Armand Colin, 2022, p. 391.

^[13] Dominique Poulot, Musée et muséologie, Paris, La Découverte, 2005, p. 99.

^[14] Examples include: Jeu vidéo l’expo (Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie, 2013-2014), L’Art dans le jeu vidéo (Musée Art Ludique, 2015-2016), GAME (Fondation groupe EDF, 2017), Behind the Game (Gaîté Lyrique, 2018-2019), Insert Coin (Monnaie de Paris, 2024).

^[15] Designed from the outset as a traveling exhibition, Game On continues to tour the world in its “2.0” version.

^[16] Marion Coville, La construction du jeu vidéo comme objet muséal. Le détournement d’un objet culturel et technique de son cadre d’usage initial et son adaptation au contexte muséal, Doctoral thesis in Arts and Art Sciences, University of Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne, 2016, p. 127.

^[17] Game boxes, user manuals, derivative products, etc.

^[18] Fanny Barnabé, “Signs and playability: the interface as a tool for gamification,” Interfaces numériques, 2015, vol. 4, no. 1, p. 88; Coville, La construction du jeu vidéo comme objet muséal […], 2016, p. 119-120; Boris Urbas, “Le fil de la nostalgie dans les médiatisations contrastées du passé du jeu vidéo : expositions muséales, rétro-marketing, et vidéos amateurs,” in Médias et émotions. Categories of analysis, issues, concepts, G. Carbou and P. Vergely (eds.), Roma Tre-Press, 2020, pp. 157-158.

^[19] Samuel Rufat and Hovig Ter Minassian, “Espaces et jeu vidéo” (Spaces and video games), in Les Jeux vidéo comme objet de recherche (Video games as a subject of research), S. Rufat and H. Ter Minassian (eds.), Paris, Questions théoriques, 2011, p. 79 et seq.

^[20] Among the museums offering spaces designed in this way are the Nationaal Videogame Museum in Zoetermeer (Netherlands), the Computerspielemuseum in Berlin (Germany), the Finnish Museum of Games in Tampere (Finland), and the recent Video Games Museum in Heraklion (Greece). This is also the approach taken by the Musée Replay association in Bordeaux.

^[21] Federico Giordano, “Almost The Same Game,” Wired, B. Sterling (ed.), 2011 [Online].

^[22] This is revealed, for example, by socio-spatial analyses of arcades in Los Angeles: see Sean Smith, “Pinballers, Videoits, and the Arcade: Race, Segregation, and Leisure Space in Twentieth Century Los Angeles,” and Jeffrey Lawler, “Lacking for Leisure: Spatial Constraints in Non-White Communities in Los Angeles.” These two articles were published in 2024 in the same issue of the journal IDEAH.

^[23] This notion of horizon of expectation, as defined by literary theorist Hans Robert Jauss, refers to everything that conditions a person’s reception of a work, and in particular that person’s knowledge of the field to which the work in question belongs.

^[24] These figures are provided by Jean-Philippe Humblot, head of the multimedia support section at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. He can be heard in the fourth episode of the documentary series “Les jeux vidéo, c’est la vie !” written by Antoine Tricot and directed by Rafik Zénine, first broadcast in 2020 on France Culture. See also the estimates and warnings of the Canadian Conservation Institute.

^[25] Coville, La construction du jeu vidéo comme objet muséal […], 2016, p. 124.

^[26] Coville, La construction du jeu vidéo comme objet muséal […], 2016, pp. 107-108.

^[27] Coville, La construction du jeu vidéo comme objet muséal […], 2016, pp. 384-393.

^[28] On the concepts of video game capital and video game literacy, see in particular Boris Krywicki and Björn-Olav Dozo, “Les livres de journalistes francophones spécialisés en jeu vidéo : du capital ludique au capital journalistique,” and Maxime Verbesselt, ”Le jeu vidéo comme espace de réflexivité et de construction discursive: retour sur Gamer Très Accro, un atelier d’expression vidéoludique.” These two articles were published in the collective work Penser (avec) la culture vidéoludique, edited by the Liège Game Lab and published by Presses universitaires de Liège in 2022. The book is available online.

^[29] Coville, La construction du jeu vidéo comme objet muséal […], 2016, p. 393; Patrick Prax, Lina Eklund, and Björn Sjöblom, “‘More like an arcade’ – The limitations of playable games in museum exhibitions,” Museum & Society, 2019, 17 (3), p. 443.

^[30] Coville, La construction du jeu vidéo comme objet muséal […], 2016, pp. 127-128.

^[31] James Newman and Iain Simons, “Make Videogames History: Game preservation and The National Videogame Archive,” Proceedings of DiGRA 2009, London, 2009, pp. 5-6.

^[32] Prax, Eklund and Sjöblom, “‘More like an arcade’ […],” 2019, p. 446.

^[33] It should be noted that the YouTuber behind the project (Benoît Theveny) is primarily an entrepreneur: he owns several hotels and restaurants, as well as a clothing brand and an e-sports team. It should also be noted that the association managing the Odyssée museum project is for-profit, which runs counter to the very notion of a museum as defined by the International Council of Museums.

^[34] At the beginning of 2025, the building permit for the museum had still not been approved, and several tens of millions of euros were still missing from the budget. On the political and economic imbroglio surrounding the project, see Simon Pierre, “Odyssée, l’intrigant projet du ‘plus grand musée du jeu vidéo’ soutenu par Emmanuel Macron” (Odyssée, the intriguing project for the “largest video game museum” supported by Emmanuel Macron), Le Figaro, February 22, 2025 [Online].

^[35] Aurélien Defer, “Dans les coulisses du futur musée français du jeu vidéo” (Behind the scenes of the future French video game museum), JV le mag, 2024, no. 105, pp. 12-13. See also the project description on the dedicated website.

^[36] Urbas, “The thread of nostalgia in contrasting media coverage of the past of video games […],” 2020, pp. 160-164.

^[37] On video games as culture and cultural practice, see in particular Adrienne Shaw, “What is Video Game Culture? Cultural Studies and Game Studies,” Games and Culture, 2010, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 403-424; Selim Krichane, Isaac Pante, and Yannick Rochat, “Culture vidéoludique ? Le jeu vidéo comme champ de pratiques culturelles,” in Penser (avec) la culture vidéoludique, S. Krichane, I. Pante, and Y. Rochat (eds.), Liège, PUL, 2022 [Online].

^[38] On the mutual benefits that amateurs and museums can bring to each other, see in particular Helen Stuckey, Nick Richardson, Melanie Swalwell and Denise de Vries, “What retrogamers can teach the museum,” MWA2015: Museums and the Web Asia 2015 [Online].

^[39] Benjamin Barbier, “Les aspects immatériels du jeu vidéo : les plateformes comme lieux de préservation des traces et des communautés” (The intangible aspects of video games: platforms as places for preserving traces and communities), Hybrid, 2022, no. 8 [Online].

^[40] Ter Minassian, “Les jeux vidéo : un patrimoine culturel ?” (Video games: a cultural heritage?), 2012, p. 128.

^[41] On the advantages and disadvantages of emulation, see Riccardo Fassone, “Archiver les jeux d’arcade : rhétorique et idéologie de l’émulation vidéo-ludique” (Archiving arcade games: rhetoric and ideology of video game emulation), Tracés, 2015, no. 28, pp. 61-79.

^[42] Henry Lowood, “Playing History with Games: Steps towards Historical Archives of Computer Gaming,” Annual Meeting of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, Portland, 2004.

^[43] Lewis Packwood, “The Preservationists. Digging through the archives with the people striving to safeguard videogame history,” Edge, no. 377, December 2022, pp. 70–79.

^[44] Jean-Philippe Humblot, head of the multimedia support section at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (France Culture, LSD, “Les jeux vidéo, c’est la vie !,” fourth episode).

^[45] Gallica is the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France: this online service provides access to more than ten million copyright-free documents from the library’s collections.

^[46] Barbier, “Video games and heritage […],” 2014.

^[47] Barbier, “The intangible aspects of video games […],” 2022.

^[48] James Newman, Best Before. Videogames, Supersession and Obsolescence, New York, Routledge, 2012, pp. 153-154.

^[49] See in particular Pierre Trouvé, “From Second Life to Grand Theft Auto: when video games serve as filming locations for documentaries,” Le Monde, Pixels, March 1, 2025 [Online].

^[50] Sacha Bernard, “De la transgression à la patrimonialisation : le speedrun comme art de préserver et valoriser le jeu vidéo” (From transgression to heritage: speedrunning as an art form for preserving and promoting video games), presentation at the conference Entraves et limite du jeu vidéo. Discours, normes et agentivités (Barriers and limits of video games: discourse, norms, and agency), Limoges, June 2024.

^[51] Henry Lowood, “Video Capture: Machinima, Documentation, and the History of Virtual Worlds,” in The Machinima Reader, H. Lowood and M. Nitsche (eds.), Cambridge, The MIT Press, 2011, pp. 3-22.

^[52] Dany Guay-Bélanger and Adam Lefloïc Lebel, “Oral histories as a tool for preserving the history and culture of video games,” Sciences du jeu, 2023, no. 20-21 [Online].

^[53] “The game, at least in its playable form, is ‘dethroned’ and ceases to be the object that is contextualized, interpreted, and made sense of by these other materials which, in turn, potentially take on the role of archival documents of games and, most importantly, of gameplay.” (Newman, Best Before […], 2012, p. 155).

^[54] Hugo Montembeault and Simon Dor, “À quoi pensent les archives de la jouabilité ? Une approche historiographique de l’expérience vidéoludique” [What are playability archives thinking about? A historiographical approach to the video game experience], Conserveries mémorielles, 2018, no. 23 [Online].

^[55] See in particular Henry Lowood, “Memento Mundi: Are Virtual Worlds History?”, iPRES 2009: the Sixth International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects, 2009, p. 121-128; Zach Vowell, “What Constitutes History?”, American Journal of Play, 2009, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 151–155; Melanie Swalwell, “Moving on from the Original Experience: Games History, Preservation and Presentation,” in Proceedings of DiGRA 2013: DeFragging Game Studies, Atlanta, 2013; Prax, Eklund and Sjöblom, “‘More like an arcade’ […]”, 2019, p. 446; Barbier, “Les aspects immatériels du jeu vidéo […]”, 2022.

^[56] “To date, there has been a fixation on collecting and preserving the game itself, sometimes at the expense of other artifacts in game history. However, researchers and curious future audiences will need more than a game if they are to discern its significance and make sense of it.” (Swalwell, “Moving on from the Original Experience […],” 2013, p. 7).

^[57] Barbier, “The intangible aspects of video games […]”, 2022.

^[58] However, it should be noted that any project to preserve playability archives faces the problem of selection: given the abundance of content available on the web, what should be preserved, in what proportion, and according to what criteria?

^[59] Examples include the Video Game History Foundation, the Strong National Museum of Play and the Briscoe Center for American History in the United States, and the Conservatoire National du Jeu Vidéo in France.

^[60] However, more “generalist” heritage institutions such as the Internet Archive and the Bibliothèque nationale de France are involved in collecting playability archives as part of their web archiving mission. Neither, however, has set clear objectives in this regard.

^[61] Elsa Boyer, “Le jeu vidéo, du tribunal à l’exposition” (Video games, from the courtroom to the exhibition), Critique, 2011, vol. 10, no. 773, p. 816.

^[62] John H. Falk and Lynn D. Dierking, The Museum Experience, Whalesback Books, Washington D.C., 1992.

^[63] Coville, La construction du jeu vidéo comme objet muséal […], 2016, pp. 316-317, and several passages in chapter 8 (pp. 337-370).

^[64] Swalwell, “Moving on from the Original Experience […],” 2013, pp. 9-10; Prax, Eklund, and Sjöblom, “‘More like an arcade’ […],” 2019, p. 446; Marie Foulston, ‘Design, Play, Disrupt: Curating the V&A’s Videogame Exhibition,’ Game Developers Conference, 2019 [Online].

^[65] Clive Gray, The Politics of Museums, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

^[66] See in particular Griselda Pollock, “Des canons et des guerres culturelles,” Cahiers du Genre, 2007, no. 43, pp. 45-69. For a more recent case study on a French museum, see Thibaut Casagrande and Alice Pfister, “Exposer le chef-d’œuvre : construire ou déconstruire le canon artistique ? L’exemple du centre Pompidou-Metz,” Comparatismes en Sorbonne, 2013, no. 4.

^[67] Chaumier, Altermuséologie […], 2018, p. 61.

^[68] However, museums and exhibitions are not solely responsible for this dual process of valorization and invisibilization: journalists, authors, academics, and streamers also play a role.

^[69] In addition to highlighting local video game heritage—presented in the Made in Sheffield section of its permanent exhibition—the NVM is also working to preserve and promote playability archives through two projects: “Animal Crossing Diaries” and “Gaming Memories.”

^[70] In 2015, MoPOP inaugurated Indie Game Revolution, a permanent space entirely dedicated to video games where the public can freely play around 20 titles, with the selection changing regularly.

^[71] In 2024, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels launched its Bozar Arcade project, which offers visitors the opportunity to discover a small selection of games whose themes echo the museum’s programming.

^[72] The Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie’s e-LAB opened its doors in 2019. The selection of games on offer and the cultural program evolve according to the theme of the moment, which changes roughly every year.

^[73] The Karlsruhe Center for Art and Media has been hosting video games since 2016 in its zkm_gameplay section, which presents independent titles (Firewatch, Florence, Manifold Garden, etc.), experimental titles (Long March: Restart, Dys4ia, etc.), and major productions (Portal 2, No Man’s Sky, etc.).

[74] The ACMI opened its Games Lab section in 2021. It regularly showcases contemporary and independent Australian productions (Unpacking, Cult of the Lamb, Untitled Goose Game, etc.) in its visitor experience and exhibitions.

^[75] The Science Museum inaugurated Power Up in 2023. The exhibition space echoes the main principles of Game On: a chronological and technological approach, cult games and iconic mascots, and free access to original equipment.

^[76] Video games are not featured in the MoMA’s permanent collection, but they frequently find their way into the museum’s design exhibitions, such as This Is for Everyone (2015-2016) and Never Alone (2022-2023).

^[77] The Quai Branly Museum occasionally includes video games in the collection of works and objects it presents in its exhibitions. Notable examples include Enfers et fantômes d’Asie (2018) and Ultime combat. Arts martiaux d’Asie (2021-2022).

^[78] “If we are going to study games within a framework of culture […], we as scholars must draw on the concepts as well as the conflicts of cultural studies. We must be reflexive and critical of both our object of study and our methodologies. Defining gaming culture as something distinct and separate from a constructed mainstream culture encourages us to only study those who identify as gamers, rather than more dispersed gaming. That is, we should look at videogames in culture rather than games as culture.” (Adrienne Shaw, ‘What Is Video Game Culture? […],’ 2010, p. 416).

[79] Entitled Video Games & Music. La musique dont vous êtes le héros (Video Games & Music. The music you are the hero of), this exhibition will open on April 3, 2026.

^[80] Marion Coville, “Repenser le jeu par l’installation” (Rethinking gaming through installation), Art Press 2, 2013, no. 28 [Online].

^[81] The National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh hosted version 2.0 of Game On from June 29 to November 3, 2024. The space dedicated to contemporary Scottish games (Observation, Viewfinder, A Highland Song, Phogs!, Pine Hearts, etc.) was located in the “Global communities” section of the exhibition, which, despite its title, mainly featured Western games.

^[82] Newman, Best Before […], 2012, p. 75.

^[83] For example, a study by the Video Game History Foundation conducted in 2024 showed that in the United States, 87% of games released before 2010 are no longer available on the market.

^[84] In 2024, we saw the closure of the servers for The Crew, the discontinuation of online services for 3DS and Wii U games, the taking offline of Concord by Sony just two weeks after its release, and Ubisoft’s announcement of the planned end of XDefiant in June 2025, barely a year after its arrival on the market. More recently, Warner Bros. announced that MultiVersus would see its servers shut down on May 30, 2025.

^[85] Two relatively recent and well-known cases are those of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Overwatch, whose servers were shut down by Valve and Blizzard, respectively, to force players to switch to Counter-Strike 2 and Overwatch 2. On the subject of multiplayer game server shutdowns, see Adam Starkey, “Game Over. What happens when multiplayer games are switched off for good?”, Edge, 2024, no. 398, pp. 78-85.

^[86] Effective January 1, 2025, this withdrawal from platforms followed the sale of the NASCAR license by Motorsport Games to iRacing. It seems likely that iRacing hopes to attract as many players as possible when its next NASCAR game is released in fall 2025.

^[87] Available until December 2024 on GOG.com, the classic versions of Warcraft 1 and 2 have been removed from the site’s catalog at Blizzard’s request. It is likely that the publisher wanted to channel potential buyers towards the remastered versions of these two titles, released just a month earlier on battle.net.

^[88] One example is the Bibliothèque nationale de France, which is struggling to remind publishers of their legal deposit obligation. See Ter Minassian, “Les jeux vidéo : un patrimoine culturel ?” (Video games: cultural heritage?), 2012, p. 129.

^[89] As a reminder, companies such as Sony, Sega, and especially Nintendo have been waging a fierce battle against ROM sites and emulator developers for years.

^[90] Phil Salvador, “Statement on the DMCA 2024 triennial review ruling,” Video Game History Foundation, October 25, 2024 [Online].

^[91] “The video game industry is a sector that deliberately organizes its own amnesia. This is due in part to working conditions that cause people to leave the industry very young and/or very quickly, but also simply because there is a kind of refusal to devote time to documentation, transmission, and training.” (statement by game designer Thaïs Arias during the round table discussion “Circulation of Knowledge,” organized as part of the symposium Entraves et limite du jeu vidéo. Discours, normes et agentivités (Barriers and Limits of Video Games: Discourse, Norms, and Agency) held in Limoges in June 2024).

[92] On this subject, see Marion Coville, “Dixième art,” “jeu d’auteur”: quelle politique de représentation du jeu vidéo comme art ?, Art Game – Game Art, University of Montpellier, 2013 [Online], and Coville, “Formuler le jeu vidéo comme un ‘bien culturel’ […],” 2022.

^[93] “Create new save point?”, Edge, no. 407, March 2025, p. 13.

^[94] Patrick Klepek, “Why Is a Game Publisher Trying to Buy Every Video Game Ever Made?”, Vice, 2022 [Online].