This War of Mine Added To Museum of Modern Art

This War of Mine, 11 bit studios’ award-winning survival game, is going to be added to New York’s Museum of Modern Art as part of the gallery’s Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive Design exhibition. Among the 36 games currently in the collection are classics like Pac-Man, The Sims, and Minecraft, as well as more obscure titles such as Passage, Yars’ Revenge, and Dwarf Fortress.

The exhibition runs until July 16th, however, the games featured will be archived for future displays and reference. The purpose of the collection, which not only includes video games but also other “notable examples of interaction design”, is to preserve important artistic creations that connect technology and people. In regard to video games, the gallery does this by preserving, where possible, the selected games’ original software and hardware. Specifically, they “try to acquire the source code in the language in which it was written, so as to be able to translate it in the future”.
 

The museum has a very strict admittance filter that takes into consideration “behavior”, “aesthetics”, “space”, and, “time”. According to the Museum of Modern Art, This War of Mine and the other games in the collection are titles that: “can be used to train and educate, to induce emotions, to test new experiences, or to question the way things are and envision how they might be”; they have “particularly inventive and innovative designers [that] have excelled at using technology’s limitations to enhance a game’s identity”; “an architecture that is planned, designed, and constructed according to a precise program”; and a dynamic “way in which the dimension of [interaction design] is expressed and incorporated into the game”.

Collection Specialist and co-curator Paul Galloway called This War of Mine “one of the most incredible examples of a video game that takes us to a hard place” and said that it left him “with a very changed understanding of what it is to be ‘playing’ in a war space.” The Museum of Modern Art isn’t the only establishment to recognize This War of Mine’s potential cultural importance since it was released in 2014; with it being announced in June 2020 that the game would be added to Poland’s school curriculum.

This War of Mine is available on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.
 

Alex Johnson (@AlexJohnWriting)
News Editor, NoobFeed