Kudos to Razimus Dragon for alerting me (and, indeed, the entire Ultima Dragons Facebook group) to PC World’s summary of the exhibit, which opened last month at the Smithsonian.

Are video games art?

The Smithsonian American Art Museum says “yes” with its newest exhibit, The Art of Video Games. The exhibit is curated by Chris Melissinos of Past Pixels, a group charged with the preservation of video game history. Over the past year, Melissinos — aided by a board of advisors that includes Double Fine’s Tim Schafer, text adventure veteran Steve Meretzky, and Penny Arcade team Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik — designed an exhibit that encourages visitors to make what Melissinos calls “a deeply personal decision” of whether video games are art. The exhibit offers five eras of video games with both playable demos and self-playing videos, showcasing everything from the Atari 2600 to the PlayStation 3, from the traditional platforming of Super Mario Bros. to the more experimental play of Flower.

Naturally, Ultima makes a bit of an appearance in the exhibit, in the form of an Ultima 4 map donated by the Ultima team at BioWare Mythic:

The Ultima 4 Map

(Additional pictures of the map can be found here and here.)

The exhibit looks at games across five eras — labeled “Start”, “8-bit”, “Bitwars”, “Transition” and “Next Generation” — and has also featured several panel discussions. It isn’t a perfect or totally comprehensive look at the history of video games as forms of art, but it certainly gives the viewer a taste of the level of love and detail that has been poured into games over the course of the last few decades.