I took these pictures of The Art of Video Games Exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum when I went up to Washington DC to check out a multi-day car auction to try to find an RX-8 for the EV Conversion Project. I had to stay an extra day between being able to see the cars and bidding on them, so I made a trip out of it by seeing the museums. I was by myself, so I got to see all the cool stuff outside of the usual tourism sites that you have to go to when you’re with somebody who’s never been to DC before. The Art of Video Games Exhibit explores the 40 year history of the use of gaming as a medium for artistic expression. Along with concept sketches, the actual game machines were split up into eras and their technological advances discussed in terms of how they were able to make games more beautiful and complex. The 80 games featured in the exhibit were voted in by 119,000 from 175 countries from February to April 2011 when the museum asked for the public’s opinion. This is the official introduction to the exhibit from it’s curator, Chris Melissinos:

When you first walk into the exhibit, there are a couple of mural pieces composed on large grids of TV screens and an intro video projected on a wall. My point and shoot camera wasn’t able to capture these in decent resolution, but I took pictures of all of the still art. The entire exhibit is very dimly lit almost like a movie theater or a laser tag arena (some of my pictures didn’t turn out because of this, sorry). After the videos at the entrance, there is a hallway featuring concept sketches from the development of some popular games. The first big room has 5 playable game demos. The video is projected onto a large semi-circular wall with the controls on a podium in the middle. The last room is where all the machines are on display with informational videos about the breakthroughs in gaming each machine was responsible for.