Restart the Game! ZKM_Gameplay relocates to the ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art

The game platform »ZKM_Gameplay« is moving out of the ZKM | Media Museum and relocating to the ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art. »ZKM_Gameplay« is scheduled to reopen from September 12, 2014. »ZKM_Gameplay in the Media Museum will be closed due to reconstruction work from August 4, 2014.

The usual and much-prized highlights of »ZKM_Gameplay«, such as »PainStation«, Feng Mengbos »Long March: Restart« and many more, will likewise be presented in the Museum of Contemporary Art. New acquisitions are the games by the independent games festival A MAZE. Among these are Lea Schönfelder’s »Perfect Woman« and Mark Essen’s »Nidhogg«.

Computer games in the museum?

Yes – and right from the outset, when the ZKM opened in 1997. Computer games have occupied a prominent place ever since the ZKM’s foundation. Thus, the ZKM | Media Museum has assumed a clear pioneer role, in contrast to the New York Museum of Modern Art, for example, which first began incorporating computer and video games into its collection in November 2012.

The ZKM recognized the significance and potency of computer games as a medium at an early stage. Teacher and social pedagogue Friedemann Schindler together with designer Frank den Oudsten began designing a permanent exhibition as early as 1995 – the »World of Games« – to illustrate the multiple levels of the medium of computer games. Through Friedmann Schindler, the early world of games is above all influenced by the (media) education perspective. The exhibition »World of Games” provides a starting point for the new platform »ZKM_Gameplay«.

Why are computer games also important for museums? Computer games represent an essential part of a life-world influenced by digitalization. For this reason, one of the key tasks of the ZKM is the critical examination of the features and the potential of games. This is achieved in so far as the artistic possibilities of the computer game shifts to the foreground, rather than cementing its conventions.

Game art, independent games and serious games

»ZKM_Gameplay« shows computer games and works of interactive art. One area of focus lies in artistic games and game art, as well as independent games and serious games. Naturally, commercial computer games in »ZKM_Gameplay« also have their place, since the computer game is most evident in the entertainments industry. All exhibited games show positions, which, by way of especially creative games ideas, interesting experimental standards, substantial cultural potency or unique consciousness of their own medium and expressive forms have distinguished themselves. The computer game is elaborated in a range of variations, genres, facets – and also art scenes –, and has thus advanced to a complex media genre. Over the course of its history, the computer game has developed a specific repertoire of expressive forms.

»ZKM_Gameplay« shows these developments and presents the computer game as a medium capable of developing its own independent self-consciousness, and of entering a phase of reflection.

We will be restarting the games in September! Restart the Game – Press Start to Continue! in the ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art.

Text: Stephan Schwingeler