V&A display showcases ‘vital design medium’ of video games

An exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum on video games will explore “one of the most important design disciplines of our time”, its director has said.

Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt will open at the world-famous V&A in September.

It will examine video game design since the mid-2000s and consider issues such as race and sexuality while “delving into the notebooks and hard drives” of the designers.

Curators said the game, which included references to child labour, was banned by Apple from its App Store partly because of how it depicted children, which raised “questions” about what subjects can be reflected in games.

Another game, How Do You Do It?, puts players in the role of an 11-year-old girl exploring the idea of sex using her plastic dolls.

Nina Freeman’s 2014 semi-autobiographical game, which “allows the audience to understand the discovery of sexuality from the perception of a young girl,” will be playable at the exhibition.

The museum’s director Tristram Hunt said that video games are a “vital design medium”.

“Henry Cole would have definitely embraced this exhibition”, he said of the museum’s first director, who in his time introduced gas lighting to allow evening opening, in the hope it “may furnish a powerful antidote to the gin palace”.

While not being a historical retrospective, it will examine both the art and the engineering behind video games, she said.

Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt runs from September 8 2018 to February 24 2019 at the V&A.