We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

I was rhetorically asking what would be displayed in a hypothetical Minecraft exhibit.

I would really love to visit a gaming museum.

There was a video gaming exhibit at OMSI (the Oregon Museum of Science and Technology) some months back. It wassss... interesting, but pretty disappointing at the same time. The whole thing was arranged largely chronologically, with various sections about everything from gameplay to graphics and hardware to marketing; my favorite part of the whole thing was probably the old print ads from the 80s. For the most part, there weren't a whole lot of things like game boxes and CDs and manuals around; when they were part of the display, they didn't feature prominently in it – they were just set next to a console that was set up to play that game. More in evidence were things like pages of concept art or demonstrations of gameplay or posters describing how and why thus and such was relevant or interesting: all sorts of things that would be just as extant or doable for purely digital games as much as physically-distributed ones.

It's not so much the manner in which things were exhibited that made it disappointing, though. For all that it must have taken time to gather all these decades-spanning pieces of software and hardware and to research them and so forth, and for all that things were well laid-out and contained a lot of genuinely interesting bits of gaming history and technology... There was this feel of slapdashedness though a lot of it, that same insinuation that the people they were exhibiting this for were all little kids or losers that you get in TV and movies that include gaming as plot points. From the badly-spelled and worse-punctuated posters and descriptions to the fact that most of what was on display were things you probably already knew if you grew up with video games – say, if you happened to be born pretty much any time in the eighties on up – there was this tacit implication that it didn't matter how good or bad the exhibit was: it was for gamers. Who cares?