The Netherlands' Home for Games: The Nationaal Videogame Museum
The Netherlands has given the medium more than its share of games, and in Zoetermeer it has given them a home. The Nationaal Videogame Museum is a national museum devoted entirely to video games, and like the best of its kind it does not ask you to admire the exhibits from a distance. It asks you to play them.
A national home, hands on
The museum sets out to tell the whole story of games, not only the famous titles but the social and cultural side: how we played, who we played with, and what that did to us. Much of the collection is switched on and waiting, so visitors move through the history by actually picking up the controllers rather than reading labels. For a medium you only truly understand by doing, that is the right instinct, and keeping that much old hardware running is its own quiet discipline.
Treating games as a subject worthy of a national museum, rather than a toy shop with a ticket desk, is a statement in itself: that this is culture, and that it deserves to be kept and understood.
The Game Boy's place in it
The Game Boy belongs squarely in that story. It is one of the machines that turned games from something you did at a desk or a television into something you carried in a pocket, on a train, under the covers. A museum tracing how play spread into everyday life almost has to pass through the little grey handheld, and seeing it treated as part of a national cultural record, rather than mere nostalgia, is heartening to anyone doing the same at a smaller scale.
A kindred spirit
This is a single-machine archive writing about a national museum, and the scales are very different. But the conviction is identical: that games are culture, that their history is fragile, and that the best way to keep it is where people can see and play it. Whether it is a nation's worth of games under one roof in Zoetermeer or a single grey handheld documented object by object here, the work is the same.
If you are in the Netherlands, it is well worth a visit, and you can learn more at nationaalvideogamemuseum.nl. A country that gives its games a national museum is making exactly the argument the rest of us are trying to make, only louder.
Comments