CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/6/2022

From Space Invaders to The Sims

Never Alone: Video Games as Interactive Design—an exploration of interactive design through 35 classic examples of video games—is on view now at MoMA. We're certainly feeling nostalgic about iconic early games like Pac-Man, 1980, pictured here. "We believe that video games can be a vehicle for moving society forward," Paola Antonelli, Anna Burckhardt and Paul Galloway write; "Steven Poole, at the turn of the twenty-first century, declared that they would 'shape the worlds we will all inhabit tomorrow.' We would like to think this is still true: That video games, through their nature as interactive design and their potential to shape behavior, can encourage tolerance, fluidity and pluralism, and help societies withstand reactionary attacks against human and civil rights. That they can be testing grounds for the avant-garde, for notions still too radical for the wider public. That they can model equitable and inclusive communities and challenge, in their imaginative spaces, previous modes of racial representation and gender construction. That they can give attention, acknowledgement and respect to underrepresented cultures, as does Never Alone, the game that gives this book its title. That they can bring us closer to nature and focus our awareness on climate change and the associated environmental crises. That through them we can embody and empathize with other individuals and other species and perhaps even will a more respectful and balanced reality into being. Through museums and other cultural institutions that look into the past to think about how the future might unroll, we may begin to comprehend the power of video games to surpass the hurdles we encounter IRL, and to harness that power for good."