Raiford Guins

Campus:

IU Bloomington

Raiford Guins is director and professor of cinema and media studies at the Media School at Indiana University Bloomington.  He also co-edits the MIT Press Game Histories Book Series with Henry Lowood. In broad strokes, he studies technological artifacts and their material lives from the vantages of design, philosophy, history of technology, and material culture studies. He earned his MA and PhD at the University of Leeds in what is now called, The School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies. Guins was trained by the generation of British scholars who shaped one of the most innovative mixed-disciplinary publications in academia, BLOCK.

Professor Guins' project, Museum Games: Journeys into Curation across the Globe pounds the pavement of the contemporary and radically diverse ecology of museums that devote time, space, and resources to collecting, exhibiting, documenting, and preserving electronic games. It maps current efforts that have developed since Guins' initial US-centric study of the subject, which was also the first book to delve into the then emerging area of games in museums, libraries, and archives, Game After:A Cultural Study of Videogame Afterlife (MIT Press, 2014). A great deal has changed in the ten years since Game After’s publication.  

Museums devoted exclusively to video games now dot the globe across Asia, Australia, Europe, and the US. The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, NY, recently completed a massive 90,000 square foot/ $70 million dollar expansion that opened in June 2023. The long-anticipated Nintendo Museum opens Fall 2024 in Kyoto, Japan. This will not be the first corporate-sponsored museum devoted to games. That distinction goes to the IT company, Nexon LTD, whose name adorns the Nexon Computer Museum in Jeju City, South Korea (est. 2013). If all goes to plan, France’s eastern Parisian suburb, Bussy-Saint-Georges, will be home to the world’s largest museum devoted to video games. The fundraising campaign has raised over 2 million Euros as of November 2023. France will join other European countries like Austria, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and Switzerland home to game museums.  “National” museums in the US are not restricted to its historic Mid-Atlantic region. In 2016 the National Videogame Museum opened in Frisco, Texas.  Such officialdom resounds across the Atlantic where one finds Sheffield, England’s National Video Game Museum (est. 2018) and the Nationaal Videogame Museum in Zoetermeer, The Netherlands (est. 2017). Consider a scattering as well of non-institutionally affiliated, non-endowed, and non-professionally staffed small museums like the Flipper und Arcademuseum in Seligenstadt, Germany, and Enjoy the Game Museum in Riga, Latvia. Major museums not traditionally affiliated with games have got in on the act too: MOMA includes games in its interactive design wing, the FIFA Museum in Zurich, Switzerland hosts, “eFootball: The Virtual Pitch,” “Play Beyond Play” occupies an entire floor of games at Stockholm’s Tekniska Museet, Helsinki’s Designmuseo exhibits examples of Finnish designed mobile games like Snake and Angry Birds alongside textiles by Marimekko, and the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, England adds the “Power Up” interactive exhibition to the city’s industrial heritage. Games have found homes outside of domestic settings, floundering arcades, and pockets stowing personal digital devices. Museums have been gamified.

To chart this ever-expanding terrain, Museum Games is composed of diverse pieces – interviews, criticism, descriptions, histories, case studies, profiles – connected by a common thread: the collection and exhibition of games at museums. This includes museums that specialize exclusively on games and museums dedicated to other subjects that also exhibit games.  As a whole, the book is part museological study, part travel log due to the extensive journeys undertaken to visit such places scattered across the world. Its scope and purpose offer observations and lessons learned at museums from Tallinn, Estonia to Jeju, South Korea and everywhere in between.  The project follows leading-edge museology research: championing a broad understanding of the word “museum” to work across the spectrum of federal to independent, corporate to private, large to small sites, single subject or exhibits part of a museum’s larger collection. Engaging with the fundamental question of “why” so many museums are vigorously turning to games in the 21^st century alongside the paramount question of “how” different museums across the globe curate, collect, exhibit, preserve, and educate the public about games is the book’s overall emphasis.  

Video games are commonplace in museums. Playful interaction is now part and parcel of the museum’s contemplative gaze and our experiences with museum exhibits. Museum Games shares how a museology of games has emerged, what it entails across different collection scales and geographical locations, and ultimately how games have become emblematic of cultural heritage the world over.