Let's play game exhibitions: A curator's perspective

Abstract

The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision is home to The Experience, a museum exhibiting the history of media in the Netherlands. For ten months in 2016 and 2017, The Experience hosted a temporary exhibition entitled Let’s YouTube . During the Let’s YouTube game month, we programmed a ten-day exhibition with a focus on video games as Dutch cultural heritage. The games were selected along two axes: popularity in the Netherlands, and made in the Netherlands. To connect this exhibition to the YouTube theme, we used Let’s Play videos as a contemporary phenomenon to engage younger visitors with “old” and often obscure games. For the Let’s Play installation, we selected games from our archives, produced in the Netherlands, and to which we had made agreements with the makers about the rights for online distribution. Over ten days, approximately 5,100 people visited the exhibition, mostly families with children, the museum’s target demographic.