EVENT: PLAYERS. GAMES, VIDEOGAMES, CULTURE, AND SOCIETY (OCTOBER 14–FEBRUARY 24 2026, MESTRE, ITALY)
PLAYERS. Games, Videogames, Culture and Society
M9 – Museo del ’900
Venice Mestre, Italy, 14 October 2026–14 February 2027.
Curated by Fabio Viola, with Michelangela Di Giacomo, Giuseppe Cosenza and Damiano Bordoni.
An original Computer Space arcade cabinet from 1971 and Media Molecule’s Dreams (2020) belong to the same exhibition. Their histories suggest different possibilities for preserving videogames. Computer Space, designed by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, survives as a physical machine, its fibreglass cabinet an artifact of early commercial gaming. Dreams, which allows users to create games of their own, depends on a proprietary software environment. The first can enter a collection as hardware. Preserving the second requires confronting the conditions under which players are permitted to create, distribute and retain their work.
This distinction provides a productive point of entry into PLAYERS. Games, Videogames, Culture and Society, the exhibition opening at M9 in Venice Mestre on 14 October 2026. Curated by Fabio Viola, with Michelangela Di Giacomo, Giuseppe Cosenza and Damiano Bordoni, the exhibition traces approximately eight decades of videogame history through technological artifacts and the changing social environments in which games have circulated.
M9 is an appropriate institution for such an undertaking. Opened in 2018 and designed by the architectural practice Sauerbruch Hutton, the museum occupies a prominent position in the cultural redevelopment of Mestre, on the mainland opposite Venice. Its permanent exhibition examines twentieth-century Italy through everyday objects and collective experience, employing multimedia technologies to reconstruct social history. With PLAYERS, the institution turns its attention to a medium that has fundamentally altered the relationships between audiences and screens.
The exhibition includes original arcade cabinets, among them Computer Space, Pong and the comparatively rare Dragon’s Lair (1983), alongside playable domestic consoles. Reconstructed environments evoke the commercial amusement arcade and the bedrooms in which an expanding generation of players encountered videogames during the 1980s and 1990s. The transition from institutional computing to commercial entertainment provides the historical structure, while the emphasis on situated experience shifts attention toward the cultural habits associated with specific technologies.
There is considerable value in this approach. A videogame’s historical significance cannot be adequately understood through the chronology of processors and consoles alone. The arcade was a commercial environment organized around paid access and public performance. Domestic consoles introduced different patterns of ownership and consumption, while networked games redistributed forms of social interaction across geographical distances. These arrangements frequently overlapped. The arcade never depended exclusively on individual participation, just as contemporary online play encompasses spectators who may never touch a controller.
M9’s accompanying exhibition, Giocare all’italiana, places this history within an explicitly Italian context. Its examination of twentieth-century toys includes Fascist-era propaganda and the reinforcement of gender roles through differentiated objects of play. Such examples demonstrate how games have participated in the reproduction of social expectations. Electronic entertainment carries comparable histories of exclusion and ideological representation, even as its technologies have expanded the possibilities of participation.
The museum’s treatment of videogames also enters an established curatorial conversation. In 2012, New York’s Museum of Modern Art announced the acquisition of fourteen videogames for its design collection. London’s Victoria and Albert Museum subsequently examined contemporary game production and player communities in Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt (2018–19). These exhibitions established different methods for presenting a medium whose meaning emerges through interaction. M9 extends this discussion by incorporating gaming into the social history of the twentieth century.
The most provocative section of PLAYERS, however, may be #Watch, devoted to videogames as visual spectacle. According to the announced programme, it encompasses cinematic storytelling and virtual photography, alongside esports broadcasting and streaming culture. The selected titles include Detroit: Become Human (2018), Ico (2001), Shadow of the Colossus (2005) and Death Stranding (2019). Their inclusion reflects the growing institutional attention paid to videogames as sophisticated visual productions, capable of sustaining aesthetic experiences beyond conventional understandings of competitive play.
Yet the relationship between playing and watching has a longer, more complicated history. Videogame spectatorship existed well before contemporary streaming platforms, while players began producing recorded performances and films within virtual environments during the 1990s. As Henry Lowood documented in his study of machinima, High-performance play: The making of machinima (2006), the early recording practices of Quake players generated new forms of audiovisual authorship. The Rangers’ Diary of a Camper (1996), often identified as an early narrative machinima, converted a multiplayer environment into a setting for scripted action. The game became a production apparatus whose possibilities extended beyond the intentions of its designers.
Artists subsequently subjected commercial videogames to considerably more disruptive operations. In JODI’s Max Payne Cheats Only (2005), cheat codes interfere with the conventions of third-person action cinema. The artists manipulate the game’s camera and physics to produce absurd movements and visual discontinuities, exposing the precarious construction of its simulated reality. The resulting videos transform the apparent coherence of the commercial game into a sequence of malfunctions. Here, watching emerges from deliberate interference with the mechanisms of play.
These practices expose an important distinction within contemporary art. A videogame designed to produce an expressive visual experience occupies a different cultural position from an artwork made through the appropriation of existing game software. John Sharp’s Works of Game: On the Aesthetics of Games and Art (2015) provides a useful account of these divergent traditions. As videogame exhibitions increasingly incorporate virtual photography and cinematic production, their curatorial classifications have consequences for which artists and histories receive institutional recognition.
The exhibition’s #Create section introduces another complication. Its attention to player-generated production includes Minecraft (2011), Super Mario Maker (2015) and Dreams. These titles have enabled players to construct environments and publish experiences through relatively accessible creative tools. Yet their possibilities are determined by software architectures and commercial arrangements that regulate what users can make and how their creations circulate.
Dreams provides a revealing example. In September 2023, Media Molecule discontinued live support for the platform, although the company stated that existing content would remain accessible and users could continue creating and sharing work. Its official documentation also confirmed that creations could not be exported to other software, apart from certain recordings. A platform celebrated for enabling creative expression consequently illustrates the dependence of that expression on decisions made by its operator. The tools remain accessible under conditions that their users cannot independently determine.
This dimension of cultural production complicates the exhibition’s emphasis on participation. The published programme also specifies that Sony has selected the PlayStation 5 titles presented in the contemporary gaming section. Cooperation with industry rights holders is an established practical condition of exhibiting commercial software. It nevertheless raises questions about the influence that manufacturers exercise over the institutional histories written about their products.
The sociological history of videogames has frequently emphasized their capacity to generate communities and new cultural practices. Their artistic history also includes refusal, modification and the appropriation of proprietary technologies for purposes that their publishers never anticipated. As museums increasingly preserve these histories, they must contend with the difference between access to a game and the ability to control its future.
PLAYERS proposes an expansive account of videogame culture, grounded in the recognition that playing has become an ordinary feature of social life. The exhibition’s longer-term significance will depend on how effectively its historical narrative accommodates the conflicts embedded in that culture. Media Molecule promised that Dreams would remain accessible after active development ended. It also confirmed that users could not export the works they had created. This kind of limitation belongs in the history of player authorship as surely as the tools that made those works possible.