Exhibition Strategies for Videogames in Art Institutions: Blank Arcade 2017

This paper examines exhibition strategies for videogames in art institutions, using the author's co-curation of the Blank Arcade exhibitions at Abertay University as a practical case study. It situates these exhibitions within a history that begins with the 1983 Corcoran ARTcade and includes major shows such as Game On (2002), Game Masters and The Art of Video Games (2012), and MoMA's Applied Design (2013), which acquired twelve games and presented them as design objects rather than with arcade context. The author traces a shift away from a binary view that separated commercial and artistic games toward a broader recognition of independent and author-driven production, a development argued to have helped integrate videogames into the art world's focus on authorship and stylistic influence.

The 2016 Blank Arcade at Abertay University's Hannah Maclure Centre, extended to nearly three months, narrowed 57 submissions to eight works chosen for accessibility, experimental character, and durability over long display periods. Curators deliberately excluded technically demanding pieces that could not withstand extended exhibition, and they arranged intuitive works early in the sequence to build visitor confidence. The 2017 iteration expanded aesthetic range through five games, many built from handmade or non-digital media and designed around physical and sensory engagement, each adapted to its gallery context through custom interaction setups, projection arrangements, and a partitioned, period-styled room for an adults-only work.

Visitor survey results, drawn from 48 voluntary responses, show that 70.2 percent of visitors were Abertay University students and that the audience skewed heavily toward ages 16 to 22. Accessibility (averaging 8.15 out of 10) and technical functioning (8.58 out of 10) received high ratings, though visitors felt they could fully experience only about 8.4 out of 10 of the games. The author concludes that these findings favor tightly curated selections over large-scale exhibitions, underscore the need for trained gallery attendants to manage interactive works, and call for accounting for spectated play alongside individual play, along with stronger institutional collection and conservation of videogame works.