London’s Science Museum is currently (21 October 2006 – 25 February 2007) hosting the Game On exhibition which explores the history, technology and culture of computer games all the way from the PDP-1 of the 1960s to the latest consoles. The exhibition covers a wide range of video game related topics including Early Arcade Games, Game Audio, Games Culture, Multiplayer Gaming and much more. Best of all visitors can play on a whole alphabet of games all the way from Asteroids to Zelda. (There are over a hundred playable games at the exhibition).
If you live/work in London or are planning a visit the exhibition is well worth a visit but while you are there spare a thought for all those unfortunates who don’t speak our language. Many of the visitors to the exhibition aren’t gamers. This is obvious from the way they struggle to get to grips with the controls of many of the games. Some of these people might well be tempted to become gamers (after all they were interested enough to come to the exhibition), if only they could actually play the games. The problem is that they don’t understand the language of games that many gamers take for granted. They don’t understand O X Δ D-Pad Left and so they miss out on many great games, just because they don’t speak our language…. or to be more precise, because we don’t speak their language.
If we really want to sell games to the mass-market we need to make games that they can understand. That means simpler controllers (Wiimote ftw) and easier control systems. The mass market will never learn our language so we are going to have to work a lot harder at learning theirs.
More info on the expo: http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/exhibitions/gameon/index.asp
