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Kerry Nolan: This is All Of It. I'm Kerry Nolan, in for Alison Stewart. We're going to talk now about an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. If you visited recently, you know that the word modern carries a lot of water, from Picasso's cubist approaches in the early 20th century to the old-school puppetry and claymation reprised in Guillermo del Toro's new adaptation of Pinocchio, which is, by the way, currently, MoMA's his most popular exhibit, and to a piece in the museum's main lobby called Unsupervised. That's a moving image generated by artificial intelligence based on 200 years of the museum's own collections.

Now, those works are all worth checking out with your eyes, but MoMA also has a very hands-on exhibit that we want to talk about today. It's called Never Alone, and unlike the other parts of the museum where you're invited to look but do not touch, most of these works include keyboards, joysticks, computer mouses, and other trappings of interactivity for you to actually participate in the art. That's the whole point of video games, right? Not the virtuosic skill of the designer, but the experience and enjoyment of the player.

Players, please help me welcome two of the MoMA curators behind Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive Design. Paola Antonelli is a senior curator in the museum's Department of Architecture and Design, and director of research and development. Hi, Paola.

Paola Antonelli: Hello, Kerry.

Kerry Nolan: Nice to have you here. And collections specialist Paul Galloway also joins us. Paul, welcome to the show.

Paul Galloway: Thanks for having us.

Kerry Nolan: So, to help orient us around the scope of the exhibit, when you first walk into it, one of the first things you see is an original iPod, and then there's also a device that, and correct me if I'm wrong, was used by nuns to share news worth praying over across convents. Paola, what's the range of elements when you're thinking about what counts as interactive design?

Paola Antonelli: That is so correct. The prayer device for the nuns is really wonderful. Interaction design is the kind of design that enables human beings to interact with digital electronic objects. Everything that you see in the gallery is in the MoMA collection. The original iPod is in the MoMA collection, and so is the on-off sign that you see on the wall.

The range is really wide because if you think about it, interaction design is a form of design that you, pardon the pun, interact with every day. When you get your MetroCard, which will soon become extinct, unfortunately, and you walk towards the MetroCard machine, what you see on the screen, the big buttons that ask for your credit card, that's interaction design, and so are the colors of the physical machine itself. If anybody that's listening started looking around their own life and just think about how many times they have to interact with screens, they would realize the scope of interaction design.

Kerry Nolan: Paul, between this exhibit and the massive video display in the main lobby that's generated by AI, it seems that there are a lot of different ways to consider computer-based work. How has the involvement of these high-tech tools in media changed the way we think about the nature of art since the early days of computers? Also, another question, what new questions have come up for curators like the two of you around more recent developments like artificial intelligence?

Paul Galloway: Well, I'll let Paola answer that second one, but I think the first question is a really good one because there's screens everywhere at the museum right now. Just recently, we opened a new video exhibition called Signals, which is an incredible exhibition on the sixth floor that also looks at the prevalence of video screens in our lives.

One of the things that I think we wanted to focus everybody's attention on in Never Alone was this incredible set of behaviors that we all take for granted. We're all experts at navigating computer interfaces now. If you think about the incredibly complex series of swipes and pinches and dragging from certain corners that you do on just your iPhone, it's an incredible series of complex behaviors that we've all just naturally become accustomed to.

This history is profoundly informed by the development of video games, which came about in an era when computers were not the province of everyday people. They were only used by highly-skilled technicians and computer scientists at research universities. How we go from them being this very exclusive field of experimentation to something that everybody uses is something that we hope we can explore in this exhibition.

Kerry Nolan: Paul, do you-- go ahead. I'm sorry.

Paola Antonelli: I'm sorry.

Kerry Nolan: No, no. Go ahead, Paola.

Paola Antonelli: I was going to answer the second part of your question.

Kerry Nolan: Yes, please.

Paola Antonelli: Technology has always existed. Technology goes with our human progress, and the kind of technology that we have today is very helpful to curators. For instance, by looking at Refik Anadol's Unsupervised, the big AI display, Michelle Kuo, who's the other curator, and I have understood more about the MoMA collection.

All of a sudden, you're taken out of your mind as a human or as a curator, and you see a machine interpreting the spaces that are in between the works in the collection, so creating a new memory and a new understanding. That's really what's interesting. New technologies and the work of artists feed these discoveries in curators and help us think of art in a completely different way. It's a virtuous circle.

Kerry Nolan: Do you find though that some people just don't see video games as an art form by default?

Paola Antonelli: Oh, my God, yes. When we started collecting video games in 2010, it was quite hilarious because some of the reactions were so vehement. I remember, there was a critic, and I'm not going to name him because I don't want to embarrass him, but the big art critic for a big, big, big British online tabloid, not a newspaper, that started thundering, "Oh, no. Pac-Man next to Picasso." We were all looking at each other saying, "There's three floors in between," but nonetheless, at his own time, Picasso was considered the same way as not really serious art. That same newspaper had another bunch of journalists that responded to their own art critic. It was very funny. There was a big debate.

We are presenting video games not as art, but as design, not that that makes that much of a difference. Video games are also art. It's just the angle that Paul and I take is an angle that talks about designing behaviors, that is about space and time, that looks at the design and the architecture of the games themselves, so it's a slightly different kind of consideration. Nonetheless, yes, the debate on whether video games are art or not will continue forever.

Kerry Nolan: Let's get a little more into the exhibit itself. We can start with a game that a lot of parents are familiar with, Minecraft. Paola, if a painter is thinking about, let's say, the aesthetics of color and shape and composition to evoke something, what are the designers behind Minecraft trying to evoke? Let's talk a little bit about the kind of tools they lean on for that.

Paola Antonelli: Well, they were not trying to evoke a closed image. Quite the opposite, they were trying to give people tools to create their own images, their own landscapes, their own architecture, so in a way, it's the opposite. That's what makes video game designers, designers, as opposed to artists for some video games. It's that they are really presenting tools to people. That makes me think of the division that we have in the exhibition that is among input player and designer. Paul, do you want to talk about that?

Paul Galloway: Sure. We were trying to think of a very easy way of helping our viewers understand the mechanics of what is happening in a video game, and so we brought it down to the most basic elements, the inputs of literally the things you're doing with your bodies, the controllers you're handling, the keyboard you're typing on, the mouse you're using, so that body to machine relationship.

The second part was looking at what the player actually brings to the equation because video games need players and they reach their meaning through the act of play, and all of the incredible things, especially with Minecraft. Really, the success of Minecraft is not because of the design, it's because of the players who have brought their own creative voices and agency to the equation.

Then the last section of the exhibition looks at the unique voices that designers have brought to bear, not only with video games, but also with interface design. There's a wonderful shrine to Susan Kare, who designed the original icons and graphic identity for the Mac OS in the 1980s. We really wanted to think about these, the input, the designer, the player, as these three very basic categories for approaching interaction design.

Kerry Nolan: Paul, what do you think is the most interesting thing that comes to mind in terms of what interactive art can do that would be impossible in a more passive spectator relationship?

Paul Galloway: Well, I think it's what the player can bring to the equation. Video games or performance in general is often likened to music. A composer can write a score, but then every musician who performs that score is offering their own interpretation, and the dialogue with the original creator becomes all the more complex and all the more rich because of that. The same holds true with video games.

A designer can create all-- they can think they've covered all the bases and anticipate every behavior that the player is going to do, and the players will spend countless hours ferreting out the kind of possibilities of where they can find the weaknesses in the code, where they can exploit certain factors, how they can speed run the game and finish it as fast as possible, playing the game with idiotic controllers or practically with one hand behind their back. I think there's this incredible dialogue that happens between creator and user and video games because it is so interactive and it's supposed to be so interactive.

Kerry Nolan: If you're just joining us, my guests are Paul Galloway, collection specialist for architecture and design, and Paola Antonelli, the senior curator in the Museum of Modern Arts, Department of Architecture and Design, and a director of research and development. We're talking about the new exhibition, NNever Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive Design.

Paola, there are some classic games in this exhibit, including Dwarf Fortress, Asteroids, Pong, and Tetris, which these last two, both have very old-school looks with very simple line drawings or color-coded alpha-numeric characters. What were the limitations that early game designers faced and how did those limitations shape the way the broader population has thought about video games?

Paola Antonelli: Designers thrive within limitations. They like limitations because if you create this ambient, this environment of possibilities, and then you give some limits, you can really do a lot. Technology and the advancement of the computational technology was definitely the limitation they dealt with.

You mentioned Tetris. The beautiful thing is that the technology of yesteryear is not really easy to emulate today. You need to redesign the game so that it can be used with the more advanced technology of today. It's the original designer, Alexey Pajitnov, that actually simulated the old game for us. It's really quite fascinating because we have some times to play these tricks, but truly, there's another beautiful game, one of my favorite, it's called Tempest. You see there what designers can do given certain limitations.

At that time, only vector graphics could be used. Basically lines, right? You were not able to do the dynamic three-dimensional drawings and animations that you do today, but with those vectors, the designer could do wonders. It's a gorgeous game that has a very spatial sense to itself, even though it's what we would call today a rudimentary technology.

I'm surprised you didn't mention Pac-Man among the classics because sometimes I'm frustrated because people immediately think only of Pac-Man, which is a wonderful game, but we have about 35 games in the collection right now since we started. They have an amazing range. Even the game that gives the name to the exhibition Never Alone is a fantastic one, a completely different and more recent one.

Kerry Nolan: Paul, maybe you can answer this. What do you gain and what do you give up as a game designer when you give your player more freedom versus less freedom? I'm thinking of the choices you had playing Pong or Tetris or Pac-Man and the choices you have now in something like Minecraft.

Paola Antonelli: No, these are good questions. Get that, Paul.

Paul Galloway: Well, I think a sense of agency was, of course, very limited in the original games, partly because of the business model that was there. You didn't want a player playing Pac-Man for too long, so you had to make the game ramp up. The idea was that you get a quarter out of that player every three to four minutes. The game had to quickly increase in difficulty in order to maximize the economic return on the arcade machine.

Once video games move into the home and there's no longer that economic imperative happening, it becomes a much broader investment in time. That allows designers to make games like the Legend of Zelda or Zork that have a far longer playtime that then allows the player to actually bring something to it. It's very hard for the player to do anything all that creative in Pac-Man because the game is designed to kick you out as fast as possible, but when you get into a longer game, that invites this participatory interpretation to take place.

Paola Antonelli: Now, with the legend goes that there was a shortage of ¥100 coins at some point in Japan because of Pacman.

Kerry Nolan: That's great. Now, with games like Minecraft and SimCity, which is also featured in the exhibit, they're designed with a lot of room for a player's creativity, but let's talk a little bit as we have been somewhat about games that have more straightforward goals. Paul, can you explain what Katamari is and what interests you from a design perspective?

Paul Galloway: Katamari Damacy is technically actually a really complex, very interesting game in that it deals with physics and gravitational forces. From a purely educational standpoint, it's actually got a lot of interesting physics to teach us. From a story and aesthetic standpoint, it's one of the most bizarre and ludicrous video games or anything on a screen you will ever encounter, where you are essentially this little guy rolling balls of stuff together, which then accrue mass and exert a greater gravitational force. You start off rolling thumbtacks and small detritus, and then by the end, you're rolling up whole cities and buildings and the Empire State Building. [chuckles]

Kerry Nolan: Wow.

Paul Galloway: The whole time, you're getting serenaded by what sounds like Japanese Vegas lounge music, and it's an incredibly-- it's a fever dream of really serious gameplay combined with some of the most ludicrous graphics and themes you can imagine.

Kerry Nolan: Paola, tell us about a game called Getting Over It, and can you use it as an example to explain some of the different types of experiences that game designers are trying to forge with their players?

Paola Antonelli: Yes, that is another ludicrous game, and it's a very frustrating game. It's meant to frustrate you and on purpose. The exhibition is on the street, on 53rd Street. There's a big screen that shows a montage of games, and then, also, you can peek through and you can see people playing. On purpose, we put Bennett Foddy there so people from the street can see people getting really, really frustrated.

Getting over it with Bennett Foddy is basically a guy in a cauldron with a hammer trying to climb on mountains, and every time he makes a mistake, he just like rolls down to the bottom of the valley. It's almost impossible to get over it, to get over the mountain, and that's what you do. You just try to desperately make it and you never do and you get frustrated, and that's what the game is about. Of course, this game is in the section of the designer cause there's a tyranny of the designer in this particular case. The designer dictates your experience and your emotion and your behavior, and you can't do anything about it.

Paul Galloway: I would add that this is the second time Paola has shown Bennett Foddy's work. She showed an earlier game of his back in an exhibition she did, called Talk to Me, which is probably his most infamous game called QWOP, where you're trying to control a sprinter with just the Q, the W, the O, and the P button keys on your keyboard, which variously control parts of his legs. It's an impossible, incredibly frustrating game, but Bennett's whole modus operandi is getting us to question, what does it mean to play? Why do we keep playing things that are very difficult? What does failure mean in this space?

Kerry Nolan: We only have about a minute or so left. As you look to the future, and this question is for both of you, what kinds of interactivity most excite you, and how are you thinking about growing this collection?

Paola Antonelli: We're waiting to see what happens, but of course, the advent of AI and the fact that it's becoming more and more diffused is something that we're very interested in. What kind of interaction will we have with AI? It's going to be much more sophisticated than what we had with Alexa, of course, but so what is it going to be? That's what we're looking at. Remember, interaction is not only tactile and visual, it's also voice, of course, and who knows what other senses might become involved.

Kerry Nolan: What about you, Paul?

Paola Antonelli: Paul.

Paul Galloway: For me, what becomes more and more interesting is just how much games become this dialogue between player and creator. There's whole hosts of-- the original model of make an arcade machine, release it out into the public and then it lives for a few years and as a static thing is gone. Games are constantly being updated, they're constantly adding new features in response to how people use them. There's a much more back-and-forth exchange of ideas that are going on. I think that kind of participatory design opens up all kinds of really fascinating possibilities and problems.

Kerry Nolan: The exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art is called Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive Design. Paola Antonelli, senior curator in the Department of Architecture and Design, and director of research and development. Paul Galloway, collection specialist for architecture and design. Thank you both so much for being with us today. This was so much fun.

Paola Antonelli: Thank you. Yes, indeed.

Paul Galloway: Pleasure.

Paola Antonelli: Bye, Kerry.

Kerry Nolan: Bye-bye.

 

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