Videogame Nation - Videogaming is now exhibition worthy history and/or art?

Videogame Nation is an exhibition running at the fantastic Urbis in Manchester about the British video games industry (no Supermario here). It is accompanied by several talks and events relating to the videogaming industry. The exhibition is slickly put together with many games available to play, sketches, merchandise and game cover art. Parts include actual bus shelters for you to play you Nintendo DS in or an arcade style room for the arcade games as well as telephones that play recorded interviews. The walls are covered in snippets of gaming history, anecdotes and some worryingly pretentious quotes. ''Man is a gaming animal. He must always be trying to get the better in something or other,' Charles Lamb' seems to be glorifying spending 4 hours straight on Tetris a bit too much if you ask me.

I have to admit that this is a great way to spend several hours on a rainy summer's day. The £3 entrance fee essentially lets you play limitless computer games, whilst indulging in some serious nostalgia. My friends' thrill at seeing 'Elite' again was strangely endearing and it offset the upset of seeing young children utterly amazed at the modern archaeological status of their beloved 'Jet Set Willy' . (Seriously, one kids was staring at Micromachines like it was a Viking helmet). We walked through the rooms to the endless cries of 'I remeber that!' and managed to get re-addicted to Lemmings. I'm afraid a lot of the nostalgia was lost on me. I never got into our Amstrad CPC 464 and my parents neither understood it nor encouraged me. I got pretty good at anything that involved viciously hitting the space bar (Bubba Bubba and Harrier Attack) and then left the world of computer games until as a procrastinating university student we were re-introduced. However at the exhibition, I triumphed in Sensible Soccer after brilliantly coming across the notion of hitting only two buttons very quickly for 2 minutes, which is exactly how I succeeded at any videogame in the 80s.

The exhibition, laid out from conception to today, underlined the meteoric speed and development of the gaming industry. I'm not sure however, that it did much else. The art of various magazines and disc covers, were sporadically dotted about but never alluded to as being part of a greater artistic trend. A shame really because the art of video games and it's influences could have been very interesting. Towards the end the recent issues of violent games, women gamers and the health concerns relating to gaming were almost cursorily shown. Which left me feeling that the exhibition seemed unsure as to it's purpose. Videogame Nation was a history lesson, art gallery and playroom all in one but it felt like a thesis that had failed to pose, argue or attempt to answer a question. It was a lot of fun, a lot of detail and information, but I'm not sure in bringing all these games together it achieved anything except saying that videogames have developed....a lot.