Museum Games

Museum Games is composed of diverse pieces – interviews, criticism, impressions, descriptions, histories, case studies, and profiles – connected together by a common thread: the collection and exhibition of video games at museums. This includes museums that specialize exclusively on games or museums dedicated to other subjects that also exhibit games. As a whole, the new book will be part museological study, part travel log due to the extensive journeys undertaken to visit such places scattered across the world. Its scope and purpose is to share observations and lessons learned at museums from Tallinn, Estonia to Jeju, South Korea and everywhere in between. The informal talk, presented at the earliest stages in the book’s development, will pinpoint specific research problems indicative of the subject matter and the process of writing about game museums.

Bio

Raiford Guins is Professor & Chair of Cinema and Media Studies in the Media School and Adjunct Professor in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of Feeling Leeds: Notes on Loving a Football Club from Afar (Pitch Publications, 2022), Atari Design: Impressions on Coin-Operated Video Game Machines (Bloomsbury, 2020), Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife (MIT 2014) and Edited Clean Version: Technology and the Culture of Control (Minnesota, 2009). Guins also co-edits MIT Press’s Game Histories book series with Henry Lowood. His newest book, Changing the Game: How Atari’s Pong Bounced Across Markets to Make Millions, is forthcoming with MIT Press in 2026.