The Art of Video Games

So this past Sunday hubby and I went to Washington, D.C. to check out "The Art of Video Games" exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.  I'm going to be dead honest, I was underwhelmed.  I was expecting to attend a museum floor of portrait, images, sketches, concept designs, alternative costumes, full landscapes, detailed maps, evolution of characters through the games and so on.  Instead, what I got was a few rooms of video game history.  A few rooms, this didn't even make up a third of the floor.
The thing started out great actually.  Right as you get there you're welcomed by this wall.

 Cool note, I saw on the wall the words "Photography Permitted."  It's rare for me to ever see such a thing in a museum.  It made it something for me to look forward to.  Then...we ended up in a room with a wall filled with television screens playing what I could only fathom as a rejected 80's music video.  I quickly passed to the next room.  Here, I found twenty small pieces of video game art.  For some reason the only video game I can remember is Epic Mickey.  There was about ten things in display cases.  Saw a sketch of that hot alien chick from Starcraft.  (Remember, I don't really play video games.  Moving on.)
Next room, four to five giant projector screens of games from different years and the devices to play them.  Of course, the first one you come across was Pac Man.  The other game I remember was something called Flower, never heard of it before but it actually looked like a game I might like.  (And I have terrible eye-thumb coordination.)
The last room was the most disappointing.  Here were displays about twice my height with a gaming console and controller (boxed in) with four categories (Action, Adventure, Tactic, Target) and one big/ideal/memorable/popular game of that category for that console.  I saw in the cases an Atari, Dreamcast, SNES, NES, Wii, Xbox, Xbox 360, Play Station, PS2, PS3, Sega Genesis, Game Cube, N64, and about five others that I've never seen before nor recall the names of.  At each system there was a phone receiver with four buttons to let you hear "something" for each game selected for the four categories.  It was crowded I didn't get near a phone.  Plus, I am mildly germophobic.
That was it.  That was all it was.  Let me borrow my husband's line, "it wasn't the art of video games it was video games as an art form."  I really wanted to just walked through a bunch of rooms and see amazing details of popular characters, original concept designs, and super detail work of the environments of the games.  What I got instead was a history of videos game consoles and a mini arcade room.  Like I said, I was totally underwhelmed.
Upside, bought The Art of Video Games: From Pac-Man to Mass Effect by Chris Melissinos and Patrick O'Rourke at the gift store.  This, this had what I was expecting but, in a book format.  At least we got something cool out of the experience.

Additional upside.  Since the exhibit was smaller than we anticipated we wandered into one of the other exhibits in the museum and I got to see this massive portrait of Christopher Reeves.  It was rather epic.