This War Of Mine Joins Permanent Video Game Collection At Museum of Modern Art

This War of Mine has been added to the New York Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection. The storytelling-forward strategy game will be displayed at the ongoing exhibit Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive Design. The conflict simulation will join games like Tetris and Flower, as well as less game-like forms of interactive design like the zine Everything Is Going To Be Okay and the @ symbol. The exhibition is on display until July 23, 2022.

The MoMA first added 14 video games into their collection back in 2012. Since then, the museum has steadily added more video games. Now, the permanent collection includes just under 40 games. These games are under the umbrella of its Architecture and Design collection.

Paul Galloway, Collection Specialist for the Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA and co-curator of the exhibition, said about This War of Mine: “There is often a kind of a conversation about games as fun, games as a diversion, but I think that there’s an increasing range of games that ask more of the players. When I played This War of Mine it made me sad, it made me afraid, it made me very tense, and in the end, it left me with a very changed understanding of what it is to be playing in a war space.”

For the unfamiliar, This War of Mine is a strategy game about civilians caught in the midst of armed conflict. The game has been featured as part of school curriculum in Poland and is also part of the ongoing War Games exhibit at the Imperial War Museum in London.