November 23, 2025

ACMI is my second favourite place in Melbourne - first being IMAX at the Museum - and checked out the new Game Worlds exhibit.

I went into it thinking the exhibition would tell a story about video games acting as environments to be explored, enabling players to experience different lives, places and points of view, but it was really more about explaining the cultural impact of some games and getting to play them.

There's so many games here from my childhood. It was nice to relive those. Particularly the little 4-player Team Fortress LAN they set up and photos on the walls of LAN parties that was like a portal to my youth.

I wanted to play it properly, but the other people were so bad at it that it wasn't fun. I never felt so old as when I heard someone say to their mates that it's "like a crappy version of Fortnite". Bitch, Fortnite wouldn't exist without TF! They were just pissed off my rocket launcher kept blowing them up.

The Sims got a huge area too and I feel like the LAN party and The Sims were the main thing the designers of this exhibit wanted to do, with everything else in the exhibit chucked in there as semi-related aesthetic accessories to that.

gameObject Permanence, a short video commissioned by ACMI for Game Worlds was cool and highlights a real issue with what happens to these virtual worlds and the humans that inhabit them when the creators of the world decide to close it down. I reckon gameObject Permanence was the most relevant piece in the entire exhibit to the "Game Worlds" theme.

Unlike an NGV exhibit that tries to curate art pieces to tell a story or a vibe, Game Worlds felt a bit more disjointed. I didn't leave the exhibit feeling anything emotional, or even having learned something like I might after visiting an art exhibit. Perhaps that wasn't the point of Game Worlds and difficult to do with the source material.

My wife and I spent around an hour here. It's great to be in a space where the games of my youth (and some modern ones) are given such reverence, but ultimately it's like, yeah, cool, I don't need it to be explained to me, I was there at the time. I found it much more interesting to watch and listen to how other people played and thought of the games, particularly people half my age who were not born when these games were released!

Here's some more pics of the exhibit taken on my phone, so pardon the poor quality.

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