Nottingham’s National Videogame Arcade gets ready for play time

Most of us, thanks to the ever-presence of the smartphone, carry with us a clutch of video games wherever we go. But during the industry’s formative years, in the late 1970s, you had to come to the video game for a play date. And it was often stationed at the end of some seaside pier, where, in a wooden cabinet, the game blinked and tinkled next to the one-armed bandits and penny drops. In recent years (thanks in part to those phone games), the arcade has largely disappeared from Britain. Until today, that is, as the National Videogame Arcade (NVA) opens in Nottingham city centre. It’s a five-storey, cultural centre for all things video game and hopes to bring in £2.5m to the local economy over the next five years.

Discard notions of dimly-lit, smoke and truant-filled rooms: the NVA recasts the once-grotty arcade as a bright, breezy sequence of rooms, equal parts art gallery, museum exhibit and educational centre. There are games here – lots of them, drawn from across the years – but they are arranged in such a way as to inspire visitors to think about the way in which games are made and, its curators hope, to get involved in making a few of their own. One of the first exhibits is Mission Control: a room-filling machine that allows members of the public to customise a virtual world in real time. Two players compete in the game displayed on a huge screen, while 10 others control and customise the experience by pressing game-altering buttons and switches and even scanning in their original drawings, which then appear as enemies in the game.

“Games are not bolts of lightning handed down by the gods, or things that roll off a faceless factory in the US or Japan,” says Jonathan Smith, the NVA’s co-director, and co-creator of the popular series of film-themed Lego video games. “Games are made by people who are constantly learning and trying to do the best they can. We want to demonstrate that everyone can participate in that process in some way. Everyone can make games.”

Indeed, the NVA’s current exhibits are mostly hands-on (or occasionally feet-on). Jump!, the debut exhibition, offers a specific exploration of the titular gameplay mechanic. It examines the history of jumping in games, but also leads visitors to consider what defines a virtual jump. A Jump-a-tron machine, for example, allows visitors to set the angle, mass, gravity and power of a virtual environment, then physically jump on to a mat to cause an onscreen character to launch into space. A paper read-out records the character’s height and the distance achieved. “We’re trying to teach curiosity,” says Smith, “by providing the right context, and rewarding experimentation.”

r the next five years.

Discard notions of dimly-lit, smoke and truant-filled rooms: the NVA recasts the once-grotty arcade as a bright, breezy sequence of rooms, equal parts art gallery, museum exhibit and educational centre. There are games here – lots of them, drawn from across the years – but they are arranged in such a way as to inspire visitors to think about the way in which games are made and, its curators hope, to get involved in making a few of their own. One of the first exhibits is Mission Control: a room-filling machine that allows members of the public to customise a virtual world in real time. Two players compete in the game displayed on a huge screen, while 10 others control and customise the experience by pressing game-altering buttons and switches and even scanning in their original drawings, which then appear as enemies in the game.

The centre hopes that the NVA will inspire parents, who are, Smith says, often “suspicious” of their children’s obsession with games, to see the benefits of game-playing and its associated discipline – computer science. “I hope the NVA leads children from wanting to play games to wanting to make them,” says Ian Livingstone, one of the founding fathers of the British games industry, who was present for its launch. “Computer science is the new Latin: it underpins the digital world just as Latin did the analogue world, and games encapsulate all of the ways in which it marries the arts and sciences.”

A raft of events and meet-ups will support young visitors for whom the NVA piques an interest in game-making, with weekend game-jams (events during which attendees make a simple game, usually on a specific theme), clubs, a schools programme and coding workshops. Pioneering, inclusive and celebratory, the NVA redefines the video game arcade, and moves the medium closer to a cultural legitimacy that has, to date, proved elusive.