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Half a Century of Digital Gaming: Game On, at the Science Museum, London, 21 October 2006-25 February 2007

Less than half a century has passed since engineering students first projected interacting dots, lines, and circles onto cathode-ray screens, but today, digital gaming is big business. Its annual revenues rival those of the cinema box office in most industrialized countries, its video-game consoles receive the same attention and acclaim in the media as do more traditional consumer-electronics items, and its individual games are critically reviewed in the manner of literature, music, and films. The exhibition Game On examines the rapid evolution of digital gaming from a niche activity to a mainstream phenomenon over the last five decades, a story that ought to be of more than passing interest to historians of twentieth-century technology. For as Martin Campbell-Kelly and others have argued convincingly, any history of modern computing that purports to be thorough must include the hardand software of interactive games.1 On the other hand, Game On demonstrates that the technology of computing is but part of the larger story of the sociotechnical realm of digital gaming. Game On debuted at the Barbican Art Gallery in London in 2002. Since then it has toured the globe, appearing in museums in Scotland, Netherlands, Finland, Israel, and the United States before returning to the United Kingdom at the Science Museum, London, in October 2006. In 2007 and 2008 it will appear in Thailand and Australia. It consists of thirteen sections, the first of which explores the precommercial roots of modern gaming as well as the public-venue machines that first popularized the notion of the “video game.” The second section is a series of video-game platforms of the sort that