“Are video games art? They sure are, but they are also design,” MoMA declared. There was pushback: “Gamebollocks,” complained one art critic. A work of art “has to be an act of personal imagination... the worlds created by electronic games are more like playgrounds”.

ACMI’s chief experience officer Seb Chan says video games cross boundaries. “We are conserving an artwork, and a cultural moment, and the documentation of how it was to make art in that moment,” he says.

Goose Game was a “global phenomenon” which captured a moment with its 2019 release: Melbourne’s heady, fertile, pre-pandemic year.

“It was so quirky, it captured people’s imagination,” Chan says. “That local game scene had really grown up – I see it like Australian music in a way, there are the local scenes that emerge and blow up on the global scene. And games are the new pop music.”

Museums and archives don’t want to, and can’t, catch everything, he says. “It’s about finding representative works, and I don’t think there is a better representative work of the recent scene than Goose Game. It’s also very rare to be able to work with developers, the makers of the game so early in its lifespan.”

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ACMI is doing a lot of work preserving computer games, but that often means battling with old technology or emulation software to recreate a lost platform.

In this case they get live software that runs on today’s tech, plus documentation and early builds from the development process, to give insights into how it was made.

However they can’t get their hands on all the code – modern software is a web of proprietary libraries and frameworks that can’t be acquired.

“Once things become a cultural phenomenon, the ability for institutions to work with the makers to ensure their preservation is super important, but it’s also super hard,” says Chan.

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Each of the three institutions will use the acquisition in their own way, likely in exhibitions that explore the game’s creation. Lisa Havilah, chief executive at the Powerhouse, says keeping technology alive is one of their key challenges.

“There’s this amazing, creative content that gets developed but then technology moves on and it’s left behind,” she says. “I think just as important as collecting innovation and technology is, it’s collecting our Australian social history.

“This game got some people through lockdown. Games like Pac-Man, or this, are connected with how we move through our lives. Technology has become almost part of us. Games, and the ways that technology work in our screens, in our hands, are very much part of our social life. And documenting that is so important.”

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