Curator
Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director at the Serpentine Gallery, London
dates
place
Galerie 3
Curator
Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director at the Serpentine Gallery, London
Certainly, this exhibit focuses on an activity worth reckoning with. In 2022, 3.03 billion people—more than a third of the world’s population—played video games. As Hans Ulrich Obrist asserts, this hobby has become “the biggest mass phenomenon of our time. Many people spend hours every day in a parallel world and live a multitude of different lives. Video games are to the twenty-first century what movies were to the twentieth century and novels to the nineteenth century”. Around a hundred years ago, in his book Homo Ludens, the historian Johan Huizinga theorized that play is a basic drive of humankind. Bringing people together in new ways, he contends, play is the source of culture.
Video games are to the 21st century what films were to the 20th century and novels to the 19th.