Even though some people still view video games as solely mindless entertainment, they have been actively used as a platform for artistic, intellectual, and cultural exploration for years. You have probably heard of virtual art galleries, but what is the full extent of possibilities that the digital medium offers? Let’s talk about two incredible video games that will change everything you know about video games as a platform for art exhibitions.

Two Very Different Video Games That Are Also Art Exhibitions

Monuments to Guilt 

Monuments to Guilt is a first-person video game released in 2023 by a user named Louis. The hyper-realistic imagery and the highly detailed space make you feel like you are walking through a space that actually exists somewhere in real life. However, once you have spent enough time looking at exhibited objects and their descriptions, the puzzle pieces begin to come together.

Monuments to Guilt displays pieces of architectural design, with most being different kinds of public seating. One major thing about them is that they were specifically designed to prevent homeless people from sleeping on them. When you finish exploring the exhibition, you realize just how much of modern urban architecture is purposefully hostile and exclusionary.

Kid A Mnesia Exhibition

Released in 2021, Kid A Mnesia Exhibition centers on artwork inspired by two albums by the famous rock band Radiohead. This virtual museum shows what video games, as a medium, are truly capable of.

The show was originally designed as a real-life exhibition. Like with many art shows of 2019, the Covid outbreak uprooted the entire plan. Now, it seems that the initial failure of the project was a blessing in disguise.

By transferring Kid A Mnesia Exhibition into a digital space, its creators allowed the project to reach its full potential. This colossal multi-sensory spectacle has crossed the borders of what would be possible if the space was physical. Space and reality cease to exist in this exhibition space. No “room” in this virtual museum is like the other, each taking you into an entirely different dimension with its own rules. Describing something so heavily reliant on visuals and sounds with words is incredibly difficult, so you will have to either believe us or play the game and experience it for yourself.

One might argue that these two video games pursue vastly different goals and have nothing in common apart from providing a virtual art exhibition experience. However, what they both do very well is show the vastness of the spectrum of artistic possibilities that the video game medium presents.