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The Smithsonian American Art Museum will be hosting an exhibit entitled “The Art of Video Games” in 2012, scheduled to run from March 16 to September 30. The museum is attempting to chronicle the history of games as an “artistic medium.” The criteria for a game to be considered for this exhibition, according to the website, are titles that are “visually spectacular or boast innovative design.” You can vote on 80 games to include (out of 240) after entering an e-mail address. Candidates from 20 platforms across four eras are included.

What’s interesting about this project are the game choices themselves, of which there are more curious finalists than in the entire run of American Idol. Pac-Man for the Atari VCS is neither visually spectacular nor innovative, but it’s one of the 12 games nominated for the system, along with the critically maligned E.T.

It doesn’t speak well of the nomination process when two notoriously bad games could be considered art. It’s also interesting that one of the four genres is called “target” instead of shooter, perhaps because the former sounds less, well, violent.

Yet the puzzling inclusions don’t stop there.

Games as Art