The Victoria & Albert Museum hosted a special Friday Late event in collaboration with the London Games Festival, transforming its historic galleries into a playground for interactive and independent video games. Visitors could play titles like the Bafta-winning 'Thank Goodness You’re Here!' and the comedic 'Sex With Friends' amidst the museum's permanent collection, while live-coding music performances and participatory art projects like 'Robot Karaoke' and 'The Line is the Game' emphasized communal, performative experiences.
The event underscores a growing institutional effort to critically engage with video games as a serious cultural form. By placing interactive, often irreverent digital works alongside historic artifacts, the V&A challenges traditional hierarchies of value and reframes game-playing as a shared, performative act, continuing its mission to explore and legitimize games culture within a major museum context.