There will be blood | 13 September 2018

For the past few decades, admirers of video-games have every couple of years mounted a new attempt to persuade the wider arts-loving public of the form’s merits. Look, they say, games are not all about shooting people in the face! They are a dynamic fusion of animation, architecture, intellectual challenge, music and drama! They can be political and subversive! This is true, and yet somehow it never catches on. Will a new exhibition at the V&A enjoy any greater success?

You walk through a series of large black rooms with giant screens that appear to be floating through the air. Along the walls are ranged game designers’ working notebooks, and concept art for the characters and landscapes, beautifully rendered in inks and watercolours. This emphasises well the sheer quantity of expert craft that goes into a modern game, while carefully eliding problematic elements. One room, for example, is dedicated to a game called The Last of Us, and foregrounds that game’s quasi-cinematic world-building and clever AI. The giant footage reel, however, neglects to portray the fact that, at heart, the game is primarily a state-of-the-art murder simulator that requires the player to kill more or less everyone she sees from the very beginning.

Indeed, by way of a slogan the exhibition — curated with evident passion and attention to detail by Marie Foulston — has a series of imperative verbs that includes ‘Disrupt’, ‘Collaborate’ and ‘Design’, but not ‘Shoot’. Or, for that matter, ‘Kill With a Giant Axe’, which would be appropriate for Bloodborne, a game rightly celebrated for the fantastically bleak grandeur of its hellish cityscape. The game’s director, Hidetaka Miyazaki, told his crew: ‘Consider the deep sorrow of a magnificent beast doomed to a slow and endless descent into ruin.’