WASHINGTON, D.C. – A new exhibition on the art form known as videogames at the Smithsonian Institution is a big leap forward – for the museum.

"The Art of Video Games" opened on Friday, March 16 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. (I participated on the advisory board for the exhibition.) This isn't the first time that videogame-related exhibits have been shown at a Smithsonian museum; the original prototypes of what would become the first home game machine are in the National Museum of American History, for example. What's unique about this exhibition is that it is being mounted in the art museum, showcasing games as creative works as opposed to technological marvels.

I thus believe that it represents no small amount of resolve on the part of the Smithsonian Institution's administration to go forward with such an exhibition, insofar as they were sure to invite criticism from the sort of people who reflexively say that videogames are not art and not worthy to be displayed next to paintings. (Not to mention the gamers who will complain about their favorite game not being included.) Good on the Smithsonian for deciding to place its considerable reputation behind the sensible, but still mildly controversial, idea that videogames are a respectable creative medium.

To hear a lot of people talk, you'd think that videogames had been waiting around in the ghetto, hoping that some benevolent arbiter of what is and is not art would decree them worthy. The medium is becoming so pervasive, and certain games are becoming so impactful to the people who play them, that games are steaming ahead full-blast entirely under their own power. As multiple people mentioned over the course of the weekend, we're not that far away from having a president of the United States who grew up playing an Atari 2600. Games need not seek the approval of the ivory tower, games only have to wait.

I went to D.C. for the grand opening of The Art of Video Games. The weekend kicked off with a gala in the museum's courtyard, at which many of the game designers whose work would be on display were in attendance. Bioseshock director Ken Levine and Pitfall! creator David Crane were both there; Skyrim's Todd Howard made a beeline to Metal Gear's Hideo Kojima to introduce himself.

The most impressive moment of the party was immediately following curator Chris Melissinos' speech: A playable version of the Xbox 360 game Geometry Wars was projected on a massive scale right across the outside walls of the museum, the outlaw medium leaving its mark right on the face of the storied old building. (Temporarily and with permission.)

The exhibition itself was upstairs, tucked into a corner of the 3rd floor. Guests entered not to a wall full of games but a series of monitors showing video of "game faces," the facial expression and body language of players as they interacted with games in the exhibit. We don't see the games; instead we are invited to focus simply on the players. One of the points that the exhibit attempted to raise is that Art may not simply be in the game itself but in the interaction between the viewer and the creation.

One of the difficult challenges that the exhibition had to tackle in the concept phase was letting a stream of museum-goers play some of the videogames without either causing massive traffic jams or constantly have to deal with broken hardware. The first room of the exhibit contains the solution; five games are playable, projected onto large walls and kept far enough away from each other that players can pick out the games' distinct audio while they play.

The games, each of which was playable for just a few minutes before the display reset itself, gave players a high-level introduction to major steps in the development of the medium: Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros., The Secret of Monkey Island, Myst and Flower. Each has the benefit of operating with very simple controls, allowing guests of all skill levels to briefly experience each one without needing to learn the control scheme first.

Past the playable games, a small door led in to the main room of the exhibit, in which 80 different games were on display thusly: 20 tall kiosesks showed four games each with representative screenshots printed on acetate and backlit to look like screens. A video monitor with a telephones-like handheld audio system let you watch videos of each of the four games while an announcer explains what is interesting and unique about their designs.

The Super Mario Bros. 3 caption said in part, "Miyamoto wanted the focus of the game to be about the wonder of discovery in places you least expect it. While the ultimate goal of the game is to defeat Bowser, it is the journey, not the destination, that is important."

The fact that the games were split up into these discrete groupings was not without meaning. While these distinctions may be going away with today's crop of indie games, games have historically been created to fit neatly within particular genres. And it's difficult to show the development of the art form without pointing out that the tools of the artists – in this case, the hardware that powers the games – have developed at a lightning-quick pace themselves. So the games were grouped by platform, with inert game consoles sitting under glass beneath the lit screenshots. On each platform, the games were grouped into four major genres: Action, Target, Adventure and Tactics.

These narrowings of the scope of the exhibit helped create a more understandable experience for guests. They could follow the development of a single genre across the ages, or watch the development of games in general as hardware became more powerful.

I hope that Art of Video Games is not where the Smithsonian American Art Museum stops, but instead serves as an entry point for even narrower, more narrative-driven exhibitions that continue to educate about games.

For example, other exhibitions that are running concurrently with Art of Video Games include "Annie Liebovitz: Pilgrimage," a collection of photographs grouped around the theme of "the photographer’s curiosesity about the world she inherited."

And there's "Inventing a Better Mousetrap: Patent Models from the Rothschild Collection," which "illustrate not only the imaginative fervor of the era but also the amazing craftsmanship required to fabricate these often intricate works of art."

When will we get to visit something so specific about games? How about the as-yet-nonexistent exhibit "A Boy and His Blobs: The Pioneering Pixel Art of David Crane?" Or take a walk through the combination of utility and artistry embodied in, say, the enemy character designs of the Super Mario Bros. series?

With any luck, this is what the Smithsonian is thinking about now.

The Art of Video Games is on display through September 30 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. and will tour other museums nationwide beginning later this year.

All photos courtesy the Smithsonian American Art Museum