Playing the Museum: Videogame Heritage, Interactivity, and Cultural Legitimacy

This article examines the emergence of videogame museums in Spain through a comparative analysis of MUVI Museo do Videoxogo Galego in Cangas, the Museo del Videojuego Arcade Vintage in Ibi, and the OXO Videogame Museums in Málaga and Madrid. It argues that these institutions are shaped by an informational-interactive dilemma: they must preserve, explain, and legitimize videogames as cultural heritage while also allowing visitors to play, touch, and experience them as interactive media. Rather than treating this tension as a problem to be solved, the article shows how different curatorial models translate the complex nature of games into spatial, educational, commercial, and participatory practices. Videogame museums do not simply exhibit objects; they negotiate among software, hardware, play, memory, authorship, community, and cultural value. In doing so, they actively define what videogames are, what counts as videogame heritage, and how games enter the museum.