Reactionary Replicas reviews 30 years of museum shooters

"Reactionary Replicas: 30+ Years of the First Museum Shooter" is a special talk by Elliott Burns, lead author for the publication Side Quest, and he takes on games that model real galleries and museums. It'll be part of a session at Museums Inside and Outside Play in Vienna. The announcement challenges the subgenre and whether it's possible to challenge the host institution, or just reinforces its power.

Burns has been tracking the space, so it's nice to see a very clear concise vision for his subject. Titles include ArsDoom (1995) and Palle Torsson and Tobias Bernstrup's Museum Meltdown (1996 to 1999), jumps to Stephen Honegger and Anthony Hunt's Container (2002) and Paul Steen's Art Assault (2010), before settling with KAWS rebuilding the Serpentine North gallery in Fortnite in 2022 and Brennan Wojtyła's LAN (2025), a replica of the Belgian gallery Tick Tack.

FROG, run by SUBOTRON and the Association for Applied Game Studies, reaches its 20th edition this year under the theme PLAYING ART, and it is the first time an Austrian museum has hosted it. Friday opens a games exhibition of student prototypes from SUBOTRON's spring jam series, with presentations on stage and an award ceremony.

Stephan Schwingeler of HAWK University of Applied Sciences and Arts opens Saturday with a keynote, "Game Art: Digital Games as Artistic Material." Burns shares the session with Laura C. Schmidt on exhibiting games at ZKM in Karlsruhe, and with Benjamin Beil and Isabelle Hamm of the University of Cologne on video games, museums and the end of the world. Makes me jealous I'm here in the US!