Spider-Man: Miles Morales and TLOU Part 2 have great video game museums - Polygon

Most video games are built as museums to themselves — inside the menus and beyond the stories are collections of items and lore.

Sometimes, a video game’s museum is more literal, like in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which has an actual museum to house the things players collect.

Each of these video games includes a “museum” in the literal sense, but also serves as a museum on a more abstract, macro level.

The idea of a video game being designed as a museum to itself feels like a major shower thought, but it also feels very fitting.

Video game designers keep coming back to the museum as an interesting space to place integral moments of a game’s story, because these spaces reflect the core concept of video games.

The science museum in Spider-Man: Miles Morales is similarly an echo of the game’s story and themes — both the past and future are represented by the different states the museum is in, both pristine and ruined.

In The Last of Us Part 2 and Spider-Man: Miles Morales, the museum scenes touch on childhood and loss — often to a violent, catastrophic world.

Video game developers were using museums to invoke and display meaning, but museums have been using video games to create new experiences in a digital space

And so video games and museums became further intertwined, as museums entered virtual worlds themselves, whether that was in creating and cataloging a collection of historic smocks, building art installations, or uploading an entire dang art collection for players to easily add to the game

We see video games reflected in museums and museums reflected in video games because the format just fits, tapping into the satisfaction of collection, information, and nostalgia

It makes sense for a game to leverage that feeling, and it’s why museum levels feel so good to play

Video games have long pulled from museums for inspiration and design, and it’s fascinating to see museums now learning from games