It’s the GOTY list we’ve all been waiting for: the best video game museums of 2020! Created by YouTube channel, The MinnMax Show, the shortlist includes The Last of Us Part II, the Final Fantasy VII Remake, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and our personal favourite, the Animal Crossing: New Horizons museum, curated and single-handedly run by our beloved Blathers the owl.
PETA might not be happy with Blathers’ treatment of animals, since they ‘cancelled’ him earlier this year, but it turns out that people who actually know about museums think that the bird-nerd has done a great job. There’s even the potential for museum-ception, if you enter your island into the National Videogame Museum’s database!
Blathers does get some criticism from Kevin Ramler (interim director of the Wyoming State Museum), who says that the T-Rex and Stegosaurus shouldn’t be placed together, since they “lived further apart in time than we lived from the T-Rex”, and also from Cynthia Jones (general manager of innovation experiences at the Henry Ford Museum) who says that the curators shouldn’t fall asleep at their posts. HE’S A NOCTURNAL ANIMAL, LADY! He can’t help it!
However, the curator of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Margaret Weitekamp, praised the museum’s “floor treatment” in the dinosaur exhibit, which plays with the idea of a family tree to make the dino room both educational and super pretty. She also loved the use of information labels, noting how challenging it is to fit enough text on a label to explain things like the provenance, importance, and detail of an object.
Incredible to think that all this started as a tiny little tent on our islands. Great job, Blathers! Er… can someone wake him up?
