Visitors to the Victoria & Albert Museum gallery will be able to immerse themselves in the Game of Thrones land of Westeros while watching people splatter each other with ink when a video games exhibition opens this year.

Announcing details of the show on Friday, Tristram Hunt, director of the V&A, said video games were “one of the most important design disciplines of our time”.

He added that he was confident the museum’s founding director, Henry Cole, would also have staged the show. “Contemporary video games are strikingly innovative, uniquely creative and commercially successful – making a huge social and cultural impact across the globe,” Hunt said.

A still from Journey. The exhibition will explore games from the mid-2000s that have been transformed by technological advancements. Photograph: V&A

Highlights from the exhibition is Nintendo’s Splatoon, a huge online squid paintball experience which pits player against player, and original character sketches for the 2013 game The Last of Us, a post-apocalyptic zombie blockbuster that follows two companions, Ellie and Joel, across a ravaged US over the course of a year.



Curators said there would be large-scale immersive installations including one showing the intricate and collaborative building of Westeros, from Game of Thrones, in Minecraft.

The show’s curator, Marie Foulston, said it would explore games from the mid-2000s that have been transformed by technological advancements, such as increased access to broadband and social media.

Vox the Dog + Blizzard Games. The show will include large-scale immersive installations. Photograph: V&A

One common complaint about video games is that they are too violent, but Foulston says there are wider issues that will be explored in the show.

“What we want to show is that this is an incredibly broad design field … the broader cultural conversation tends to be sometimes quite fixated but there is an immense design field that needs to be explored and appreciated,” she said.

Overtly political games will be on display including Phone Story, a satire in which players control aspects of mobile phone production, including babies mining coltan in the Congo while being watched by armed soldiers. It was banned from the App Store.

Some of the games will be playable by visitors, including one called How Do You Do It?, which puts players in the role of a curious 11-year-old exploring the idea of sex. The character uses plastic dolls to allow “the audience to understand the discovery of sexuality from the perception of a young girl”.

Hunt said the V&A had the national collection of digital art and design and had been acquiring digital material since the early 1960s. It continues to do so. In 2014, it added the Flappy Bird app to the collection; last year it acquired WeChat, China’s largest social media platform, a process which took two and a half years to achieve.

To coincide with the exhibition, the V&A said it was inviting applications from UK-based artists and designers to be its video games resident between October and June 2019.

Which games will feature and, crucially for some, what will be playable has still to be announced, but Foulston promised a DIY arcade space at the end of the exhibition and the opportunity for people to play Line Wobbler, a game inspired by a viral video of a cat playing with a door-stopper spring.

• Video games: Design/Play/Disrupt will be at the V&A 8 September-24 February.