Up until this week, the most notable video game exhibit at an American museum was probably the Smithsonian Institute's "Art of Video Games," due largely to the Smithsonian's reputation. However, that 2012 production, which eventually traveled to multiple museums, had a surprising lack of playable stuff, along with a largely pedestrian look at gaming's history as categorized by console generations, as opposed to technological or artistic strides.

Seattle's Experience Music Project was one of the Smithsonian exhibit's hosts and from the look of things, its staff had a similar inkling about how games exhibits could be done better. On Friday, EMP debuted its own wildly different take on such an exhibit, and it's a stunner. Titled Indie Game Revolution, the two-year venture has chosen to spread gaming's artistic gospel not by recalling its history but by celebrating its weirdest small-team creations.

"For me, I really love the idea that we could maximize the number of experiences people could play, but also that these games are either unreleased or released within the last year," EMP senior curator Jacob McMurray said to Ars. "We're focusing on what's happening now, rather than hitting the highlights of yesteryear, even within the indie realm."

McMurray's work at the EMP has mostly been about music, including putting together impressive Jimi Hendrix and Nirvana exhibits in recent years and he admitted to being an indie gaming novice before taking this project on.

"I'd always played a lot of games, but definitely not in the indie realm," he said.

Hence, his video-taped interviews with 45 game makers, music composers, and others can be found all over the exhibit, and they're nearly as omnipresent as the playable games themselves. That's no accident.

"I had an idea for a narrative pretty early on, but everybody we interviewed served to course-correct what our narrative was," McMurray said. "It made me realize that those human stories needed to be huge. It couldn't just be games. It had to be the human stories of why people create these games. That ended up being a big surprise, and one of the most important parts of the exhibit."

The current selection of 20 games ranges from indie heavy hitters like Gone Home and Broken Age to games we'd never even heard of and McMurray promises a dozen new games being rotated into Indie Game Revolution every two months. Check out the current selection, and the exhibit's wild, live-pixel aesthetic in our gallery below. (All photos by the author.)