NOTTINGHAM, England—Despite the name, the UK's National Videogame Arcade isn't an arcade in the '80s coin-munching sense of the word. Nor, despite featuring a small collection of video game antiquities, is it really a museum. The NVA is something else entirely, something that carves out its own niche in a country that isn't exactly starved of historical computing collections, housing as it does both the Centre for Computing History and the National Museum of Computing.

Instead, the NVA errs towards interactive art installation. It is a place where video games aren't just given the stoic museum treatment, but visitors are encouraged to tear games apart and prod around their inner workings. It's an inventive approach: one that's as much about highlighting how games are developed as it about being a fun distraction for the family. Don't get me wrong, the NVA is a fun place to hang out, but it immediately conveys an important message that no other installation does: games are for everyone, and everyone can make games.

For Iain Simons, co-director of the Arcade, the NVA is just the latest in a line of events to promote that ideal. As the director of GameCity, he has staged the annual GameCity festival in Nottingham for nearly a decade. GameCity is an event that's a million miles away from your typical Gamescom or Eurogamer Expo. There are no darkened booths to house the latest and greatest shooter from a mega-publisher, nor are there lines that snake around the entire show floor. GameCity celebrates the cultural impact of games and the people that make them, letting visitors talk directly with developers to discover what makes their favourite games tick.

That the festival has been running for so long belies its humble beginnings as a community meetup with Jeff Minter (Llamasoft founder and creator of games like Attack of the Mutant Camels) inside a cramped, beer-fuelled curry house. Nevertheless, its success proved that there's an audience outside of the notoriously exclusive enthusiast core eager to learn more about games. All that GameCity needed to further expand gaming's cultural clout was a more permanent home.

While some may baulk that the NVA isn't in the nation's capital, its central Nottingham location, just behind the city's historical market square, is hardly out of reach. Inside, it's all new: a mix of bright walls, comfy cushions, and exposed technology. Like the exhibits, the building itself isn't afraid to expose its innards. A central staircase that connects each of its three floors reveals a mass of TVs powered by Raspberry Pis, and colour-coded electrical and data cables can guide visitors to each exhibit.

Welcome to the NVA

On entry you're greeted by old arcade machines: a huge Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles unit followed by Ms. PacMan and a wonderfully battered version of the button-mashing classic Track and Field. There's even a Sega Dreamcast there, perfectly placed to capture the nostalgia of the company's last console hurrah. But it's the NVA's own homemade exhibits that prove to be the biggest draw and its greatest success.

The first, Dash and Bash, is a wall of monitors linked up to a set of large of buttons. It's essentially a quick-draw pattern matching game, with each player assigned a card that randomly appears on a particular screen. Points are scored by pushing the corresponding button underneath the screen as quickly as possible. It is immediate and fast-paced, and later stages up the ante by introducing rules such as only pushing a button when your card is upside down. Dash and Bash quickly moves beyond video game into a physical tussle of pushing and shoving.

























That Dash and Bash is so physical, and a game that can only be played with two or more people, is by design. It's a way to loosen people up and show them that the NVA can make both code and its own games.

"It's not an accident that we ended up with a place where people can play together," Simons told Ars. "Lots of people that know and love games understand that games are intrinsically social—Nintendo worked that out really, really well. But I think there are a lot of people that feel quite disconnected from that. There are lots of people in gaming that don't want these other types of gamer involved in their community. We are trying to work past that."

"You don't get to meet developers very often if you're a member of the public," Simons continued. "Most of the time you don't even know who they are. From an educational point of view knowing that games aren't made by, like, wizards, but are made by actual people, boys and girls alike, even subtly that's a really important message. We were surprised that people didn't try and say that we were validating some toxic dysfunctional part of culture. They've really treated this as a culturally important and inclusive place. We were all ready to get beaten up by The Daily Mail, but there's been very little of that."

Wandering around the NVA's enticing rooms of bold buttons, madcap DIY installations, and lovable video game classics, it's hard to imagine a home for video games more inviting than this. Its second homemade game is a sort of '50s sci-fi vision of the future, a hulking great mass of flashing control panels and switches called Mission Control. It's the first thing in the NVA that really dives into how games are made, separating its individual elements out onto control panels for visitors to prod and manipulate.















There's a panel of faders for changing the frequency of enemies and power-up drops for the Asteroid-like game, while big metal switches, the kind you imagine being flipped in trepidation when a missile is launched, add a spotlight to the screen or make it wobble and warp. Two nearby spots—one with a whiteboard, the other with a blackboard—let you draw your own monsters and backgrounds, with a camera instantly capturing the designs and uploading them straight into the game. There's a clever use of off-the-shelf tech too: some light-up MIDI-controllers feeding into a nearby patch bay let you change the pixel art of the characters on-screen.

While that might all seem a little overwhelming, the way everything has a homemade, chunky feel—like it was built in a garden shed with nothing but a screwdriver on a spare Sunday afternoon—is wonderfully inviting. I'm told there's always someone around manning each floor should a family find themselves a little lost with a particular exhibit. That homemade feel also has its benefits for maintenance: the physical components are easy to swap out if broken, and the in-house code is easy to modify for any future tweaks and changes.