National Videogame Arcade will have five floors, changing exhibitions and permanent display of objects from gaming world

Just as film has the BFI and fine art has the National Gallery, the world of British gaming is to get what will be called the National Videogame Arcade (NVA) with the announcement of a £2.5m centre in Nottingham.

The project will be the world’s first cultural centre for gaming, promoting it as an art form every bit as important as film or theatre or dance.

Details of the centre were announced at the ninth GameCity festival being held in Nottingham this week.

The GameCity director Iain Simons said it was “hugely exciting” and had been coming for some time. “We do tours, we do an archive and we do a festival but what has been lacking is any kind of anchorage to all that … any kind of home for video games.”

The NVA will become that home, taking up five floors and 33,000 sq ft of a building that was once an important centre for visual arts as home and gallery space to the Midland Group of artists.

There will be four gallery floors and an education floor and as well as changing exhibitions there will be a permanent display from the 12,000 objects which are held in the National Videogame Archive.

Simons said the way games were exhibited and experienced had to be different from watching a film or a gig or going to a gallery.

“It throws up some really interesting challenges which we absolutely wouldn’t pretend to have all the answers to. This project is about creating a space in which we can play around … experiment.”

Simons said most art forms and genres – music, architecture, visual art, design, narrative – all “come together to form this clumsy, difficult-to-explain thing called video games which might be on your phone or your 60in plasma TV. That makes it difficult to pin down but also makes it really exciting.”

Gaming has come a long way since the days when a 1970s teenager might spend hours, days even, knocking a ball back and forward on an Atari games console. It is now an enormous, sophisticated multibillion-pound industry with the UK as a major player.

Ian Livingstone, who wrote an important 2011 report setting out how the UK could become the world’s leading hub for games, said: “For the millions of people who love them, it’s only natural that video games should have their own permanent cultural home.”

He said it was a much-needed space along the lines of the National Theatre for performance and the National Gallery for fine art.

“Video games have an important role to play in our economy, our education policies and our cultural lives – so while it’s taken a long time to arrive, I can’t wait to visit the first ever National Videogame Arcade.”

The new centre is due to open next March and will promote the idea of games being for everybody, no matter how old.

One of the most exciting recent developments, Simons said, was that the tools were now available for people to create their own games just as they might sit down and write a poem.

The centre will welcome too anyone who raises their eyebrows at games being art. “We’re more interested in moving past that and celebrating whether something is interesting and adds to life.

“People who come if they hold that position will be surprised and delighted by the breadth and diversity of what games have become. They are some way removed from what they were if the last time you played was Pac-Man in a pub in 1989.”