Gaming at the museum

Of course everybody knows the world famous museums in Paris: Louvre, Orsay, Pompidou... But Paris offers also smaller museums not as well known such as musée du moyen âge de Cluny and the conservatoire des arts et métiers. The later two are my favorites.

On friday I was off from work and we went to the "arts et metiers" to experiment their museogame special exhibition.
Let me first start with a few words on the museum:
It is actually, despite what i just wrote, world famous because the museum houses the foucault's pendulum. The namesake artefact from Foucault's Pendulum Umberto Eco's novel.

A word on what is displayed there:

The museum is dedicated to presenting technics used in France and the science associated to them since the middle ages. The conservatory is housed in the former Ecole des arts et metiers (a French grande école) building.

More on Wikipédia.

I first visited the place when I was 14 during a trip to Paris with my grand-mother. I remember being impressed by the old artifacts : weights from before grams where established, the first meters, old Pascal calculators... Planes, cars, steam engines... Real stuff that conducted to technologies used in 1987.
My second visit took place 2 years ago soon after moving back to France. If you want to do the math that's roughly 20 years after the first one. The first thing I noticed then was the reorganization of the collections. In his book, as far as I can remember, Umberto Eco describes the entrance with old cars, planes, a model for the statue de la Liberté... And it was exactly like that in my childhood memories. (For that reason I enjoyed the beginning of his novel when many readers did not). The second thing I sadly noticed where new objects in the display cabinets that were in use when I was a teenager. That blows ! It's a very crappy way to make some old feel suddenly very older when this person is reliving a memory. You can now see in the Arts et Métiers : old computers, the first cellphones and so on... It made me realize how fast technology is evolving and how quickly the years go by...

On friday then, was the third visit. We did tour the galeries but the reason for the trip was museogame. It is an exhibition dedicated to the history of videogames. The global impression is "that was fun" and I am really glad we went.
The exhibit starts in a small hallway made of storing racks from the museum. On the shelves are randomly (or made look like random) put old computers, gameboys, game boxes (why did they use to make them so large !) and so on. It's fun to point out thing we used to own.
After the hallway, there is a large table with machines on each side of it. On the wall are projected the images of the games played by the visitors. Because, yes, you can play. In order to allow everybody to have fun, upon buying your ticket, you received a timed voucher granting you entrance at a certain time for 90 minutes. It wasn't crowded and everyone could play. It went on chronologically, starting with Pong, pacman, space commander, lemmings, tetris (complete with the annoying music) and so on up to Tekken, rayman...
Sadly some old mice where not properly working and some games were not working.
I heard a kid tell his mom, who was winning at Pong that "this game is hard". I also saw a grand mother play Tekken with her grandson.
There was a second room with arcade machines.

PS : a nice thing is that the museum is rarely crowded and you can have the room for yourself.