“No video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form,” Roger Ebert declared a dozen years ago.

Until recently, art museums have strenuously ignored video games, consigning them to a purgatory once occupied by photography, fashion, film, and the decorative arts. The irony is that all this began at the Met. Overnight, an activity I’d associated with Scrooge McDuck pogo-sticking on the moon had unsettled my reality, prompting questions like “What happens after death?” and “How do we know that there’s only one God?” Like many millennials, I came to owe a disproportionate share of my early cultural education to games, which introduced me to Bach’s violin concertos (Civilization IV), “ The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam” (Titanic: Adventure Out of Time), Pure Land Buddhism (Cosmology of Kyoto), and the medieval Spanish epic “ El Cantar de Mio Cid” (Age of Empires II). It was my first intimation that video games could be a form of aesthetic experience. “In the beginning, stranger, there were no beginnings,” a voice from nu, the lifeless waters of chaos, said. My heart pounded when a papyrus clicked open to reveal a gorgeously animated creation myth. Soon, in defiance of the twelve-and-up rating, I was wandering the tombs of Giza with a talking jackal, searching for grave goods to nourish the souls of kings. In the gift shop, I spotted “Nile: An Ancient Egyptian Quest”-a three-disk “edutainment,” co-produced by the museum and scored by Brian Eno, which invited me to bring the enchantment home.

My favorite spot was the Temple of Dendur, where you could actually go inside the narrow chamber etched with hieroglyphs. Obsessed, like many kids, with ancient Egypt, I’d spent the day marvelling at scarabs, sarcophagi, and ivory game pieces with canine heads. At some point in my childhood, I persuaded my parents to buy me a computer game at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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