Sifu by Sloclap and H2 Interactive - 2022
On July 4 2026, I interviewed Dr. Aristotelis-Georgios Sakellariou, a museum collections specialist who holds a PhD on “Museum Representations in Popular Video Games: a 40-year study of buildings, spaces and collections”. Beginning with what he initially believed would be approximately forty examples, his research eventually identified more than 340 museums across video game history.
Dr. Aristoteles’ research has already developed practical applications. Alongside his work at the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia, he consults on collections management for the Video Games Museum in Heraklion, which has been recognised by ICOM as an example of good museum practice.
Dr. Aristoteles approaches video games from the perspective of both a museum professional and a lifelong player. His work highlights how video games can represent museums not simply as architectural settings, but as cultural spaces containing collections, exhibitions, installations, educational experiences, and different forms of interaction.
His research originated in a personal experience with The Dagger of Amon Ra, a 1992 puzzle adventure game developed by Sierra. Growing up on a Greek island, Dr. Aristoteles initially found museums distant and uninteresting. Encountering a colourful and mysterious museum inside the game transformed that perception:
“For the first time in my life, I wanted to be inside a museum”
This experience eventually led him to ask why museums had been extensively studied in literature, film, and comics, but rarely in video games. He began mapping their appearances through personal experience, online databases, conversations with other players, and recorded gameplay available on YouTube.
We discussed several games that provide distinctive museum experiences. Dr. Aristoteles highlighted the contemporary art gallery in Sifu, whose installations were convincing enough that he sometimes wanted to stop fighting and simply explore the exhibition. He also referred to Ghostbusters Remastered, in which players are financially penalised for damaging museum objects. This apparently simple mechanic encourages players to recognise the material and economic value of a collection.
We also considered the difficulty of recognising individual artistic authorship within collaborative game production. Reflecting on his experience of visiting the exhibition about the videogame Journey in Doha, during the Qatar–China Year of Culture in 2016, Dr. Aristoteles proposed that video games could acknowledge their contributors more visibly, like movies do. Rather than limiting recognition to a long list of names at the end of a game, credits could become part of the visual and interactive experience itself.
“Everyone deserves to be acknowledged because everyone contributed to the final work.”
The conversation eventually moved toward the future of artistic production considering the new technologies available. Dr. Aristoteles contrasted contemporary generative tools with the labour involved in creating the pixel art of games such as Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, Monkey Island, Simon the Sorcerer, and Discworld. Although he recognised the potential of AI to reduce technical barriers and allow artists to contribute more directly to video games, he also questioned how automation may alter our perception of creative achievement:
“Back then there was a sense of achievement because producing that work demanded tremendous effort and skill.”
His reflections raise an important question for my research. If artistic authorship was once associated with the successful results after overcoming remarkable technical limitations, how will it be understood when similar successful results can be generated rapidly through automated systems?
The interview concluded with a broader discussion about how the worlds of museums and video games can increase their collaboration. We considered exhibitions combining original video game concept art, playable games, and historical objects, allowing visitors to move between artistic processes, cultural references, and completed interactive experiences.
For more information about Dr.Aristoteles’s work, check his profile on Instagram and on LinkedIn.
On June 2, 2026, I interviewed Susan Lammers, author of Programmers at Work, a referential collection of interviews with early software creators conducted in 1985 and published in 1986.
The conversation is especially relevant to my PhD research because Lammers approached programmers as creative practitioners, not only as technical specialists. Her reflections offer an important historical perspective on how early software creators thought about invention, constraint, structure, and authorship.
We discussed her interview with Toru Iwatani, creator of Pac-Man, and the broader question of how creative identity emerged in the early years of personal computing and video games. One of the central themes was dealing with technical limitations.
Lammers said: “In a lot of ways, programming is like architecture.”
She also described how early programmers had to reduce their ideas to their clearest possible form: “They had to distil their ideas to such a degree that there is a purity to them.”
This idea connects directly to my research on early video game authorship. In games like Pac-Man, artistic identity did not simply appear once technology became more powerful. It emerged through limitation, simplification, and careful design choices.
Lammers also recalled that Iwatani and his team considered making Pac-Man more visually detailed, including adding a face, but rejected the idea because it would be distracting. For my project, this is a crucial insight: simplicity was not only a technical condition, but also an aesthetic decision.
The interview also moved toward present-day questions about artificial intelligence, procedural generation, and the future of authorship. If early computing was defined by scarcity and hardware limits, today’s creative systems may be defined by abundance, speed, and the need for new boundaries.
This conversation will contribute the first publication of my PhD, which focuses on early video games, creative constraint, and proto-artistic authorship.
Susan Lammers’ Programmers at Work, the 40th Anniversary Edition, will be released this July 2026 by 8080 Books/Simon and Schuster. It contains a new introduction and all the classic interviews.
This schedule provides an indicative overview of the PhD timeline from 2024 to 2028, mapping major phases such as proposal work, literature review, data collection, publications, analysis, and thesis drafting. It is organised by quarters to support steady progress and regular review points. The schedule is intentionally flexible and will be updated as the project develops, with adjustments made in response to research findings, opportunities, and institutional requirements.
The research proposal outlines the aims, theoretical framework, historical scope, methodology, and planned outputs of the study, centered on understanding how artistic authorship operates in video game history. The document serves as the foundation for the ongoing research.
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Research Journal
The Research Journal documents the ongoing development of this PhD project. It records interviews, methodological reflections, case-study notes, conference participation, publications, and theoretical developments as they emerge.