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When you think of the Ontario Science Centre, you normally don't imagine Lara Croft statues
or Tron and Buck Rogers arcades. But that's the focus of Game On 2.0, an exhibit spanning
over 50 years of video game history.
FILART: The Science Centre is all about learning through play. And an exhibition
about gaming takes the play and allows us to explore the technology behind video games.
The original Game On opened in the UK and has already been seen by a million people
worldwide. 2.0 now features 150 playable games, as well as an exclusive look on game development.
HITCHINGS: Game On 2 came about because Game On 1 was so popular, so we actually
had venues who wanted to book the [exhibit] at the same time. So we generated, created
Game On 2 to be slightly improved over Game On 1, have a lot more stuff, and basically
to appeal more so to major museums and galleries. And this past year we've now been touring
for over 11 years.
Emphasis has been placed on the evolution of gaming platforms, from the PDP series back
in the 1960s, to the motion-powered Xbox Kinect and handheld consoles like the PlayStation
Portable.
STOKES: I've been a gamer, I guess, since day one, since you used to put a floppy disk
inside of a Commodore 64. To this day, moving forward to blow on a cartridge and put the
cartridge back in, to when you would slide a CD in, and now we're getting to the stage
where there's no physical product anymore. Now it's just you download a file and you
play the game from there.
There also seems to be an ageless appeal to the exhibit, and Canadians are feeling right
at home.
CROSBIE: Video gaming is an important industry in Canada. We're number three in
the world. So video game design is something that is part of our future, it's part of our
everyday lives, and it's a very viable career path as well. It involves mathematics, it
involves design, it involves music, so there's a lot of different aspects to gaming that
make it a really important part of the industry.
STOKES: I see so much coming forward for this industry and I'm so excited about
it. I think we're at the tip of the iceberg where it can go. And all your
sci-fi movies that showed you all kinds of unbelieveable things, we're passing them very
And you can see it all, right before your eyes.
Game On 2.0 continues into the summer and ends on September 2nd, so you have plenty
of time to get your game on.
Aleksander Bajrak, Guelph-Humber News.