Bringing video games into an art museum would be considered an ambitious undertaking in years past, but visitors to the Smithsonian opening of “The Art of Video Games” say it isn’t surprising at all.

The new exhibition explores 40 years of video games as art through interactive games people can actually play, pieces of gaming memorabilia and dynamic visual displays that highlight the artistic work done by developers. It is the first such exhibit to appear in a major museum, and visitors of all ages came away from its opening day with feelings of nostalgia.

Groups of family members – parents and children, grandparents and grandkids – marveled at the exhibit, and each took away something different.

“I thought it was pretty neat to watch the evolution of games,” said Kim, a mother from Columbus, Ohio. “I grew up playing 'Frogger' on the Atari but got away from games until my son started playing.”

“I thought it was amazing,” said Jimmy, a 21-year-old from southern Maryland. “I thought it showed the great history and beauty of video games. People will be able to come to the Smithsonian and still learn about video games and see the beauty in them.” FULL POST

Curt Schilling can throw a baseball far better than you can. He can also kick your dark-elf butt in a Nagafen raid or smite Deathwing the Destroyer before you get close enough to smell the smoldering embers.

Schilling is, and has been for the past 31 years, a gamer. He honed his controller skills on an Intellivision video game system. His first favorite game was - surprise - “Major League Baseball.”

“I was at the right age for consoles, when ‘Pong’ was the ‘Need For Speed’ of the day,” Schilling said. “(‘Major League Baseball’) was like the greatest baseball game ever. If you had a consistent playing partner like they do in ‘Starcraft’ now, every game was 1-0, and you had to hit a home run down the left field line.”

But that fascination didn’t last long. Schilling - who had a very successful MLB pitching career lasted for 20 season; who helped two different teams win world championships in 2001, 2004 and 2007; who was a six time All-Star and currently holds the record for postseason winning percentage - said baseball video games were never hard enough to keep his attention.

So he started playing fantasy-based, massive multiplayer online games such as “Ultima Online” and “EverQuest.”

“I was always a big fantasy guy, a big ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ kind of gamer,” Schilling said. “That was always a very big, significant piece of my gaming because I was always a very avid reader as a kid. I read ‘The Lord of the Rings’ trilogy for probably the 20th time a couple of years ago, but that’s what got me into fantasy gaming.” FULL POST

The word "gamer" was more prevalent than ever in our lexicon this year.

Zachary Levi recently chimed in with his theory that everyone is a gamer at some level.

CNN Geek Out recently spoke to hardcore gamer Morgan Webb, host of “X-Play” on G4, and asked her what it means to be a gamer and about the state of gaming in 2011.

“Unfortunately, it is a more confusing word now because there are so many different types of games and so many people playing games from on their cell phones, or on Facebook, or on many other things," she said.

"The word encompasses so many different groups, so it doesn’t really mean as much as it used to. I call myself a gamer, but someone’s mom who plays ‘Farmville’ all the time, maybe she calls herself a gamer too, and she should, because she is. I think we need words to start differentiating the subgroups.”

Webb got into gaming well before "Farmville," of course. Her first console was an Atari 2600, where she played “Combat” and “Plaque Attack” for hours on end. She is also an avowed fanatic when it comes to the “Centipede” arcade game.
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