Ready Player One

IT SAYS a lot about our current times when an exhibition on video games serves as the perfect location to meditate and reflect. Sure, it's not the quiet leafy open sanctuary in which you sit cross-legged, close your eyes and go "ohm". But it is an expansive digital universe into which you can escape, see strange surreal images burst onto screens, and interact with the images - as if they were no less alive to your touch and presence than a mimosa leaf or a butterfly.

ArtScience Museum's exhibition Virtual Realms: Videogames Transformed has six virtual rooms that promise different experiences. Among them are a few in which you can sit back, soak in the sights and sounds, and think about your interconnectedness with the universe. Other rooms invite you to participate actively in games as if you've somehow been turned into a virtual avatar and dropped into a computer game.

Virtual Realms is a co-production of the ArtScience Museum and the Melbourne Museum, and is co-curated by celebrated game designer Tetsuya Mizoguchi, in collaboration with the London arts institution, the Barbican.