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As director of the Swiss Museum
of Games, Selim Krichane is also the lord of the castle on Lake Geneva. The exhibition “De la case au pixel” is currently running there, with a “Minecraft” look on the poster and a room dedicated to building.
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um shop moved from the first floor to a smaller area on the ground floor and is to be renovated; Krichane wants it to have more space, and to “have a more visible presence at the museum, to make books more viewable and games more accessi- ble.” He is thinking that maybe the muse- um can offer game nights, working with the shop. Employees now get together for game nights themselves, and recent- ly had an evening of Swiss video games. “Senior Tuesday” is an ongoing project, offering Chess and Mah­Jongg. The museum is looking to have more public events that involve playing games. “The team is working on bringing more play experiences. We want people actually to discover games by playing them.”
Perhaps the most important question one can ask a new director is what new di- rection he wants to take for his museum, besides more opportunities for people to play. Krichane answered this way: “We plan to develop more programs. We want to develop an interest in games beyond the ‘Big Five’ countries; focus on games of the world. We will become a larger space for contemporary game creators—this is not new, Ulrich [Schädler] had an annual event for this. And we want to make it bigger and better and do the same for video game creators.
“We will have a smaller permanent exhibition and move to have more tem- porary exhibitions with catalogs, and one big catalog publication per year.”
The decisions for the future of the mu- seum are made in consultation with a Board of Directors. The board consists of people who work with the city and/or are involved in political oversight. One nota- ble board member is the prominent games researcher and historian Thierry Depau- lis, out of Paris. Video games studies are represented, and there is a local repre- sentative in charge of cultural affairs. But the population of La Tour-de-Peilz has a say also. People were consulted for ideas and invited to participate in a survey con- ducted in September 2023. The questions
were not about the game museum itself, but on the use of the castle as a whole and the possible inclusion of a restaurant within its walls. By a vote in 2021, the locals rejected the proposal to renovate an excavated 1000-year old dungeon, and they quashed the idea of having a high-end restaurant there. The museum is financed by private funding, and public funding from the city and at a local level, including “Friends of the Museum.”
Bruce Whitehill, a passionate game col- lector, has already worked with the Swiss Museum of Games. The first time was in 2004, when a major exhibition on Ame- rican games was curated in La Tour-de- Peilz: based upon Whitehill‘s collection and with his expertise on the subject.
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