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The installation is “an experiment to isolate the experience of the interaction itself,” said Paola Antonelli, the senior curator of the museum’s department of architecture and design, comparing her decontextualized approach with Philip Johnson’s in his 1934 “Machine Art” exhibition at MoMA, which set things like propeller blades against white museum walls. Instead, each game is austerely contained on a screen set against a gray wall, with a joystick or other controller resting on a spare platform beneath it. There are no arcade cabinets on view, no outmoded consoles or computers to gawk at. The games on view, from Pac-Man to Canabalt, are naked, without their packaging or other nostalgic trappings. “Applied Design,” a new installation at the Museum of Modern Art - and an important one because it is the first time the museum has displayed the 14 video games it acquired in November - attempts to isolate this relationship. The defining feature of video games is interaction, the three-way conversation among designer, machine and player. But the unsatisfying name we are saddled with for this medium - itself approaching middle age, if you date its history to the first home console in 1972 and apply the rule that middle age begins when you are older than every current Major League Baseball player - doesn’t capture the essence of video games. Video games, as their name suggests, combine the ancient human practice of formal play with moving pictures, a younger form.