Jason Rohrer and the Art of the Video Game

On a recent Tuesday evening, the video-game creator Jason Rohrer was visiting Manhattan from Davis, California. His work is the subject of "The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer," the first full-scale museum show devoted to the video games of a single artist, at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College; his game Passage, from 2007, is in the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art. That night, he was the star of an event at NeueHouse, the vast private-membership work space "for the ambitious and the curious" on Twenty-fifth Street, in which he discussed video games and art in front of an eager crowd. NeueHouse has the atmosphere of a tech incubator crossed with a popular restaurant--five stories of elegant young professionals drinking wine and espresso, sitting in front of laptops instead of plates, patrons and servers alike zipping around in a mood of anxious exhilaration. Before the event, Rohrer showed me his games on his laptop. "When I first walked in, I thought it was a club," Rohrer told me.