Anyone play these? I haven't managed to get hold of any of the commercial ones like "The Journey", but I've played quite a few free, usually very minimalist ones. They're usually very short and casual, and try to have some sort of impact on that budget.

Here's one of the most memorable ones you can play in flash:

Coma

I love the art style and music, and the dreamy (comery?) property of the dialogue.

Oh...is this the stuff of flamewars?

All games are art ;)

but this sounds like what is being described in OP:

http://amanita-design.net/samorost-1/

http://amanita-design.net/

tuco wrote:All games are art

but this sounds like what is being described in OP:

http://amanita-design.net/samorost-1/

http://amanita-design.net/

I guess I'm thinking about games that are not intended to present the player with any sort of challenge, but instead to present them with, I dunno, just stuff.

I think the first one of these to get any attention was probably Jason Rohrer's Passage, perhaps because the lead project developer on Far Cry gushed about it or something. I didn't really like it, but Rohrer's later game Gravitation really got to me.

Here's another 5 minute one that you can play in the browser: Immortall.

Without any sort of challenge, well, that would make them movies ;) So perhaps interactive movies?

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edit: I just got the read the links:

Passage is meant to be a memento mori game. It presents an entire life, from young adulthood through old age and death, in the span of five minutes. Of course, it's a game, not a painting or a film, so the choices that you make as the player are crucial. There's no "right" way to play Passage, just as there's no right way to interpret it. However, I had specific intentions for the various mechanics and features that I included. You've probably figured most of these out already, but I wanted to put forth a few explanations for anyone who is interested.

http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passa ... ement.html

The teenager in our house loves Journey.

tuco wrote:Without any sort of challenge, well, that would make them movies So perhaps interactive movies?

Yeah, I'm cool with that.

Also:

There's no "right" way to play Passage, just as there's no right way to interpret it.

If these games offer you choices, they're not strategic choices. They're choices about what aspects of an idea you want to see, with some authorial idea about what those choices mean expressed in code.

Fuck that sounded pretentious.

Yeah I liked that quote too, despite I do not think that the notion is necessarily the difference between art and something else. At the end its the player, audience, consumer who interprets, no matter author's intention or explanation. In this sense, its beyond author's control, thus I would not consider it as criteria for art.

tuco wrote:Yeah I liked that quote too, despite I do not think that the notion is necessarily the difference between art and something else. At the end its the player, audience, consumer who interprets, no matter author's intention or explanation. In this sense, its beyond author's control, thus I would not consider it as criteria for art.

Yeah, I'm happy to treat the adjective "art" as just an arbitrary identifier for a recognisable genre in games (mostly flash games). It'd be silly to suggest that what I call "art games" are the answer to "games as art." The term "art game", I think, mostly means "game as not game", or "game as neither skill, strategy nor problem solving."

There is plenty of authorial intention though. It's just that the intention is expressed in the mechanics. Rather than the author saying "this is how I see the story starting, progressing and beginning", the author says "this is how I see the constraints on your choices within the world." Those constraints completely reflect (IMO) the worldview of the author, so there's still a lot of authorial control. And you can hate these games by saying "fuck off; those constraints do not reflect any sort of real inconsistency in life."

In Immortall, for some completely unexplored reason, the humans start randomly trying to destroy you without any regard for collateral damage. It's pretty unambiguous what the author thinks about big organisations of people (government, military) against the small farming community.