We’ve been playing The Company of Myself and Dys4ia in today’s Games Club at work, run by Tomas Rawlings. This sparked off a conversation about experimental/art games (which I’m not going to try and define here, I think you’ll get the gist) and some really great examples were mentioned. I thought it would be useful to collate these somewhere, not least because every time this subject comes up I have to try and dig up the examples I dimly remember to send people links, “oh it’s this game about suicide or something by an, um, Daniel someone, I’ll go look it up”.
So here’s my list, with several examples via Danny Birchall (updated to add examples from Phil Stuart).
- Everyday the Same Dream by Molleindustria, “a slightly existential riff on the theme of alienation and refusal of labor. “. Or anything by Molleindustria, in fact.
- The Killer by Game Trekking. About the Killing Fields of Cambodia.
- The work of Pippin Barr. E.g. Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment
- The Company of Myself. About loneliness.
- Dys4ia on having a sex change.
- The work of Jason Rohrer. E.g. Passage, a “a sweet memento mori game”
- Average Shoveller by Carlo Zanni, ” you have to shovel pumping news from your head saving your life from a news overload”.
- Various games by Michael Molinari, or Bean. E.g. Together
- Today I Die (a “poem game”) and others from Daniel Benmergui.
- About 300 examples from MolyJam.
- The Majesty of Colours “a pixel-horror game that puts the player behind the tentacles of a titanic, writhing sea creature”.
- The Black Forest, “the game equivalent of a webcomic”.
- Facade, a “on-act interactive drama”, trailer here.
- Phil asks “Does ‘Don’t Shit your pants‘ count?”, you be the judge of that 🙂
- Platform. (“No reward – funny ending”)
- Proteus. “a game of pure exploration and discovery… with a reactive ambient soundtrack”
Update 22.09.12 Some more examples from Mathias Poulsen, who has two lists for “Poetic” and “Newsgames“, I think I like “poetic” and “news” better as descriptions.
Anyone got more good or interesting examples I can add to the list?
SwanQuake: (not playable online)
at http://www.swanquake.com
JODI’s Quake mods — bonkers, and all downloadable/playable http://www.untitled-game.org/download.html
Also worth keeping an eye on
http://www.selectparks.net/
http://www.gamescenes.org/
http://artgames.ning.com/
(the latter of which contains Jon Cates’ complete course notes for his art games studies course)
Limbo has to be in there http://limbogame.org/
Beautiful, haunting and a good sized game.
Aha, it is beautiful, and lovely, but is it an *art* game? Discuss :). NB, I hate getting into discussions about whether something is or isn’t art, but I guess part of what I was going for with these games were that they are expressing something in particular. I bet Danny Birchall has something to say about this…
I’d consider adding The Graveyard to the list:
http://tale-of-tales.com/TheGraveyard/
And, yes, Don’t Shit Your Pants *is* art.
‘To the moon’ and ‘Dear Esther’ might fit the bill. Thinking more mainstream, I think Silent Hill 2 could be on the list also.
The IGF winners page is always a good place to look for experimental stuff too: http://www.igf.com/02finalists.html