Experimental

Stéphane Bura is an eminent game designer, of both digital and tabletop games, as well as something of a game design theorist. His War and Peace is more of a thought experiment than a game; it is, he proclaims a "one-button Civilization". You make only one decision during play: to toggle between "peace" and "war."

As a reviewer, it's my job to push you in the direction of cool things in the hopes you just might check them out. I wouldn't be living up to my duty if I didn't direct you towards more of Stephen Lavelle's work, and you would be doing yourself a disservice as well if you aren't keeping up with his explorations of the medium. His motto is "let's try something out there" and he holds to it. He cranks out quirky little games that can make you feel empathetic or maybe slightly uneasy; he crafts experimental pieces that toy with game mechanics in a novel way. That is, when he isn't making games about female masturbation or a nerdy math joke. These are short experiences, so overlong explanations would ruin the fun. For the uninitiated here's a few tidbits about each.

Think of this as the game equivalent of a webcomic. To follow this train of thought, the advent of the internet allowed cartoonists free reign in their work. It's like making an underground zine where everybody is a potential reader. All someone needs to make a webcomic is a scanner or MS Paint, but it wasn't till recently that Flixel was released and game developers were given the tools to rapidly create short, online little games. Developer Pixelate set out to make four of these experimental webgames for every week of December, and this is the fruit of his labor.

GAMBIT, the Singapore MIT Game Lab, have developed a series of games based on "research questions" from game academics. The inspiration behind Pierre: Insanity Inspired is this question from Jesper Juul: "How does [sic] different ways of communicating failure influence the player’s experience and performance?"

FATALE is the newest work by Tale of Tales, developers of The Path, The Graveyard, and The Endless Forest.

Frobot is an Experimental Gameplay Project game, meaning it's done in seven days or less, on the current month's theme ("unexperimental shooter"). Its theme is also one I've thought about before: a game in which you have to get a room full of people dancing. It would never have occurred to me to make it a Robotron-esque shooter, however.

It's been a while since Petri Purho stopped doing a game every month, so I don't visit his blog so often -- but today looked in, and lo and behold, he has another game up, for the first time in a while.

Post-I.T. Shooter is, like all of Purho's ouevre, too cool for school. It's essentially Space Invaders, if Space Invaders was stop motion animation created with colored Post-It notes. Also, the enemies are apparently procedurally generated. And as we expect from Purho's games, the music is both excellent and danceable.

If Purho were a musician, he'd have a cult following across the planet, mostly at universities, and fans who encountered each other would know they had found a kindred soul. Post-I.T. Shooter is not a good game, exactly; I doubt you'll play it for long, unless you want to hear the end of the song. But it is starkly amazing. You need to play it to understand why Purho is, in his own odd way, one of our most important indie auteurs.

Cactus's Lovecraft Game is a quick vignette he developed for a TIG Source competition. By "vignette," I mean this isn't a completed game, and is missing some of the things we normally expect from games, like a quantifiable outcome. But as is typical of Cactus's efforts, it gets a lot of points for sheer style.

Dreaming on E is a Cactus-inspired FPS platformer that's interesting, mostly in part to its ending. It's vague, frustrating, and has 3D graphics circa 1992. All five levels are ideas NAL had for FPSes that didn't have enough meat to make for full games, but stitched together produce a somewhat surreal experience -- which is no doubt why the title.

Mightier is a little 3D game in which each level contains a number of object you must retrieve. You begin at level zero, and while you can jump as high as level 1, many objects are at higher levels.

Scattered about the field of play are "crystal pillars," all of whom begin also at level zero. ESCing out brings you to an interface where you can draw closed loops about the play area, each loop containing a pillar and one (or more) of the retrievable objects. Once you have done so, the application interprets your drawing, and then you view a scene in which a laser from space zaps the crystal pillars, "raising" them to a different level. The idea is that you create platforms that allow you to jump up and grab the objects you're after. The platforms are the same shape and size as the loops you drew.