Deirdra Kiai is an adventure game developer, mostly working in the Wintermute engine, who has created a series of games that explore the functional space of the game in interesting ways. I'm not at all sure that's her intention, actually; my impression is that she's simply creating things to satisfy a personal aesthetic. And yet the results are interesting enough to merit a degree of intellectual analysis that most commercial titles, hackneyed as they are, do not.
In Chivalry Is Not Dead, she created a short graphic adventure where (in Doug Church's conception of the term) player expression dictated outcomes, and the "beads on a string" linearity of most graphic adventures was abandoned.
