(I must be into lists this week :-P)
- Endless Forest, by Tale of Tales. It is supposed to be an art work, but it seems like a video game to me. Also, it is nice that you can run it as a screen saver. I just tried it for the first time the other day because I haven't had a Windows machine in a while. It reminded me of a work that Eduardo Kac had made in 1996, titled Rare Avis. The eyes of the bird are positioned like human eyes because it was built after a mythical bird from Brazilian folklore. I have heard also that the text The Animal Therefore I Am by Jacques Derrida was half-way based on Eduardo's piece. It is interesting because the deer avatars in Endless Forest have eyes which are positioned on the front of their faces, and the only way to communicate in the game is to use predetermined animalesque movements.
- flOw, by Jenova Chen. There is also a Play Station 3 version, but I don't think that it qualifies for this list because when you reach a certain level you return and unlock other avatars. I don't actually know if this is not the case in the Flash version, but because it is a Flash game, I don't play it long enough to find out (and that is story for another post). Also, Jenova's game Cloud may qualify for this list, but every machine I have tried to run it on has frozen.
- The Sims, ofcourse, by Will Wright. I have only played this game a couple of times, but I do identify with in at the level of a toy, which is what Will calls it. Interestingly enough, I think that this is a border line case, and for different reasons than Jesper Juul (and to borrow his term :-) thx!) does. I think this because there are certain social limitations that the gamer brings to the table during play. It is easy to think that there are more in-game goals in The Sims because there are social ideals that relate to real life, and to the players.
More on this topic later I think.
