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name	publisher(developer)	year	description
Passage	HC Software	?
Transcend	HC Software	2004	Transcend can best be described as retro-style, abstract, 2D shooter. The graphics are geometrical, and the pace is sometimes frenzied. Two features set Transcend apart from other games. First, its dynamic graphical engine, which can smoothly morph from one complex shape to another, produces striking displays. Combining these dynamic shapes with subtle randomizations makes each play through a Transcend level visually different from the last. The second novel feature is Tran scend's musical power-up system. As you play through a level, you are simultaneously assembling an abstract visual collage and arranging a unique piece of music. Transcend merges video games with pure art---it can be viewed either as a game or as a multimedia sculpture. Stereo headphones or speakers with good stereo separation are highly recommended. The music generated by Transcend is in stereo, and how you interact with Transcend affects stereo positioning in the music. Transcend is playable on a monophonic sound system, but many subtle sound features will be missed. Basic Keyboard Controls: Arrow keys: direct your glyph around the plane Space bar: fire projectiles D key: pick up or drop an Element P key: pause the game Q key: quit Advanced Keyboard Controls: S key: slide your glyph to the left F key: slide your glyph to the right To win a level, you must destroy the major anti-glyph. Your glyph starts out very weak---its initial projectiles are powerless (they cannot even destroy minor anti-glyphs). Build the strength of your projectiles by gathering Elements from the plane and dropping them near the center of the grid in a collage. Minor anti-glyphs will try to break apart your collage---destroy them with projectiles (you need at least one Element in your collage to have projectiles that are powerful enough to destroy minor anti-glyphs). After you destroy the major anti-glyph, a portal will appear. Pass through this portal to move on to the next level. A level in Transcend contains the following components: Your glyph - Always at the center of the screen. This is the component that you control (i.e., "you" in traditional game-speak). The plane - Marked by a grid. Your glyph can travel anywhere on this grid. Umbilical - A colored line that connects your glyph to the center of the grid. This line's color and width change according to your current projectile strength and attributes. Elements - Stationary objects that start out strewn along the border of the grid. Your glyph can pick these up and move them around. Elements can be dropped at the center of the grid to form a power-up and music collage (see below). Music cursor - A red, yellow, and green line that traverses your Element collage. This line moves to show the current music position in time. The vertical extent of the cursor represents the stereo space (red is right, green is left, and yellow is center). Minor anti-glyphs - The enemy. These mobile components pursue your glyph and the Elements in your power-up collage. Major anti-glyph - A large enemy that travels in a circular path around the grid. This enemy is your primary target: when you destroy the major anti-glyph, you can move on to the next level. Portal - Appears after you destroy the major anti-glyph. While the portal is visible, minor anti-glyphs will stop attacking. You can explore the various Elements and musical possibilities without being bothered by enemies. Pass through the portal to move on to the next level. When you are hit with an enemy projectile, your glyph drops any Element that it is carrying and is propelled back toward the center of the grid. When an Element is hit by an enemy projectile, it is propelled away from the center of the grid. Once you have started building a collage of Elements, the minor anti-glyphs will try to knock Elements out and disrupt your collage. Elements that are dropped near the center of the grid (where your umbilical ends) form a collage. Elements that are dropped near the collage also become part of the collage (thus, a collage can extend far away from the grid center as long as some Element in the collage is near the center). Each Element represents a projectile power-up. The Elements in your collage are combined to determine the strength and form of your glyph's projectile. After your collage contains at least one Element, your projectiles will be strong enough to destroy any minor anti-glyph in one shot. However, the major anti-glyph is much more durable, and a relatively large collage will be needed to make your projectiles strong enough to destroy it easily. If your collage grows to be asymmetrical and/or off-center, your projectiles will become weaker (they will appear transparent and your umbilical will become thinner). In addition to a projectile power-up, each Element represents a section of music. A cursor traverses your collage and plays the music associated with the Elements that you have assembled. Thus, a chain of elements that extends perpendicular to the cursor will be played sequentially in time. A chain that extends parallel to the cursor will be played simultaneously in time but spaced out in stereo. [Zerothis]
Book & Volume	Manifesto Games	2005	Also packaged with Jason Scott's documentary, GET LAMP.***In a fictional world nWare has established the city of nTopia in the middle of nowhere. You are the sys admin and must do menial admin tasks that are assigned to you. But, there is something more going on. This seems to be a art piece designed to explore the problems of motivation and prior knowledge in interactive fiction. And/or its about consumerism. And/or its just a very hard game to complete. Its meant for the player to fail repeatedly before being able to establish victory conditions. And/or its meant for the player to fail repeatedly. If this were an infocom game: Difficulty Level: \| Junior \| Introductory \| Standard \| Advanced \|[b]>>EXPERT<<[/b]
Cultivation	HC Software	2005	Cultivation is a game about a community of gardeners growing food for themselves in a shared space. Cultivation is quite different from most other games. It is a social simulation, and the primary form of conflict is over land and plant resources---there is no shooting, but there are plenty of angry looks. It is also an evolution simulation. Within the world of Cultivation, you can explore a virtually infinite spectrum of different plant and gardener varieties. All of the graphics, sounds, melodies, and other content in Cultivation are 100% procedurally generated at playtime. In other words, there are no hand-painted texture maps---instead, each object has a uniquely "grown" appearance. Every time you play, Cultivation generates fresh visuals, music, and behaviors. You can read more about what I was trying to do with Cultivation in this essay I live with my spouse and child in the small town of Potsdam, New York. We're pretty active in our community, through our food co-op, through our town's fight about Wal-Mart, through the non-profit Seedcorn, and even through our controversial choice of landscaping. Throughout my three-year experience as an active community member, I observed (and participated in) many conflicts that erupted. Some conflicts were over relatively small things (like paper vs. plastic bags for co-op-made bread), while others were over much bigger things (like a 186,000 square foot store being built in our 15,000-person town). I was discussing the Wal-Mart fight with a veteran of the local activism scene. He brought up the idea of "using war as a metaphor" for our struggles---he said that these days, he strives to avoid thinking about community issues in terms of win-or-lose and us-or-them. Instead, he said, the community itself, and the relationships in it, are the most important thing. A few days later, I was discussing the Wal-Mart fight with a Christian. He talked about how the fight had created a terrible discord in our community, and that the damage caused by that discord was worse that whatever damage having (or not having) Wal-Mart would do. Those two conversations caused me to think about how I approach conflict in real life, but they also caused me to think about game design. Many games deal with conflict, but almost all of them paint conflict as black-and-white. These game reward scorched-earth victories (and may make such a victory the primary goal). I wanted to make a game that explored the subtle trade-offs involved in conflict. On the one hand, you want to fight for what you think is right, but on the other hand, the fighting itself can have enormous costs for both sides. Is it better to compromise with your opponents and end up with a result that only seems half-right to you? This conflict balance is lurking everywhere, from small community squabbles to the global "war on terror." For example, should "we" negotiate with "terrorists?" That is a difficult question, certainly. Of course, every conflict has a setting, and I needed one for my game. I didn't want to make yet another game about war, so I spent many months thinking. I could make a game about a Wal-Mart fight, but that felt too much like jumping on the persuasive games bandwagon (there's a McDonald's Video Game, but did I want to be the creator of the Wal-Mart Video Game?). I was feeling particularly stumped on June 16, 2006, so I took a walk out into our backyard garden to clear my head. The general mechanic I was considering at the time revolved around compromise---sometimes, it might be best to give up something that you want in order to end a fight with your opponent and move on. You could think about this general mechanic in terms of gaining and losing ground. While I was sitting in my garden, an idea came to me: when neighbors are growing food together, conflict might erupt over the boundaries between neighbors' plots. Back in the house, I scribbled down eleven pages of notes in what felt like eleven minutes. Those eleven pages were a rather complete---albeit rough---design document for what I would eventually call Cultivation. The next three months were consumed by coding as I turned the design into a game. Implementing the mechanics for the social simulation was relatively easy. As far as "content" was concerned, I already had the groundwork for a nice solution---for years, I had been exploring genetic algorithms for content generation, but I had never found any use for the fruits of those explorations. Applying these ideas to Cultivation, I tried several ways of mapping genetic parameters to plant leaf shapes, and I finally came up with an algorithm that carried out a rough simulation of cell growth to fill a texture map. My first test of this algorithm simply generated 50 leaves and saved them to disk as image files. Watching a slide show of the resulting images stunned me---I was looking at some of the most beautiful 32x32 pixel images that I had ever seen. There were endless variations of form, and just when I thought I had seen every possible "style" of leaf generated by this system, I would stumble upon yet another leaf that looked like nothing I'd seen before. Still to this day, while testing Cultivation, I am surprised by the unique and interesting plants that appear on my screen. With this success behind me, I continued to apply genetic and procedural ideas to the rest of the graphical content: to flowers, to fruit, and to the gardeners themselves. When I was finished programming all the content, I had a graphical game without a single pre-rendered texture map or sprite. This was a game with endless visual variety that still fit on a single floppy disk. In the initial release of Cultivation, neighbors would respond to encroachment with both counter-encroachment (claiming some of your plants as their own) and social scorn (refusing to mate with you). With only these mechanics in place, fighting just didn't feel serious enough---a fight could continue indefinitely without any real consequences, since after two plots overlapped completely, no further revenge was possible for either side. I had to think of a more serious act to crown the peak of an escalating fight. Poisoning, which is now a key mechanic in Cultivation, fit perfectly. This mechanic allows an angry neighbor to poison a plant. Poison not only kills the target plant, but it also renders the ground around the plant forever unusable. With poisoning in place, fighting has a serious consequence: part of a common resource (fertile ground) is ruined for everyone. Thus, the mechanics of the game underscore what I was trying to explore as an artist. This leads me to the point of this article: games can convey a message in a way that other media cannot. As an example, let's consider the novel as a medium for conveying a message. First of all, we could come right out and state our thesis to the reader: "Conflict can cost both sides more than either stands to gain by winning." Of course, a bald statement like this might not be very convincing, and it is certainly not much fun to read. Instead, we could tell a story in our novel that somehow illustrated this point (the book/film House of Sand and Fog comes to mind). Even if we never come right out and state our thesis in plain words, a perceptive reader would hopefully understand the point of our story. After using either a direct thesis statement or an illustrative story, however, we have pretty much emptied our "novel" toolbox. The same set of tools are available in the other non-interactive media, such as film, audio, or painting. With games, we have those tools, too. We can come right out and state our thesis (by displaying text on the screen, or through a voice-over). We can also tell a story with our game that illustrates a point (as many adventure games do). We have one addition tool, though: we can construct mechanics that illustrate a point---mechanics that tend to lead the player down a particular path and toward a particular conclusion. For example, instead of telling a story about characters that find themselves trapped by a difficult decision, we can actually trap the player with a difficult decision and let the player experience the consequences of the choice that he or she makes. In Cultivation, the game system teeters on the verge of uncontrolled conflict, and the player can make choices within this system that affect the balance. Perhaps it is impossible to win the game by acting only out of self-interest, but likewise, it may be impossible to win acting only out of altruism (I say "perhaps" here because, even as the designer of the system, I have only explored a tiny fraction of the game's possible permutations). Players can directly see the results of the choices that they make. In his book A Theory of Fun for Game Design, Raph Koster explores the idea of building mechanics to convey artistic messages in great detail, so I won't discuss it further here. I will say, however, that I strongly believe we should be doing this. If we want to tell a story, why not just write a novel or make a film? If we are making art games, we should take advantage of the strengths of our medium: we should use interactive mechanics to help the player explore our points. [Zerothis]***Spread thy seed. This is a kind of farming simulation where the goal is to create a self sustaining plot of land by direction the actions of multiple generations of the cultivating creatures in planting and harvesting. Since the creatures are short-lived, each must seek a mate and produce an heir to inherit the land. Having food and a good spot of land attracts better mates. In the mean time, rival cultivators may try and steal your resources. But perhaps not, if you are generous.[spoiler=show trailer;hide trailer][media=youtube]s_ws1m5aTSA[/media][/spoiler] [Zerothis]
Passage	HC Software	2007	This description is one big set of spoilers (see the [url=/game-173178-Passage#art3]official description[/url]) for a spoiler free experience. [spoiler=open spoilers;close spoilers]This is an interactive Memento Mori. The Latin phrase mean "Remember you die" and it referes to a specific subset of art designed to remind the audience of their inevitable death. There is only one permenent death of the protagonist(s) which is based on the author's own (the game is autobiographical). Though the author had not actually passed away yet. There are no saves. Time passes regardless of what the player does. The view slowly passes the protagonist(s). The ultra wide (6.25:1) default view is representative of a passage. The protagonist(s) are passing away. It is intended that one can run the game from the command-line to add to the game experience. It is intended that one edit the unusually stored settings in /etc/passage/ to add to the game experience. Various life events are represented in the game, including romance and marriage. These events can have lasting consequences. [/spoiler] [Zerothis]***Passage is a video game written by Jason Rohrer about navigating the maze that is life and the obstacles, rewards, disappointments, challenges, relationships and the inevitable departure that is part of the adventure of life. Passage is an art game. As a result, some people love it and some people hate it. Check out the links to places it has been discussed on the website for some of the reactions. The mechanics of the game are fairly simple. Your "score" is related to two things; exploration and treasure. Treasure pieces are represented by blue stars that you find in the treasure chests scattered about the maze of life's challenges. Some chests will be empty, so you must learn which sequence of gems on the front of the chests means treasure is inside. You have the option to team up with a spouse. If you do, exploring life will be more rewarding but some treasure will no longer be reachable. As in life, your spouse will die and that death will slow you down. In the end, you will die alone after your 5 minutes is up. The most interesting part about this game is the emotions it evokes within the player of the game. The ultra-low-res pixel art helps here, by not being too distracting and by leaving plenty room for viewer interpretation. Passage has no command-line options. The arrow keys move the player around. The Esc key is used to quit the game. The game resolution and use of fullscreen or a window can be set by editing the files in /etc/passage.
Gravitation	HC Software	2008
Between	HC Software	2008
Between the Worlds	Applied Systems;'WE' Group	2009
Judith	distractionware;distractionware	2009	References [url=http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/bluebeard/index.html]Bluebeard[/url]
Dear Esther	thechineseroom	2012	According to some sources, this is planned to be released after the Mac port is done (which was released on 2012-05-15).
Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP	Capybara Games (Capybara Games;Superbrothers)	2012
POP: Methodology Experiment One	Rob Lach Games	2013
Splice	Cipher Prime Studios	2013
Rehearsals and Returns	author	2014	Explore the platformer world to find nice, mean or wise things to say and people, both living and dead, to say them too. Definitely something different. Encounters effect others (cause and effect, what was said to whom and in which order, etc). Players will participate in conversions that will (theoretically in some cases) never take place. Some of the people include: Kim Jong-un, Whitney Houston, Hillary Clinton, Mao Zedong, Steve Jobs, George W. Bush, Kurt Cobain, That Cousin I Rarely See, Gangas Khan, Patrick Swayze, Nicoli Tesla, Pope Francis, Edward Snowden, My Hilarious Friend, Ada Lovelace, Saddam Hussein, Harry Houdini, Ludwig Wittgenstein and lots more. It's not too terribly intimidating to those who may not know who the heck they are talking too. The game offers hints such as "Pope Francis (the new one)" and such. dialog-stance
Fatale	Tale of Tales	2014
The Graveyard	Tale of Tales	2014
Mountain	Double Fine (author)	2014	The announcement [media=youtube]FpObFKcyLJ8[/media]***At first I read the information on the web about this game and it sounded as if it a neglected niche market that was before tamagochi players and after pet rock owners. I figured a 16K UHD (8640p) 48 inch Electrophoretic Color Display (when these became affordable) framed and hung in my living room would be the best place for it. However, after seeing [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpObFKcyLJ8]David OReilly's presentation[/url] I realized the product has interaction, there are features to unlock, causes to effect. It is on the outside definition of a game. But it is still more of a game than [game=#162665]Narcissu[/game] (which is often accepted as such). And it's minimally subversive (kind of an artistic necessity). I couldn't tell you exactly what, but this guy has probably started something at least as noteworthy as [game=#19073]Kings Quest[/game], [game=#34]Centipede[/game], [game=#173178]Passage[/game], or [game=#107889]Seven Cities of Gold[/game]. However, I'm still looking forward to decorating my wall with this first of the new. "You only live once, buy Picassos whenever possible." Right? $1 is way more than possible for me.
Elegy for a Dead World	Dejobaan Games	2014	[media=youtube]bfps2HKE4B4[/media]***In Elegy for a Dead World, you travel to distant planets and create stories about the people who once lived there. Three portals have opened to uncharted worlds. Earth has sent a team of explorers to investigate them, but after an accident, you are the sole survivor. Your mission remains the same: survey these worlds and write the only accounts of them that outsiders will ever know. We created Elegy so that everyone can write. As you explore, the game helps you create the narrative. You begin on Shelley’s World, now devoid of life. A bloated, red sun scorches a landscape of towers, sculptures, and cryptic machinery. As you encounter these elements, Elegy will cue you with a series of writing prompts. Here, the game asks you to describe the landscape: There are many stories to write and many places to visit, from the crumbling museum, stone faces and sweltering plains of Shelley’s World to the central planning station on Keats’ World to the desiccated shores and frigid tundra of Byron’s World. Each world offers multiple sets of prompts, each intended to inspire you to write a different story about it. Elegy might ask you to write a short story about an individual’s final days, a song about resignation, or a poem about war. In the more advanced levels, you’ll sometimes get new information halfway through your story which casts a new light on things and forces you to take your story in a different direction. We like to think of those as puzzles — writing yourself out of a corner, so to speak. When you’ve completed your narrative, you have the option to share it with other players through Steam Workshop or reproduce it in digital and print media. You can read other players’ works, browsing through the most-recent, the best-loved, and recently-trending stories. You can also take screenshots of your story and upload them to a print-on-demand site like Blurb or Lulu, which will then send you a gorgeous, full-color, physical book (additional costs apply).
Reflections	Broken Window Studios	2016
T H E YV	voidwaste	2016

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