My candidate for artistic games would be Myst and Riven. The games were certainly limited in movement, but the images were gorgeous and well complimented by the audio. I can still remember the eerie feeling and sense of loneliness I got from my first encounter with Myst.

-Chris

http://viewfromthecorner.blogspot.com/2007/04/oblivion.html

(Which we tried to follow the next year with TwilEIT, only to discover that there’s just not enough substance in the Twilight series to parody. So, we did the natural thing: in the opening scene, a freshman gets bitten by the vampire disguised as an Emerson art major. He collapses, the other students come on stage and exclaim, “We have to get him to MIT Medical, stat!” Cue “Teardrop” by Massive Attack, and the story (d)evolves into a House episode. Oh, and with a “death panel” to make the story topical.)

Taking classes on hypertext fiction and such was an interesting experience, in a Sturgeon’s Law sort of way. A good many of the prototypical computer-based interactive fictions, written back when HyperCard was a novelty, which were supposed to be the paradigm-shattering innovations which would level the playing field between author and reader. . . just aren’t that fun to read! The self-conscious “we are the innovators” attitude and the clunkiness of the software interfaces probably both contributed to the “what if they held a revolution and nobody came?” story of 1980s hypertext fiction.

Nowadays, with everybody used to the Web, it might be different. Interactive fiction and text adventure on, say, the Amazon Kindle might be interesting.

Such classes also subject you to a whole lot of art-that-must-be-explained. If it’s not a HyperCard programmer or a videographer going on about what they “were trying to achieve”, it’s your fellow students doing their homework assignments and final projects, which in most cases (see again, Sturgeon’s Law) have to be elaborately prefaced. “What I wanted to do with this piece was to explore the tension between individual and society. . . .” When I realized how much I didn’t like that, I started doing much more interesting work! My favourite was when we had to do a video — this being a year or so before the rise of YouTube. I knew I wanted to make something which wouldn’t require an artist’s statement to understand, and I figured, “Everybody’s seen movie trailers,” so I ended up making a trailer for an early version of the novel which eventually became Until Earthset.

I should probably go back and do that again, now that the written part is finished. . . .

Being an MIT alum, are you familiar with Infocom’s old “The Lurking Horror” text adventure? The college campus is, as I understand it, a thinly-disguised MIT.

It’d be interesting to see a similar thing done with the modern science blogosphere. “You are in a maze of twisty little inside jokes, all alike. It is very dark. You may be eaten by a raptor.”

The only problem is that most of the puzzles in such a game would be involve outwitting creationists, which would make the game difficulty somewhere around “easy”.

His criterion was the multiplicity principle: when a scene is doing more than one task at once, then it’s being “artistic”.

That actually reminds me of something Scott Adams of Dilbert fame said about comedy (before he went totally “woo”). He said that good humor involves the combination of two or more humorous elements, such as meanness, cuteness, bizarreness, etc.

Oblivion was another game I thought of putting on the list — the only reason I didn’t, I think, is that I’d already spent 4 evenings trying to finish the damn post and didn’t want to make it any longer!