![]() Even when you’re not playing, your character’s busy wandering the countryside, fighting battles, and leveling up, with your character’s actions summarized with text largely created by the community. Inspired by Progress Quest, Godville is a “massively-multiplayer zero-player game” that requires no interaction to play. Jakob Skjerning’s modern HTML5 click-fest describes itself as “Like Progress Quest for people who aren’t old.” Don’t miss Dot Dot Dot, the hilarious dramatic reading of a frustrated player’s review of the game. The “PSTW” stands for “Press Space to Win,” which is all you need to know. No interaction, just a giant black-and-white progress bar. If anyone else starts it up during that period, the game quits and you lose. Your goal is simply to be the only other person running the game online for 4 minutes and 33 seconds straight. Petri Purho, creator of Crayon Physics, created this experimental program that’s barely a game. Kian “Mazapán” Bashiri turns a walkthrough into a game, with an original song by Henrik Nåmark.Ĥ Minutes and 33 Seconds of Uniqueness (Windows, 2009). Cameo by Peter Cetera.ĭon’t Shoot the Puppy (Flash, 2006). Paul and Nate Redcloud’s parody of 8-bit RPGs, complete with forced narrative, epic ending music, and an official strategy guide. There’s no interaction at all, just watching your character stats increase as the game plays itself in progress bar status messages. Eric Fredricksen’s cult favorite “streamlines the more tedious aspects” of modern RPGs by cutting out the middleman: the player. Progress Quest (Windows/Linux/Web, 2002). Despite the title, it’s actually winnable in two moves. Rob Noyes’ classic piece of minimalist interaction fiction. Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die (Z-code, 1996). The flipside of abusive games - games so obvious that they’re barely games at all. It can take upwards of 15 minutes to complete a single line. Sometimes, the tutorial is the best part of the game. Here’s video of one poor bloke beating the game, after nearly three hours of button-mashing. Ostensibly made for the 1984 Olympics, this Flash game made for TV channel E4 by Rob Manuel and Matt Round asks players to run a 26.2 mile marathon in real-time, Track & Field-style. A frustrating, and not very fun, platformer with a very unreliable narrator. If you play it in the easiest setting (“Medium”), your characters has a pink bow in his hair and all the save points are renamed from “SAVE” to “WUSS.” One of the hardest games ever made, Michael “Kayin” O’Reilly’s “nail-rippingly difficult platform adventure” pays homage to countless 8- and 16-bit era games. I Wanna Be The Guy: The Movie: The Game (Windows, 2007). ![]() Federico Poloni’s malevolent AI always sends the worst possible brick. In interviews, Jillette said Desert Bus was their attempt to make the most mundane, realistic game ever, a direct response to the Clinton Administration’s fight against violent games in the mid-1990s.īastet: Bastard Tetris (Windows/Linux, 2005). And if you manage to complete the trip, you get one point. ![]() Driving off-road gets you towed back to Tucson in real-time, making it difficult to cheat. In Desert Bus, the most notorious of the mini-games, players drive a tour bus on a mind-numbing eight-hour trip from Tucson to Las Vegas. Like their earlier Cruel Tricks for Dear Friends video from 1987 - see Vidi Kopy or Super Kleener for meta-VHS examples - Smoke and Mirrors was a collection of small pranks that used unique aspects of the medium to let buyers play tricks on their friends. Penn & Teller’s Smoke & Mirrors (Sega CD, 1995). For more information about abusive game design, see this academic paper and presentation by Douglas Wilson and Miguel Sicart at the University of Copenhagen. But these games deliberately test your patience by taking a single game mechanic and make it hard to endure. Note: I’ve tried to stay away from specific game parodies (like Pong Kombat or Pyst), and stick to games that comment on game design, mechanics, or culture. This is just a starting point, please post your additions in the comments or email me and I’ll add them in. Since I couldn’t find an exhaustive list (this TV Tropes guide to “Deconstruction Games” is the closest), I thought I’d try to pull one together along with some gameplay videos. Others, like Cow Clicker and Upgrade Complete, are playable critiques of game mechanics. Most of these, like Desert Bus or Quest for the Crown, are one-joke games for a quick laugh. Over the last few years, I’ve been collecting examples of metagames - not the strategy of metagaming, but playable games about videogames. ![]()
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