Really inspiring read, thanks!

Makes me wonder what Thomas thinks of The Love Letter...

Welcome, and best wishes with the beekeeper thing! My dad started getting into that a few years ago now - so far no hives have survived the winter, but maybe you'll have better luck.

Now if only I could find the time.

i don't know if i should smile or cry ... i know this.

Me too - both of those games have been on my list for a long time. I haven't played any games on my list for years, literally. The last game I played was Portal.

Yes, finally! :p

Finally read it! Fun story, though I wouldn't say that's my ultimate goal in creating games (or notgames). I haven't watched any MLP:FIM, but I'm kinda curious now...

I like your soundscapes! Definitely rich and evocative.

I don't have any current projects in need of a composer, but I'll definitely keep you in mind for the future. Thanks for sharing your work!

I can agree that it would be wise to introduce the audience to our ideas gently,  with pieces that are not too extreme - although I don't think this is a universal requirement: I want to see more extreme pieces too, there's far too few of those either.

But we should be careful not to conclude from this that our work should be more game-like. Games are an ancient form that is only tied to videogames as a medium by historic coincidence. While humans certainly enjoy games, I don't believe this is why they are attracted to videogames. We need to exploit the unique qualities of videogames.

To ease a larger audience into this work, we can use things they are already familiar with in videogames. But there's many such things that have nothing to do with formal games. Dear Esther is a good example: it uses controls and aesthetics that are familiar to many gamers, but have nothing to do with goals, rules, rewards, etc.

We should make compromises with the elements in videogames that serve our purpose, not with the ones that defeat this purpose. I believe there is a great medium hidden inside of videogames. We only need to peel away the game layer to allow it to bloom. And I believe there are ways of doing this so that existing gamers still enjoy the work,  without even noticing that "it's not a game".

Yes, I agree. Thank you for the reminder.

It's like they took a FPS and stripped out everything except the immersion. It works very well.

So it seems like thoughts and emotions associated with violence can be generated by notgames as easily as other emotions. You just have to put the player in a corresponding situation. Games put players in such situations all the time, but the emotions are weakened because it's gameplay in immersion's clothing.

Yes! I've encountered this before, in my first game programming job working on casual games, where we found that fictional penalties and a fictional sense of urgency worked fine without backing it up with gameplay consequences. In particular it was a tornado minigame in the hidden object adventure game Fiction Fixers: The Curse of Oz, where if you click on the wrong object it would hit the house and the characters would be like "Oh no!" but it didn't actually matter in terms of gameplay. But it was enough for people to get into the fiction and play along.

Looks like you're doing some great work! I think I've seen it around - maybe even linked from here on these forums?

Yes, welcome! We've definitely been passing your posts around this forum a bit already. Glad to have you here.

Thought you guys might enjoy this article on Kotaku: We Are Explorers: In Search of Mystery in Videogames

Well stated, Dale.

It seems to me that the real skill is the thing you're doing while walking or standing still, like appreciating beauty, contemplating, planning, etc. Maybe that can be the learning process. It's like the idea of using content as the difficulty curve.

Yes... Could you share some of the insights you may have come across in trying to do this for your own project?

In the same way I would want a friend to instruct me when he introduces me to something dear to him.

This seems like a great way to approach it. It doesn't have to be ridiculous.

But the game seemed to be what I think of as a "tool for reflection" to go along with the books.

This seems likely. I haven't read the books either. I like the idea of the game as a tool. Not the reading the books is necessary, but something like that.

Someone made a notgame where you make art using games: Art Game

There's an interesting article about it here:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/187118/Art_Game_Make_art_with_games_in_a_game_about_art.php#.USvR96XvtpB

Yeah, I'll be curious to see if Chris Crawford has anything to say about it.

I haven't tried Versu yet, due to my lack of an iPad, but here's a review by someone (another IF author) who did try it:
http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2013/02/the-longer-than-i-expected-versu-post/