Why not have a game that has a tutorial half-way through?  Maybe it's teaching you things you already know, maybe very obviously covering things that you had to toil over to work out yourself in the beginning, but the section might still fulfill some artistic purpose.

'Memento' (as in, the film) game. First you see the credits, then fight the final boss, then the final stage, etc. Wait... this was done already, in a way; there was this 'Mario clone', but I forget who made it, or what it was called...

I remember now: it was Hempuli's Jump on Mushrooms (video). It's more 'reverse playback' than 'Memento', though.

I'm not sure what other 'parts' of a game might be treatable in this manner, though.  I can't think of any other possibilities for interesting abstraction right now.

I imagine that a linear 2D game's level could be assembled from randomly selected pieces, according to how they fit against each other in the way that two sections of a composition may fit in succession or not. But this is pretty crude, as an extension of your idea.

Mmm. I also know virtually nothing on the subject, but it does seem relevant. It's often relevant to films (martial arts and most action genres, most evidently), so I can't see it not being important to video games.

Welcome, brother Paul. It is most pleasant that you have decided to join our Cult.

It is possible to be 'estranged' from oneself in different situations because the memories of self do not match the analysis of the current self. It is possible to 'expand' a consciousness by doing things such as driving a vehicle; it removes (or reduces) certain sensations but expands on the feeling of 'having a car as a body' (McLuhan wrote a lot about this). The mind, and self, can be described more in 'flux', or an 'area of effect'.

Quite true. Are you familiar with Oliver Sacks, and the concepts of proprioception and egosyntonic sensation? All my knowledge about the author is second-hand, as I am actually surrounded by psychologists and related professionals or students in everyday life, but his literature intrigues me enough that I don't know why I haven't read any of his stuff yet. At any rate, one of the interesting things I heard about is the possibility of losing egosyntonic feeling of an extremity via physical trauma; you know rationally that it's, say, your leg, but your body tells you otherwise. And on the other side of the spectrum, egosyntonic sensation is necessary for a prothesis to be usable.

I have a feeling that symbiosis is important for therapeutic games (of which I know none that uses symbiosis as its basis).

I'm reminded of that part in William Gibson's Neuromancer, in which Case 'connects' to Molly's senses, and experiences what she does (you may recall, if you read the novel, that she draws a circle around her nipple, and Case feels the contact as if the nipple was his own.) Absolute symbiosis is definitely what virtual reality researchers have been trying to achieve for so long, and this is not really the realm of (non)game design, of course. I don't think I had a point with this paragraph, anyway.

By the way, Jeroen; where did you discover the concept of 'salience'? Wherever I read, I find a totally different meaning for the word, which is the one I know: prominence. I would have used the word 'empathy', perhaps? Not correcting you, I'd like to know your reasons/sources.

It's nice to see some familiar faces around. Yup.

I'm Alejandro. I'm a 25 year-old graphic designer, and have been making small games for some time now.

I'm pretty happy about this place existing. I've also felt that it's an uphill battle convincing most people (gamers or not) that video games can be something other than what they are for them. It's not so strange, as people feel the same way when they're confronted with literature that radically escapes what they're used to, or films as well, but both these mediums have a tradition of experimentation and divergence which video games do not. So. I'm here to make way into the unknown.

All my game stuff is in my blog, but some highlights: Viewpoints, The Lake, Heart.