LSD Dream Emulator

[black snoopy]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSD_(video_game)

I feel like, in some respects, this might be the granddaddy of notgames. It plays like any number of early 3d games for the PSX or otherwise, but all you do is effectively walk around and explore and examine the changing scenery. Touching walls/objects will usually warp you somewhere else, and if you jump into a chasm you'll wake up. And sometimes your nightly dream is replaced with a completely unrelated video clip. And there's certain events that can happen which affect the dreams.

... it's hard to adequately describe the experience.

I'd love to see a modern remake of this, given all that can be done nowadays with modern graphics cards and procedural generation and the like. But at the same time, I think the primitive PSX graphics really drive home the fragile and dream/hallucination-like feel.

[Michaël Samyn]

I never really got into this game. I never got into LSD or any other drugs either. So maybe that's why.

My granddaddy of Notgames, in the sense of "great, inspiring example", is Alex Mayhew's Ceremony of Innocence. Not because it doesn't use game elements, but because it is a moving experience about something. Avoiding rigid game structures is just a means to an end to me, not a goal.

[black snoopy]

I was never one to hallucinate either (unless you count being intensely sick and full of Nyquil), but I found it to be oddly relaxing to play. Not often, mind you ... but kind of an Animal Crossing thing where you spend fifteen or twenty minutes with it to relax before bed/after work/etc.

[Michaël Samyn]

I somehow never managed to spend 15 minutes with Animal Crossing. Every time I played I was stuck in there for hours!   

[shredingskin]

I tried this game a couple of years ago, I think that all the "levels" were based in your choice of what you "bump", they divided the game in 4 moods and the places were generated from there. Never found something compelling about it, it made me more nervous than relaxed.

Mike Oldfield (the musician of tubular bells) had a couple of games similar (they didn't generate the levels, but also is based on exploring and dreamy landscapes.

I was hoping bill viola's game to come out, seems like it got canned, looks like it was going to be something like these games.

[God at play]

I was hoping bill viola's game to come out, seems like it got canned, looks like it was going to be something like these games.

Whaaaaaat?! Are you serious? When is the visitation service? 

[Bruno de Figueiredo]

I once asked Tracy Fullerton about LSD and she acknowledged it as being of some influence to The Night Journey. Also, the project didn't get canned at all: Viola simply decided not to release it to the public, unfortunately. It was available to play in several art exhibitions - one of which in New York, just last year - side by side with his video art displays.

As for LSD, it's one of the most significant non-videogames ever made - in some regards, an anti-game. The problem is that it is always referenced/played out of context which is rather unfair, since it is part of a greater work of postmodern art including ten years of research, the publication of an art book and a music album. Of course, we look at these stills nowadays and chuckle at how maladroit it all seems compared to what has been done recently.

It wasn't created to please or to be enjoyed. In fact it was made, on purpose, to be an excruciating and outlandish experience which is extremely difficult to interpret - mainly to a westerner. Osamu Sato, the author, is quite an authority on Japanese abstract art and has several publications on the topic of Eastern Religion - see his other work entitled Eastern Mind and its sequel Chuuten.

Doesn't mean we have to like it: just as long as we respect it as a pioneering experience coming from a visionary who shared many of the concerns expressed in this forum as early as fifteen years ago.