Analysis: Every Day's Not The Same 'Art Game'

Gamasutra news director Leigh Alexander looks at Molleindustria's Every Day The Same Dream and how it is -- and isn't -- like other "art games", to great success on all fronts.

The debate over games as art is long since settled, but it’s interesting to revisit - a lot of quality analysis came out of discussion of the successes and failures of so-called “art games”. Here, Leigh Alexander takes a look at the briefly-influential Every Day The Same Dream and how it serves to illustrate that what makes games art is not what they say but how they say it, using interactivity to provide experiences impossible in other media.

The writeup also contains a bonus link to a contemporaneous article by Emily Short discussing two other “art games” of the time, Home and The Graveyard.

Bandersnatch (Netflix)

If you work in interactive narrative at all, there was a period recently where you could not go anywhere without people asking your opinion of Bandersnatch, Netflix’s branching-narrative epis…

Distinguished elder of interactive fiction Emily Short shares her take on Bandersnatch, Netflix’s interactive episode of Black Mirror. It includes a sort of a roundup of takes in which she mentions concerns and links to other essays that go more in-depth on those specific angles. To me, the most interesting aspect (due mainly to not having occurred to me) is that the thematic flaws are typical of creator’s first works of interactive fiction.