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.

Let's revisit Final Fantasy X! Anyone?

Games remember who we were when we played them. Leigh Alexander revisits Final Fantasy X -- and puzzles over the lost heyday of big Japanese roleplaying games.

The same game can affect players wildly differently depending where they are in their own life when they play it. For all its flaws, and whether or not you think it holds up today, Final Fantasy X matters a lot to people like me who played it and loved it in our late adolescence. In this wonderful, personal, heartbreaking piece, Leigh Alexander explains why.