hi all,

so here is the subset of the list provided that I played (for the record):

• Tic tac toe
• Rock paper scissors
• Chess
• Poker
• Dominoes
• Solitaire
• twenty questions
• Charades
• Memories
• Monopoly
• Clue
• Risk
• Scrabble (I haaaaaaaaaated it)
• Trivial Pursuit
• Little wars
• Warhammer
• Stalingrad
• War in Europe
• Diplomacy
• Battletech
• D&D
• Cthulu
• Vampire: the masquerade
• Gamebooks
• Magic: the Gathering
• Pong
• Breakout
• Asteroids
• Space invaders
• Missile command
• Pac-Man
• Pole Position
• Donkey Kong
• Dragon’s lay
• Virtua racing
• Street Fighter II
• double dragon(not on official list)
• DDR (amazing embodiement of play in a game, so deranging)
• Space War
• Hunt the Wumpus
• Hammurabi (you have 200 acres , 20 people, 12 died and 15 arrived, the arvest represents…)
• Adventure
• Pinball Construction set
• Kings Quest
• Monkey Island
• Sam and Max hit the road
• Myst
• the 7th Guest
• Grim Fandango
• Ultima IV
• Baldur’s Gatre
• Diablo
• Civilization
• Populous
• Dune II
• Heroes of might and magic
• Comand & Conquer
• Starcraft
• Age of empire
• Doom (bersek!)
• Quake
• Half-Life
• Counter strike
• Deus Ex
• Unreal (not on official list)
• Flight simulator (played from version 3 till 7)
• lemmings
• tetris
• SimCity
• The sims
• Modem wars
• A tale in the desert
• Atari football
• Final fantasy
• Super mario brothers
• Legend of Zelda
• Super mario World
• Super Metroid
• Pokemon
• Castelvania Series
• Sonic
• Toekam and earl
• Earthworm Jim
• Megaman
• Metal gear solid
• Final fantasy
• Wipeout XL (where the soundtrack is actually thought as subject and not object of the game)
• Resident Evil
• Gran Turismo
• Grand theft auto
• Halo
• Tamagochi
• Prisonner’s Dilemma

[EDIT: I wrote the following at 1am so please forgive the style and the simplifications, I just had to get it out]

Alright, that was painful to write… so summary: I played 94 out of around 150. So what?
We are not in a debate knowledge/instinct. No thank you. I would rather emphasis the difference electronic game/ Analog game.

In a sense, Andy Warhol was right, he said that pop art wasn’t , that pop art will be. I think video game is pop art. What do I mean?
I mean that pop is about abundance, symbolized in Warhol’s work like “Campbell soup” or his many portrait repetition.

The world before industrialization was about the rules of scarcity, the world after is about the rules of abundance. The art world before Warhol was about the individual and unique act of the artist (Hegelian framework), the art world after is about the collective and multiple (as we interestingly see it happening nowadays).
finally, the world of play before video games is about scarcity of two kinds:

• scarcity of players (you have in general to be more than 1 to play)
• scarcity of interaction (turn based mostly, can’t repeat endlessly the same move or action without pissing of the other player)

With abundance comes repetition as a rule. In the game mechanic it translates into algorithms. Abundance of players, whether human or not, takes us for the first time in history to playing with a machine, instead of using a machine to play.In this way, video games follow the same trend as DIY. In an industrial society, the production of knowledge is very much linear (the whole production is the sum of its parts, produced hardly by people owning the means of production), in the information society, the whole production of knowledge is not the sum of its parts, because recombination, mash-ups, copy and paste and alter make it different, exponential. This very aspect renders it discredited by official, pre-information society institutions and powers.
DIY is not an emergent phenomenon, it is a consequent one, consequence of the end of information scarcity.
Video games are not an emergent phenomenom, they are the consequence of the end of interaction scarcity. And as in DIY, they are disregarded for precisely that reason. Their value is not in a one-in-a-lifetime interaction. Their value comes from what happens in abundance: the flow of information and interaction, the interactive aesthetic if we understand aesthetic as a mechanistic word and not a visual one.
In both cases, it is a radical answer to a technological change in the society that was enforced upon populations without too much choice(damned Mac Luhan).

DIY for that it demystifies technical production, Video games for that they create new metaphors, are a sain act of desobediance in front of the proposed literality of the world: a technical literality.
As a reminder, note that video game’s capacity of making freeing metaphors, the narrativation of the world, comes as a veritable act of existence. And as every act of existence, video game is an art form.
This is why, Frank, video games are SO different from analog games. Video games are to analog games what dancing is to walking, what flying is to dancing.