gamestate » Koster http://www.gamestate.org All games are serious games, but some games are more serious than others. Wed, 07 Sep 2011 17:20:20 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Tetris and Torture http://www.gamestate.org/2009/02/tetris-and-torture/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=tetris-and-torture http://www.gamestate.org/2009/02/tetris-and-torture/#comments Fri, 20 Feb 2009 02:46:23 +0000 Garrison http://www.gamestate.org/?p=560 Raph Koster revisits his book on A Theory of Fun as he points to Loodo’s Calabouço Tétrico, a highly-polished, deeply disturbing Flash-based Tetris variant that replaces colored blocks with human beings in different states of distress.  Speaking of it on his website, Ian Bogost points back to his text, Persuasive Games (wherein he rejects as inferior those games whose mechanic is not “tightly coupled” to its narrative) (see also this post).

In short, Calabouço Tétrico demonstrates how narrative can overdetermine the mechanics of gameplay — no matter how familiar those mechanics may be:  As Tetris becomes a dark exercise in body stacking, the pleasure of closure that should come with every completed row quickly dissipates.

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