Is This a Game?

December 16, 2019 11:25 PM

Is This a Game? was an unusual gaming exhibition that just wrapped up in Japan. It contained games and game-like experiences from a variety of designers, ranging from a fairly conventional party game, to a secret video, to experiences that take a year or longer, to a massive team-based tactical extravaganza. The question "What is a game, really?" was a central theme of the exhibition.

Among the exhibitors were:
Oink Games of A Fake Artist Goes to New York fame
Itten Games, best known for Tokyo Highway
America's Jordan Draper, designer of Import/Export
Kazunari Yonemitsu, creator of the Puyo Puyo video game series

posted by CrunchyFrog (5 comments total)

That is so cool. I love seeing things like games and game play inside of art. It allows people to interact with art in a way that purely visual/auditory experiences can sometimes lack.
posted by xingcat at 7:29 AM on December 17, 2019 [1 favorite]

That sounds like a great exhibition. I especially love these two:

Surume Days featured 2 really interesting exhibitions, the first one is called the 1 Year Game. This is a game where players create a scoring rule and seal it into a tiny numbered box which will be anonymously exchanged with another player. All players play the game throughout the course of 1 year. After 1 year, players meet at a party and tally the points scored.

The 2nd exhibition is similar but is called Post Life Game and is definitely one of the most intriguing entries on this list. The game only begins when an owner of the game passes away. Prior to that, the owner designates 21 players to play for 1 year, each player playing under a specific and unique rule set defined by the deceased.

PS: For anyone who missed it, there was another great post recently about a game-centric museum exhibition.
posted by yankeefog at 8:53 AM on December 17, 2019 [1 favorite]

Very cool. Though, I think they might have missed an opportunity to name it "You think this is a fucking game?" (link to DMX video).
posted by mhum at 12:16 PM on December 17, 2019

This is awesome. There's such a great sense of playfulness and inventiveness to the exhibits, and it sounds like a blast to go to.
posted by storytam at 1:51 PM on December 17, 2019

Metafilter: is this a game?
posted by Jacen at 8:09 PM on December 17, 2019