Reading about the controversial board game/museum piece "Train" has reignited a old debate within myself: the narralogical game versus the ludological game.
For those not in the know, Train is a game designed about loading passengers onto trains and making sure they reach their destination. Of course, since it's a board game, most of the pieces are fairly abstracted to yellow pegs and some box cars.
When you play it, you find out their destinations are all concentration camps. Thus, you're left to either win by going through with it or simply rage quitting from the actual, physical, game itself.
Obviously, if it gets a full release it'll be an absolute blast to pull out at a party.
Sarcasm aside, I do applaud a designer for taking authorial control to such an extreme. Hell, you can't even play this game without her present.
To a certain extent, her game is what I had proposed months before with having location based "narrative devices" that allow a group of users to generate a story. While her game has certainly stirred up the "artgames" crowd, as insufferable as they are, most gamers have already been complicit in an experience she has proposed for years.
Take, for instance, every single player game released ever. As much as she'll try and push the heavy-handed idea of her games being true personality tests, all games ultimately require you to sacrifice the control of yourself in order to abide by their rules.
Now if she had made a game with the ability to generate win conditions dynamically via an in game mechanic, I might start listening.
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