“I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s.
I will not Reason & Compare; my business is to Create.”
- William Blake

Hello there, fellow genties & ladlemen,

I would like to talk aboot games.

In my life, I've found that games are an integral part of my spirituality.  From things like soccer, where I learned aboot things like teamwork and a good offence and defence.  From things like Role-playing Games, where there really is no winning, it is just people using their imagination to play in a shared world.  From things like chess, which is very logical and teaches the importance of "losing" and planning ahead.  From wargames, that sometimes are very complex simulations of things past, like chess supercharged.  From Live Action Role Playing, which is the purest hit I have found of role-playing, immediate and full of jazzy improvisation.  To more abstract things like the rules of everyday life, of conversation, of working, of merely walking across a street.

To computer games.  Computer games can be art (even though famous movie critics might have problems with it).  Computer games can also be spiritual.

I will be showing you some of these games that I consider spiritual.  As always, I invite you here to include some games that you have found to be spiritual/meaningful as well.  I will try to include links to the games and designate them in bold.

Now, my spirituality isn't always aboot DEEP THOUGHTS and MEANING URRRR!  If I had to choose a favourite flash game of all timeh!  I would choose "The Bounce" where you play a giraffe trying to reach the moon.  Everything is perfect, from the animation to the song "Waltz in Blue" by Jean-Jacques Burnel.   The game is totally SFW and quite short too.

Following are a bunch of games from the same designer, a Greek, Jonas Kyratzes, who completely floors me with some of his works.  They tend to be for mature audiences (in themes, none of this explicit gore or porn, but stuff like what is existence? what is ethics? stuff like that).

My favourite of his is The Museum of Broken Memories.   Based on the works of William Blake, you are in a museum and you enter certain paintings and experience the world of the painting, with elements of adventure games (find the objects and solve the puzzles that will get you to other places and then, eventually, out).  I found it haunting, eerie, melancholic, divine, transcendent, and it captured William Blake's works very well.

Another one of his is The Infinite Ocean.  I wont say much, but in it, you are one of the survivors of an Earth-wide catastrophe...and it takes important looks into such things as being, existence, purpose, hubris...it is a flash game now (you can download it as well) and requires patience (but the soundtrack is BEAUTIFUL) -- you have to solve puzzles to get more of the storyline.

His latest one is You Shall Know the Truth. It appears to be an object-hunting game...but everything is self-explanatory and there is more to it than at first seems.  It deals with themes of Empire.  Enjoy the game.  Completely SFW.

Now, a while back, some people actually were able to convince Harlan Ellison (he's one of those writers where, even if you don't recognize his name, you've experienced his works -- one of the best original series Star Trek episodes was scripted by him) to do a computer game based on his I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream story.  It is the tale of the last humans on Earth being tortured by a AM, Allied Mastercomputer (think 'Skynet' but more thoughtful), a G_dlike computer that can pretty much do anything.  So here we have the last survivors, and they each have their own personalities, and we get to see how they act to such a malevolent presence.  In the game, you get to play each character and AM puts you through a scenario to torture them, but what I really enjoyed aboot this game is it is one of the few computer games that I have ever played where how well you do depends on the moral choice one makes.  Do good moral choices, hold on to your humanity, and...:3  Alas, the game isn't made any more.  It seems the mainstream market is so full of endless iterations of How Can I Murder This Person? games...

Thank goodness for the internet, that gives voice to these designers to give us REAL GAMES for us to enjoy, to enrich and to ponder.