Anima Mundi: Dark Alchemist (Hirameki International Group Inc. 2006) is a Japanese gothic horror game targeted to girls, or to be more exact, interactive visual novel giving a player change to influence how the events progress. It is very similar to Fighting Fantasy game books published in 80′s. In the beginning choices offered to a player are very scarce: Later on there are more choices after Georik (the player character or protagonist) is introduced to alchemy–the forbidden art: to search material, do research, buy materials, or to go to library. How the game progress is determined by the choices the player makes (including how alchemy research progress). Anima Mundi is like puzzle where one tries to find right combination of choices that lead to a good ending.

Anima Mundi is charming and engaging game–despite that you need to be ready to sit back and watch how situation evolve after making choices. Minuses are also that some twists are quite predictable and there are some inconsistencies.

I also bought Chain: The Lost Footprints (ZyX Inc., 2003). It is a hard-boiled suspense dating sim game, where a player takes a role of private detective who has been hired to investigate extramarital affairs. I need to find time to play it…

Novitz, David (1996). Disputes about art. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Critisim, 54(2).

• Novitz investigaes relationship between table-top role-playing games and art.

Punday, Daniel (2005). Creative accounting: Role-playing games, possible-world theory, and the agency of imagination. Poetics Today, 26(1).

Tavinor, Grant (2005). Videogames and interactive fiction. Philosophy and Literature, 29: 24-40.

• Game objects are used to build link with theories of fiction and games. Punday uses Pavel’s Fictional worlds (1986). Tavinor builds on Walton’s Mimesis as make-believe and Currie’s The nature of fiction (1990).

Smuts, Aaron (2005). Are Videogames Art? Contemporary Aesthetics, 3.

(Quotations are from Smuts’ paper.)

Smuths argues that many contemporary computer games should be consider as art based on varius definitions of art. He uses Max Payne (Remedy Entertainment, 2001), Halo (Bungie, 2001), and Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell (Ubisoft, 2002) as examples.

I do not claim that any of these games are great art, but they are all adept at achieving the goals they set for themselves, goals of provoking specific emotions that are typical of similar genres in other art forms.

Smuts makes interesting point about rules: Computer games lacks them. He compares computer game system to natural laws; games system offers physical limitations comparable to e.g., gravity. “We would not say that the law of gravity is a rule governing our behavior.”

(All quotations are from Aarseth’s paper.)
Aarseth discusses about what is real, fiction, and virtual (in games). He adopts Philip K. Dick’s definition of real: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing it, doesn’t go away” (A). Aarseth goes on to discuss fictionality; he defines fiction as “invented phenomena” (B) based on definition from Encarta. Aarseth goes on further and argues that things that are manipulable, like doors that can be opened, are virtual but objects not manipulable like texture of doors (that cannot be used) are fictional. Thus there are both fictional and non-fictional things in games and “the non-fictional doors are virtual, a mode of existence that is neither fictional nor real.”

Albeit, virtual objects and textures of objects are both real based on definition A, aren’t they? They can also be fictional or not based on definition B. Thus the categories offered seems not to be working like described in the paper–at least if one uses definitions offered.

Relation between real, fictional, documentary, non-fiction and documentary is not simple as seen in works of for example Currie in Image and Mind (1995, pp. 9–16) and Walton in Mimesis as Make-Believe (1990, pp. 70–105).

Aarseth, Espen (2005). The Perception of Doors: Fiction vs Simulation in Games. In Proceedings of the 6th DAC Conference. Copenhagen (December 1st–3rd), 59–62.