#Encarta game mindmaze play online software#
While all these things are variously playful elements of software that people used recreationally on computers (what a mouthful!), they’re not what jumps to mind when people talk about videogames, or even subcultural or independent videogame production. Even the way I played more straightforwardly game-y things was to disassemble them to an extent and play with the parts in a less game-y way, like my liberal use of cheat codes in SimCopter.
Neopets is not only a collection of a variety of flash and html-based games, but an imaginary world you move through, the social systems and economies players participate in, and, on top of all that, the resources the site offered for players to create their own pet pages and adventure stories.
I also touch on MindMaze, a minigame included in the Encarta Encyclopedia CD-ROM sets.
#Encarta game mindmaze play online free#
In my entry I discuss things like the Windows 95 Maze Screensaver, and time-killing games that were bundled with operating systems like Skii Free and Rattler Race. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that, referring back to Nooney’s tweet, that many of the things that people brought up in their entries are in a vague area between videogames and software. I was hoping to get entries which would reflect what was intriguing and enticing to me about using a computer (and playing videogames secondarily) during my childhood which influenced me to study videogames more deeply… if not with the same cultural touchpoints I was hoping to at least get people to think about similarly compelling experiences, for them. I think my wanting to propose this jam topic came from the same sort of malaise at how, on the one hand, we’re constantly told that videogames are a shiny new medium that haven’t been properly historicized and preserved and canonized yet, on the other hand the History of Videogames seems incredibly rigid, the canon very real, and all of it extremely boring and with very little overlap to many people’s own experiences. I don’t disagree here, but the point about “software” is something to pay attention to. This week Laine Nooney tweeted an interesting point about how we frame the ephemerality of videogame history that I’d like to preface my roundup of the entries by addressing: ON TOP OF THAT many pushed the format and scope of their work beyond what I could have imagined! Historical research is, as a concept, pretty intimidating and not something most people think they’re equipped or qualified to do! And finally, there was frankly such a huge amount of attention/entries for Manifesto Jam which I knew was probably not replicable… I kind of dreaded getting no submissions at all.įortunately we got 18 submissions and all of them definitely represent what I was hoping for when I decided to propose this theme. Additionally, I thought the idea for this year was a bit more complicated than previous years, it was less a specific writing format to explore and more a topic, and one that could be interpreted broadly at that, and people seem to enjoy it more when they’re given a task over a topic. Suddenly it was late January and people were asking if I’d do one this year, too. I felt really nervous about doing another game writing jam this year, after the Visual Essay Jam in 2017 and the Manifesto Jam in 2018. Reed - Writing Home > Writing Portfolio > The Writing Jam Rolls On! What we found in the Lost Histories jam
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