Film, television, and literature all tell them better. So why are games still obsessed with narrative? A longstanding dream: Video games will evolve into interactive stories, like the ones that play out fictionally on the Star Trek Holodeck.

The dating sim has been experiencing something of a reexamining of late, finding itself in the broader public eye as iterations upon its core tenants are warped, distorted, and pushed past their typical use cases.

In 1984, the philosopher Aaron Sloman invited scholars to describe ‘the space of possible minds’. Sloman’s phrase alludes to the fact that human minds, in all their variety, are not the only sorts of minds.

An historic milestone in artificial intelligence set by Alan Turing - the father of modern computer science - has been achieved at an event organised by the University of Reading.

How many researchers does it take to change a test of artificial intelligence? Sixty-five years ago, famed mathematician and WWII code-breaker Alan Turing unveiled the “Imitation Game,” a playful scenario designed to test a computer’s ability to disguise itself as a human agent.

Chess has problems. Not for most of us, perhaps - not for the bluffers and the fudgers and the seat-of-the-pants players who prod a path through matchups in which each side's strategy is a winsome, wobbling comedy of errors. No, chess has problems at the grandmaster level.

In an address to the New York State Chess Association in 1952, Duchamp attempted to define the link between chess and art: "I believe that every chess player experiences a mixture of two aesthetic pleasures: first, the abstract image akin to the poetic idea of writing; secondly, the sensuous pleasure of the ideographic execution of that image on the chessboard. From my close contacts with artists and chess players, I have come to the conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists."

At one level, I am sure that is right. I don't know anyone devoted to chess who is purely motivated by the desire to win; that is, for whom it is simply a mental sport, as everyone outside the game seems to suppose. When we sit down to play our intention is to win; but we also start the game looking at the pieces in their original positions and feeling overcome with a sense of the possibility of creating something beautiful with them. At the end of the game we are almost invariably disappointed. If we lose, of course, that's bad; but also if we win, yet then discover that we missed a more incisive way of concluding the game, we are filled with what I can only describe as a sense of artistic dissatisfaction — that we have made a crude daub on an otherwise harmonious work of art.

In proposing the imitation game as a stand-in for another definition of thought or intelligence, Turing does more than deliver a clever logical flourish that helps him creatively answer a very old question about what makes someone (or something) capable of thought. In fact, he really skirts the question of intelligence entirely, replacing it with the outcomes of thought--in this case, the ability to perform "being human" as convincingly and interestingly as a real human. To be intelligent is to act like a human rather than to have a mind that operates like one. Or, even better, intelligence--whatever it is, the thing that goes on inside a human or a machine--is less interesting and productive a topic of conversation than the effects of such a process, the experience it creates in observers and interlocutors.

This is a kind of pretense most readily found on stage and on screen. An actor's craft is best described in terms of its effect, the way he or she portrays a part, elicits emotion

The "prisoner's dilemma" is a classic psychology game used to study how collaboration evolves in animal societies. Now, a pair of mathematicians have identified a new way of playing the game that allows a player to do significantly better than their opponent. Whereas most winning strategies involve playing nice, the new method relies on playing dirty.

In the prisoner's dilemma, if both players keep quiet, each gets a brief sentence. But if one betrays the other, the snitch gets off scot-free while their partner suffers a long sentence. If both players betray each other, each gets a medium sentence. As a united pair, players do better if they both keep shtum. But crucially, if criminal A thinks B won't blab, it is in A's best interest to snitch, as he will then walk free - at B's expense.

An excellent example of distributed cognition.

The hope that swarms of gamers can help to solve difficult biological problems has been given another boost by a report in the journal PLoS One, showing that data gleaned from the online game Phylo are helping to untangle a major problem in comparative genomics.

The game was created to address the 'multiple sequence alignment (MSA) problem', which refers to the difficulty of aligning roughly similar sequences of DNA in genes common to many species. A DNA sequence that is conserved across species suggests that it plays an important role in the ultimate function of that particular gene.

Although computer algorithms can do very rough alignments of sequences across species, they have proven inept at getting the answer just right. "It is fair to say that present alignments are not just a little bit bad, they are really pretty crude because we have to take a lot of heuristic shortcuts," says Adam Siepel, a computational biologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who was not involved with the study.

That is where human gamers can make a difference. "Understanding when something breaks a general rule is very difficult for a computer but that is what human visual intelligence is very good at," says lead author Jérôme Waldispühl, a computational biologist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

Writing articles about video games is so much fun that we often have to stop, wipe the manic grins off our faces and find something really boring to do. Sometimes we stare at a blank white wall and recite the Declaration of Independence under our breath, other times we watch Lost in Translation. Now we have a new option: We can play The Artist is Present, a game about waiting in line at New York's Museum of Modern Art created by Pippin Barr.

Unfortunately for us, the game's backstory is pretty entertaining. Contemporary artist Marina Abramović held an exhibit in 2010 that had people waiting hours in line for a chance to look into her eyes for as long as they wanted, and Barr used that idea to make a hilariously serious game about the contemporary art experience. In the game, you enter MoMA, buy a ticket and -- surprise -- wait in line to stare into Abramović's eyes.

Games are sneaking into every part of our lives -- at home, school, and work. Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, and even the Army depend on games. and Pretty soon, you'll be a part of one. We guarantee it.

If Schell's vision seems a little, well, out there, consider this: Much of what he discusses already exists, having infiltrated our culture and our business landscape in ways that are barely recognized. Sure, 97% of 12- to 17-year-olds play computer games, but so do almost 70% of the heads of American households, according to the Entertainment Software Association. The average gamer is 34 and has been at it a dozen years; 40% are women. One survey found that 35% of C-suite executives play video games.

In this in-depth analysis, Daniel Johnson discusses games, language and sociology with regard to Valve's Portal - please note that the article contains story spoilers for the game.

In 1959 Erving Goffman released The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life; a book that went on to heavily influence future understanding of social interactions within the sociology discipline. In it, he discusses social intercourse under the metaphor of actors performing on a stage. Specifically, in the second chapter he shares the idea of a front and backstage to social interaction.

As with the theater, we have a place where we manage the performance and a place where we give that performance. As social interlocutors engaged in interaction, we are presenting an impression of ourselves to an audience; we're acting out a role that requires constant management at the whim of the interaction.

The front stage is the grounds of the performance. The backstage is a place we rarely ever want to reveal to others,

There are three rules to The Game:

1. Everyone in the world is playing The Game. (Sometimes narrowed to: "Everybody in the world who knows about The Game is playing The Game",[4] or alternatively, "You are always playing The Game.")
2. Whenever one thinks about The Game, one loses.
3. Losses must be announced to at least one person[6] (either by using a statement such as "I lost The Game" or by alternative means).

A lot of game critics you talk to will tell you that, after making a career of playing games, it takes a lot to impress them. But that's not exactly the truth.

Perhaps I shouldn't speak for them, but I know for me that all it really takes for a game to knock my socks off is that smallest yet boldest of features: A single great, new idea. I'm not talking about squishing together the dual-stick shooting of Geometry Wars and RPG elements and hoping for the best. I'm talking about an innovation that takes a single step back from the whole idea of what video games are and reapproaches it in a way that feels utterly fresh.

Sleep Is Death is just such an idea.

Types of Games: I have come across various attempts to catalogue the possible varieties of stories that exist. The basic assumption being that all plots (narratives?) can be be boiled down to one among only a few types e.g. Hero leaves the kingdom; Hero steals fire, etc. I am looking for a similar classification system for GAMES, that is: how many fundamental types/kinds of game are there? Note: when I say 'game' I mean everything from checkers, through hide n' seek, pool and soccer up to and including Tower Defence, Super Mario or Halo. I know this might be too broad, but I don't want to limit my enquiry at this stage.

I know a bit about game-theory, but what I want is more taxonomical than this. A taxonomy perhaps of possible game structures / directions / goals / rule organisations that can be applied across game types.

Has there been such an attempt at categorising games? Is it even possible, or should I be thinking about the question in an entirely different way?

Thanks in advance

A surreal webgame, littered with explosive potentialities. Help the arrow escape influential pages from historical art movements.