I’ve written in the past about the perennity of casual games like Bejeweled and BubbleShooter, and their inevitable shift toward mobile.

Then about two weeks, Google featured a Pac-man applet on its home page, which resulted in an estimated $120 million of lost productivity, but gave me a boatload of enjoyment while I was waiting for the rain to stop during a saturday morning in Paris.

These enjoyable diversions follow the common theme typical of successful casual games, i.e. bringing order to chaos in an intuitively simple format that takes merely seconds to learn and provides immediate gratification.

Last night however, I encountered a diverse group of gaming developers that turned this logic of immediate gratification on its head. This group constituted the winners of a speed competition last weekend to develop an « ArtGame » in 54 hours.

Organized by Silicon Sentier, ArtGame Weekend’s objective involved creating a fun, aesthetic, and interative game that also conveyed a message or artistic vision.

The winning ArtGame, Generations, consisted of a game whose premise was to construct digital platforms by way of making a running avatar jump through the air to eat floating stars (think a vastly simplified version of SuperMarioBrothers). The height of the platform constructed correlated to the number of floating stars eaten by the avatar before it fell back to earth.

But the real innovation of the game lied in its built-in freeze-frame mechanism. After a few minutes of playing the game, the action grinded to a halt for an interval of a few seconds, forcing the player to wait until a return to full tempo to continue the construction of its platforms. The genius was that the length of this interval increases expoentially as the game continues. Starting at a length of a few seconds, the subsequent interval lasts over a minute, then several minutes for the next one, followed by an hour-long interval, and so on. In short order, the freeze-frame interval passes from a matter of hours into weeks, then years, and then decades.

In order words, this game cannot be completed in a single lifetime, but rather spans multiple generations !

In this day and age of disposability, instant gratification, and immediate feedback, this game swims against the tide and raises a number of interesting philosophical questions, such as:

• Should I begin playing a game which I know I won’t be able to finish during my lifetime ?
• What can I pass on to my great grandchildren ?
• Or, since somebody else expended such effort, wouldn’t it be nice to continue their work ?