Games as Diaries or Why Creatures is "Magic"

I just ran across this piece on Unwinnable about the game Creatures, something of akin to an ant farm simulator/behavioral modeling machine. The game has no true goal, but its mechanics are incredibly complex. The purpose of the game was to recreate the phenomenon of life in a basic, algorithmic form such that the beings within could run their course from birth to death, all while allowing the player to influence their actions both directly (by giving them direct orders) and indirectly (by way of providing materials and some pavlovian operant conditioning).

-REVIEW: From Dust- you won't see it coming

From Dust

Developer: Eric Chahi/Ubisoft

Release: $14.99

Why do you always have to treat people like money, sir

super.hype: Sterilized Chaos

Fun is really hard work most of the time. Real Life necessitates it: a night of heavy drinking is always accompanied by a terrible hangover no matter how good of a time you had that night, unless you take the necessary precautions and eat adequate amounts of food and space your drinks out by the hour with glasses of water (but it’s likely that if you had a good time, you were too busy doing that and not drinking glasses of water). Blowing up an old CRT monitor 10 miles from the highway in the middle of Death Valley by stuffing it with 20lbs of Tannerite binary exploding targets and firing a large-caliber rifle at it necessitates being 10 miles away from the highway in the middle of Death Valley to prevent the possibility of stray fragments landing in populated areas or roadways. Having fun, good, explosive, regrettable, coyote ugly-style fun, is annoyingly burdensome.

Not so in videogames.