Games that intentionally have no ‘game-play’

[GarryG]

Ok, so normally games with no game-play are rubbish, but what about those things that intentionally break this mould?

I’ve recently been playing ‘Dear Esther’ and I liked it. This also made me break out my old ‘LSD Dream Emulator’ for the PS1.
I also like ‘The Path’ and ‘Fluid’ both of which have also been slated for having ‘no game-play.’

So what do you think of ‘games’ like this?

[speedlolita]

I've only played LSD out of those, but my stance on them is that they're interesting. I mean, they're games so not including gameplay is a bit of a risk really.

Still, rather play LSD than something like Dynasty Warriors..

[killbot]

Fluid was okay until I realised you couldn't actually make any music as such, just create short loops. After that it started to feel a bit limited.

[GarryG]

LSD has that ‘one more go’ addictive quality, but for no fathomable reason because you don’t ‘do’ anything.

I suppose ‘The Path’ is the closest to having a point, albeit a fairly arbitrary one. If you play the game ‘correctly’ you do nothing but walk in a straight line!

[GarryG]

What else have you played that is like this?
I'd like to gather a list of things to have a look at.

I also remember having Lamasoft`s 'Trip-A-Tron' and 'Colourspace,' but I don't have these now
I'd be pushed to call these 'games' though!

[ShadowNeku]

It really depends how you define 'Gameplay'. Its a very ambiguous term. What makes shooting things to progress/survive to be considered gameplay more so than wandering around a forest aimlessly without any goal?

[mainvein]

sim brick on the amiga is a classic example.

i quite like games like electroplankton, something different, a bit more like modern art than a game.

does dead or alive extreme volleyball count as that was made intentionally with no game play

[resident paul]

Laserdisc games have little or no gameplay eg: Dragon's Lair!

[Shinobi]

What about that Tubiular Bells on the Commodore 64.. I remember having some translated Love Hina game on the GBA that had no gameplay

[Sixteen Plus]

Psychedelia - Llamasoft
I played this on both the C64 & C16. It was really just a user-defined lightshow demonstration, nothing more than that. No idea what the yak was smoking then.

Little Computer People - Activision
I had the C64 version of this. I would say that there is no gameplay as such, it's more of a limited SIMS simulation where you type commands to make him do pointless things, no score or missions and not that much to do. Try as you might you can't kill the little guy or his dog through starvation, it just merely makes them a little sick. It's the original SIMS game but with no real gameplay, strangely enough though it had me hooked for a while.

[Antiriad2097]

Laserdisc games have little or no gameplay eg: Dragon's Lair!

That's a matter of opinion.

I'd say they have very fixed gameplay, quite the opposite of what the OP raised. There's no way to play a laserdisc game other than precisely how the designers planned. Its perhaps the least freeform genre of any of them.

[The Beans]

Laserdisc games have little or no gameplay eg: Dragon's Lair!

That's a matter of opinion.

I'd say they have very fixed gameplay, quite the opposite of what the OP raised. There's no way to play a laserdisc game other than precisely how the designers planned. Its perhaps the least freeform genre of any of them.

After giving the XBLA version of Dragon's Lair a spin I totally understand why people would see it as having no gameplay. It really does feel as if you're doing nothing when you play, even though you're dead right about the fixed gameplay. This isn't helped by the fact that the game's one big draw from when it was first released has now been made redundant. The graphics have been totally surpassed. Even the slight novelty of QTE has gone now that games often feature them. The game has probably got a lot of younger gamers wondering why anybody bothered releasing it.