Riven


Riven, and its more famous predecessor Myst, are first-person exploration games where the player slowly pieces together the mysterious story of the abandoned, symbol-laden landscape in which they find themselves. Both are important historical works in building a bridge between videogames to the arts even though it enshrined in geek canon. There are a number of reasons that it stands apartment from the Marios, Zeldas, and the link which also occupy the heights of fan adoration. Indeed, one of the reasons that this game is of great importance is social—the team responsible for creating the work had a vast vision of the potential of videogames to engage with a broad cultural audience. To the creators, this especially meant developing methods of physical interactions with videogames that weren’t reliant on hand-eye coordination, as well as an artistic model that presumed a great degree of agency and intellectual autonomy to parse these swaths of digitally imagined myth and history like a modernist literary work. The second major point of interest: these games are essentially long exquisitely beautiful explorations of how we as players use the many facets of our perception to assemble meaning from the shifting multiplicity of perspective in interactive computer-rendered created spaces, places, and objects. In this manner, there are clear linkages between Riven and many contemporary arts practices, such as earthworks, installation, site-specific sculpture, and the current rise of interactive multimedia works.  

Creators: Robyn Miller, Rand Miller, Richard Vander Wende

Link: https://cyan.com/games/riven/

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