Games that last for one second, one millenium in Pippin Barr's Durations
Pippin Barr is an expert in crafting oddly insightful, simplistic games, and his latest collection is a testament to this skill. Durations is a group of mini-games, some quick and others that will last long after you're dead, running for hundreds or thousands of years. They have names that range from "One Second Typing Hour" and "One Hour to Write a Novella," to "One Month Maze," One Hundred Years of Solitary" and "One Millenium Avant-Garde Band."
Scroll through a list of the games and click the spacebar to play one here. On his blog, Barr writes about being "on the precipice of a game that will outlive you:"
"One thing about the longer games in the series, specifically '100 Years of Solitary' and 'One Millennium Avant-Garde Band,' is that they will outlast us. That is, when you start the game you're at the beginning of something you can't really figure on seeing the end of – you'll die. So there's a weird kind of 'memento mori' going on in those games that I hadn't really given a lot of thought to at the time. It's funny in particular to me because the games do have specific endings."
Barr created these games in a collaboration with the Marina Abramovic Institute, a crowdfunded, perpetual art space cultivated by artist Marina Abramovic. If you're into the eccentric, or want to be a part of something that will outlast your own life, check out Durations or some of Barr's other strangely engaging games here.
[Image: Pippin Barr]
