GENERATIONS

is a cellphone gaming app designed to be played out over many centuries. Unlike a conventional video game, it is impossible to finish a game of Générations in your lifetime. The player decides to whom the game will be passed on to and if one day they want someone to be able to reach the end of the game. This game alludes the notion of digital heritage and the player's capacity to build their performance with long term strategy. Can we pass on a saved digital file in the same manner we pass on a family photo? Can we have fun playing the game with the objective of allowing a distant heir to see the end of the game? Designed on a smartphone, Générations also raises the question of the obsolescence of a particular digital media. Designed to be used with today’s technology, it asks what happens in the future when the digital medium itself may seem unfamiliar. What answers will be used for this problem by the heirs of a game ? Will they choose to export the saved digital file to a new medium? Or will they prefer instead to consider the game and its current hardware as an integral whole, giving it a status of relic? The whole idea of the game is to leave these questions and issues unsolved to allow each participant to work through these issues.

Collaborators: Arthur Schmitt (iPhone case Design)