the game may well be able to last for 100 years, say, conceptually, but that doesn’t mean that that would be easy to put into practice. Say I run it on my laptop – well what about battery life? System updates? Power outages? Hardware failure? Software failure? The number of things that could disrupt the game before it even came close to ending is large. If you really wanted to see that game through you’d have to take prodigious steps to do so, essentially treating your computer as a kind of archival object immediately and so on. Very strange.
I really enjoyed Barr’s Duration series of games for this reason and others. One of my favourites is about a slot machine, forcing you to wait—if I recall correctly—a decade before it stops. What’s good about this is that the act of waiting is already connected to slot machines. By extending that period of waiting the futility or at least silliness of it is highlighted.
