Causality bludgeons freedom into a pulp and annihilates any semblance of player choice, denying any puzzle experimentation and making for one extremely unappealing game. This online game is part of the Puzzle and Point & Click gaming. Causality 2 is a pretty weird game where you have to make stickmen to die in some normal conditions by choosing some natural causes. Ultimately, mind-game films amplify ontological instability and dismantle both the sovereign subject and its antidote, the divided self of modern subjectivity, in view of accepting more complex but also self-contradictory, more limited but also more extended forms of agency. Causality (Reviewed on Windows) Minor enjoyable interactions, but on the whole is underwhelming. Causality Stickman Isolation is a high quality game that works in all major modern web browsers. Finally, the essay presents twelve key features of mind-game films: (1) multiple universes, (2) multiple temporalities, (3) causality between coincidence and conjunction, (4) feedback: looped and retroactive causalities, (5) mise- en- abyme constructions, (6) the observer as part of the observed, (7) living with contradictions, (8) imaginary resolutions no longer dissolve real contradictions, (9) antagonistic mutuality under conditions of distributed agency, (10) agency – with the self, against the self, (11) time travel films as black boxes and (12) the mind-game film as pharmakon. This essay also updates the analysis given in the 2009 essay, mindful that there have in recent years been a number of popular big-budget films that qualify as mind-game films.

This essay complements my earlier symptomatic, sociological and economic reading of mind-game films (‘The Mind-Game Film’ 2009) with a reassessment of their status as a privileged (though minoritarian) object of study for contemporary cinema from a philosophical perspective. Causality is a puzzle game about manipulating time, changing the sequence of events and altering the outcome of each level.

Causality game