and Stefano Gualeni,[1] Gua-Le-Ni is the first commercially released casual video game that was designed and tuned with the support of biometric experiments.
Mentored by the old taxonomist, the player pursues this purpose by rotating, moving and spinning toy-cubes with pictures of animal parts printed on the six faces of the cubes.
The task that was assigned to the researchers was to determine biometrically the optimal speed of the game for the target audience indicated by the developers as soon as the player successfully completed the first tutorial.
The idea behind this design parameter is that if our fantastic creatures are not properly fed, their actions become more frenzied as they grow hungrier in their search for food.
By means of fantastic beasts of the same combinatorial nature as Hume’s Pegasus, Gua-Le-Ni; or, The Horrendous Parade challenges the players to twist the creative capabilities described in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding on their heads and use them as game mechanics: impossible paper beasts will parade across the screen (the page of a fantastic bestiary) only to be recognized as combinations of parts of existing animals.
In other words, the main game mechanic of Gua-Le-Ni is a playful and interactive material interpretation of the Humean notion of ‘complex ideas’.