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Edit - I've replaced all instances of the word "Experiential Not-Game" with "Videodream", which is less awful.
When I filled out SoundSelf's Steam Greenlight page, I hesitated over the "genre" section. Given that "psychedelic mindfuck" wasn't on the list, I asked myself - is SoundSelf an Action game? An RPG? A Casual-Horror-Puzzler?
Clearly it's an Adventure title! An adventure into your mind! An adventure of self-love and discovery! An adventure as every breath is itself an adventure! An adventure into something new! Don't you understand?!
Some gamers disagreed with me.
In this series of blog posts, I'll be exploring the characteristics of what I see as an emerging genre in videogames that I'm calling "Experiential Not-Games." "Video-Dreams." As a developer of an Experiential Not-Game a videodream, I'll be exploring the patterns I see emerging in this space, and the ways we're exploring those patterns in SoundSelf.
Some early examples of Experiential Not-Games Videodreams are:
Proteus (available from Steam now) - a walk through a musically responsive island.
PixelJunk 4am (available on the PlayStation Store now) - a house music mixing/sharing experience with PlayStation Move controllers.
Panoramical (Release TBD) - a musical landscape controlled by the dials and faders of a midi controller. It's no coincidence that Panoramical shares a co-creator with Proteus (David Kanaga).
Frequency Domain (Release TBD) - the player flies through the peaks and valleys generated by the game's music's FFT graph.
 SoundSelf (Release TBD) - Our own game, in which a light and sound show dances with the player's sustained voice. Also not yet available (but we'll be at the Indiecade booth at E3, you should comay hi)
The first commonality I see arising in these games is explorative gameplay containing inexhaustible and infinite discovery.
In SoundSelf and Proteus, the player is presented with a complex system that cannot be mastered, but whose exploration reveals a glimpse of new and beautiful possibility beyond every corner. Unable to achieve a position of control, the player is forced to surrender to the infinite beauty, or to rage-quit.
In Proteus, that exploration is of a literal physical space. Your visit to the island is temporary over four seasons, with each season changing the flavor of the entire experience.
The other games I've listed have within their system an exhaustible possibility space that *can* be mastered. Once the system is understood though, the player's exploration turns (infinitely) inward as they use the system for self-expression. These games are sublime in the way that learning a musical instrument is sublime.
In SoundSelf, we're trying to exploit both of these explorative paths by presenting the player with systems that are comprehensible enough to be explored for self expression, while periodically changing the rules of that system so mastery is impossible. This is a delicate balance - as a system that is too obtuse or too transparent quickly loses its magic.
In traditional games (and in life outside gaming) we see this balance played out in multiplayer experiences. Another mind is a complex system that responds to player behaviour unpredictably. That unpredictability contains patterns that can be grokked on a surface level, but the depth to which the player can recognize more and more patterns is infinite, or at least beyond the capacity of an equivalent mind. Furthermore, because another mind has memory, the impact of player behaviour ripples permanently through the system in a manner whose long-term impact goes beyond this moment (e.g. by learning the player's own predictable patterns).
 We're currently exploring methods of making SoundSelf "remember" player behavior, so as to facilitate a sublime relationship like a player may have with another human. We'll go more into detail on the successes and failures of those methods after our next experiments.
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I think this kind of game is due for an explosion if the Oculus Rift gets big.
Re: Dear Esther - what I think is interesting here is that we may be seeing the first strokes of a pattern of abstract dreamlike experiences, and while Dear Esther shares some elements with those experiences (and has certainly opened the door for more experimental pieces), I don't think it fits this particular pattern.
This could go in a couple of ways (or both). One way is to let individual player actions be pretty trivial, and pass without any special results, but to respond to an accumulation of related actions. Getting an achievement for shooting 500 opponents is an example of this, as is being granted special abilities after raising "faction" with some in-game NPC organization. In this mode players usually know exactly what they're doing and what they'll get. And that works for conventional follow-the-rules games.
But wouldn't it be interesting -- especially for an "experiential" game -- not to reveal all the possible player actions that the game can observe and count, or the reactions of the game to certain combinations of accumulated player actions? This might not be a good fit for conventional "you play it to beat it" designs -- surprises can be frustrating. I suspect it might be a very good fit, though, for a game where the pleasure is in the exploration of the gameworld and its internal systems.
The other way of "remembering" player actions is simply to set a flag for specifically detectable individual actions, then test that flag sometime later and trigger a consequence if the flag is set. This approach can be seen in computer roleplaying games. In Bethesda's Fallout 3, for example, the game plays out in slightly different ways depending on whether you choose to detonate the warhead in Megaton. A somewhat more exotic example is the way that your choices for Commander Shepard in the first and second Mass Effect games, as preserved in your final savegame file, are reflected in minor options in the second and third installments if you let them read the previous savegames.
This could also be enhanced. Games could take important choices early on and deliver very different gameplay later on based on those choices. This is rare, but a very good recent example is in The Witcher 2. Your choice for Geralt toward the end of Act One dictates which of the two mutually exclusive Act Twos you get to play. (Not everyone was a fan of the specifics of that, but I think the idea itself was worth trying.)
The important thing about consequences for one-off player choices is that developers almost always want to plant big flashing neon signs around it: "Look! Important Choice Here! This Will Have Consequences!" That's not always a bad thing. In a typically mechanics-driven game where it's considered wrong to ever let the player be confused about anything, signposting an important choice simply meets player expectations.
Not flagging such choices might be OK (at least sometimes) in a more exploratory game, though. Part of the fun of exploration is figuring things out. This is why puzzles are common in games where the developers want to encourage exploratory play. It's also why "adventure game" may indeed have been exactly the right choice to describe the genre of something like SoundSelf -- adventure games encourage exploration by setting puzzles for the player to solve.
So in a game of discovery, maybe discrete player actions that have later consequences (minor or major) don't always have to be signposted. (There does need to be an obvious connection between the choice and the consequence, though. If the game doesn't clearly explain that the consequence flows from a specific action by the player, then it just looks random. In that case there's no value in implementing this feature.)
It's a good idea to be up-front with players that choices they make may sometimes have important effects later on in the game, and they won't always know when they're making such a choice. Developers should be honest about this so that prospective players who absolutely hate not being able to control all outcomes understand that this may not be a game they'll enjoy. If that's done properly, then letting some actions have unexpected (but plausible!) consequences later could be a lot of fun for players who do enjoy interesting surprises.
Overall, I'm very happy to see games like Proteus and SoundSelf being made, and I'm looking forward to seeing how they evolve. Thanks for inspiring a mini-essay. ;)