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The finalists for the upcoming IGF 2011 Nuovo awards have been announced, and they run the gamut from interesting, gameplay-driven games to experimental art titles. Much like last year, some of the games are ones that utilize a simple new mechanic in such an artistic way, while others approach gaming from a completely new perspective. Regardless of what kind of game these Nuovo nominees are, however, we can't wait to get our hands on them.

The finalists are: Bohm, a game about controlling the growth of a tree in a zen-like environment; A House in California, an experimental adventure game that uses non-convential actions in a surreal environment; Nidhogg, a 2-player vs game about eviscerating enemies and rushing through the heavily pixelated stages; Dinner Date, a delve into the subconcious of a man being stood up by his date; Loop Raccord, a game where you manipulate clips to create the illusion of movement; The Cat and the Coup, an adventure-like game where you play a cat who reminds his owner of his downfall as the leader of Iran; B.U.T.T.O.N., a party game intended to force players to take wild, ridiculous actions in actual physical space; and Hazard, a puzzle game with philosophical elements and 4-dimensional physics.

WIMP Environment [noun]: Window, Icon, Menu, Pointing device (or Pull-down menu) - A graphical-user-interface environment such as X or the Macintosh interface, esp. as described by a hacker who prefers command-line interfaces.

- The Jargon File

These wonderful, powerful, magic boxes of ours can turn long strings of ones and zeroes into dazzling graphics with breathtaking speed, perform tremendous, complicated mathematical computations in the blink of an eye, and, in a pinch, do a fair impersonation of a space heater. They are ours to command, ready to do our (possibly nefarious) bidding. Whether we know what we want or not, if it's within the operational parameters and capabilities, a PC will do exactly what we tell it to do.

Of course, there's a catch or two. First, we need to know how to tell it to what we want. Heuristics be damned, other than on-the-fly spell-checking, no matter how sophisticated the modern PC is, it's not clairvoyant. Ask anyone who's done time in a call center how much disconnect can exist between what a user wants, and what they say they want. Unlike our not-so-hypothetical phone staffer, the computer can't ask questions or make inferences. They're fabulously literal.

The second catch is having some way to communicate our wants and needs to our willing digital minions. And that's where our input devices come into play.