A very nice article reviewing Loop Raccord appeared on Mother Board:

“Animated GIFs are cool to stare at, but what would it be like to play them like game? We’re at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week, and there’s been one little indie title here that’s utterly hypnotized me in its attempt to answer that question. Nicolai Troshinksy’s Loop Raccord, which went up against low-fi fencing simulator Nidhogg for the IGF’s Innovation Award, is an experiment in finding order within the chaos of moving images — essentially, videogames’ answer to Eadweard Muybridge.

While it may have been overshadowed by indie sensation Minecraft at the IGF and Game Developers Choice Awards, Loop Raccord didn’t fail to impress when it was demonstrated at the Experimental Gameplay sessions on Thursday.

There’s no precise English translation for the word ‘Raccord,’ but Troshinsky says it can be described as that feeling of visual closure you get when a film’s editing causes images to transition seamlessly between cuts. The result is a kinetic progression of unrelated imagery that gain cohesion through small and deliberate modifications.

The game pulls random video clips from the Internet Archive and places them side-by-side. By adjusting the speed and loop points of the various clips, players attempt to create a continguous string of moving images. The ultimate goal is to set the timing on each clip so that they appear to flow between one another in one continuous movement.

Videogames borrow from the language of film quite a bit these days. But Troshinsky’s project, much like animated GIFs, seems to hearken back to the most fundamental idea in the history of moving pictures — the illusion of movement created by tactically-placed images. Imagine living in 1st century A.D. China and being able to edit a zoetrope in real time.”

http://www.motherboard.tv/2011/3/4/gdc-11-loop-raccord-is-a-game-about-playing-with-gifs