Part of the price that we all pay for the unprecedented high quality, cheapness, and variety of consumer merchandise in economically privileged countries is a certain loss of intimacy in the process surrounding the exchange of gifts. But artists in a variety of genres have often attempted to design their best works in such a way as to be accessible at its deepest level to a single beloved individual. Evidence of this can be found most easily in literature - hence the often indecipherable dedications that we find on the front pages of books in virtually every genre of fiction and nonfiction, and hence the existence recent works like Martin Amis' Novel The Information and Paul Theeoux's Sir Vidia's Shadow, both of which were at least arguably written primarily for the edification of a single person. The sorts of motives associated with gift-giving in fact arguably extend across a much wider range of works - perhaps to include virtually any type of portraiture, any fictional work containing characters with names drawn from the real world, or anything ever brought into its existence 'for the glory of god.'
The connection between games and gift-giving has been explored in a number of recently popular works of fiction. In David Fincher's brilliantly crafted 1997 film "The Game" a corporate magnate's younger brother enrolls his sibling in a terrifying, morally ambiguous game that bleeds over into real life, all as part of an apparently innocuous birthday present. In Neal Stephenson's award-winning science fiction novel "The Diamond Age" a gifted computer programmer gives his daughter a mysterious book that changes while she reads, and educates her in a way that no normal book or father ever could. And Laura M. Knauth's brilliant, enchanting INFORM work "Winter Wonderland," which recently won the 1999 Annual Interactive Fiction competition, is a sort of sustained reflection on the art of gift-giving, as well as itself being something that was thought up by the author (as she explains in her notes to the game) as a sort of paradoxical gift to an earlier version of her self.
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