Smith+MSA

Jason Nelson’s “Game, Game, Game, and Again Game.”

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**Overview/Summary** "Game, Game, Game, and Again Game" utilizes "game" mechanics, similar to platforming video games, in order to take the player/reader into a somewhat confusing experience that combines sound, video and text in order to offer a reading of existence, belief systems, and the paths one goes through in life. All told, GGGAG uses 13 'levels' in order to divulge the tale, with a rather interesting 'ending' in which not much actually happens, perhaps akin to the way that life is less about the ending and more about the journey. The graphics of Nelson's work is confusing and distracting, making it somewhat required to 'play/watch' the piece multiple times in order to ensure everything (or at least, everything one can find), is read and viewed.


 * Textual Features**
 * Text spawns all over the screen, in both the back and foreground, and at times text covers other texts, muddling the display to a point of confusion.
 * The work features no real cohesive text, and instead relies on the player to follow the prompts from point A to B, with the text being secondary to the goal.
 * There is no real music through most of it, but there are indeed some minimal uses of music at certain parts, particularly in some of the stages that appear 'somber.'
 * Media Features**
 * The piece features basic gaming controls--arrow keys move left and right, and the space bar jumps, requiring at times some actual skill in navigation. However, the mouse is also required in order to open video links.
 * The piece is driven only by player action; without moving, the piece will not progress, meaning that the viewer must play along with the text's devices in order to reach the ending.
 * The graphics, as they are, are an interesting blend of animated .gifs overlaying seemingly childlike drawings, with Flash as the 'skeleton' or 'engine' upon which the game works.

Reading GGGAG is not particularly easy. Playing it certainly is, but the piece itself almost defies the viewer's ability to really read anything, as the text begins to cover up other pieces, and some levels feature no actual text, but sometimes just drawn symbols or lines. There are also numerous times in which the stage text plays out in a somewhat non-linear format (Particularly Stage 2 for example,) making it much more difficult to actually "read" the level. Beyond that, there are some interesting problems in "reading" and "playing" at the same time--one's attention is drawn to the mechanics of the game, which makes it hard to read, and if one gets distracted by reading, the game grinds to a halt.
 * Reading Experience**

The confusing elements of the work combine particularly well with the idea of "life" as the main theme of the text. The work gets increasingly confusing and harder to "read" and "play" as it goes on, mimicking the ways in which life itself begins to become harder and more difficult as we age. The work also deals heavily with the problems of belief systems, tackling religion quite early in the text, but also with things such as economic, ecological, and personal difficulties, moving towards the hardest question of all for humans to face: what is death, and what is the "goal" of life? The game ends with a particularly bleak stage that has only one movement--downward--and no goals, just a darkening stage that brings the player to the "ending," in which the player is given two different types, one that reflects back upon the life that was, and one that takes a much more bizarre take on the meaning of life, featuring 5 potatoes. All in all, the work is particularly interesting in the ways that it really denies itself from being a text and a game--the game play is rudimentary and boring, and the text is confusing and hard to read, causing the reader/player/viewer to struggle with the reality of both the text itself, and their will to actually finish it, as the work makes it quite hard to generate interest in doing so.
 * Analysis/Interpretation**


 * Question**: Some of the pieces we've seen so far have "game" elements, but this is the first one that is actually created in a fashion similar to a Flash video game, meaning that it's also the first work that actually IS a video game by definition (a game created on a specific engine/platform, with Flash being one of the most currently popular). However, upon looking at the piece, its quite easy to see that the game is secondary to the text, but the text itself is quite difficult to parse. How, exactly, does this work seek to create some new dialogue between game and text, or is it perhaps trying to do the opposite, and destroy or deny that connection?