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Game, game, game and again game

Digital poem and art video game From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Game, Game, Game, and again Game is a digital poem and art video game by Jason Nelson, published on the web in 2007.[1][2] The poem is simultaneously played and read as it takes the form of a hand-drawn online platform game. It was translated into French by Amélie Paquet for Revue Blueorange in 2010.[3] Its sequel is I made this. You play this. We are Enemies, released in 2009.

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Gameplay and reading experience

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Although the game uses game mechanics familiar from simple platform games,[4] the hand-drawn graphics and the integration of poetic lines and phrases draw attention to the literary and aesthetic features of the experience. Rather than striving for a high score, the player is "moving, jumping, and falling through an excessive, disjointed, poetic atmosphere".[5]

Game, Game, Game, and again Game has "high interpretive difficulty from a minimal mechanical difficulty", Patrick Jagoda argues.[6] It is not difficult to play the game, he writes: "the game includes relatively few enemies and obstacles, avoids substantial punitive measures for the avatar's death, and gives the player an unlimited number of lives".[6] However, it is difficult to interpret the meaning of the game while playing it. For instance, the level names are often long and subtitled, but disappear quickly, cheating the reader-player of the "slow reflectiveness that is both possible and encouraged in print-based poetry".[6]

With its inclusion in the Electronic Literature Collection Vol. 2, the editors introduce the work with this: "By usurping the well-known conventions of video game play, in this case, the run-and-leap paradigm familiar since Donkey Kong, Nelson has found a way to lure the user through his many levels of writing, drawings and old home movies with a simple but effective reward, increased survival."[7]

The gameplay has been documented in video recordings by archivists[8] and Let's Play videos.[9]

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Reception

The game has been taught at several universities such as Davidson College, Yale University, and UCLA.[10][11][12] Nelson himself describes his surprise at the online attention the game received when reviewed on game sites: "Here was an artwork, considered experimental in the fields of electronic art and writing (a digital poem and art-game for crusty crunk's sake), and it was being discussed, shared, blasted and praised as a game".[13] L.B. Jeffries writes that it will "forever change how you think about video games."[14]

David Thomas Henry Wright notes that "disrupts commercial video game design".[15] However, Maria Engberg and Jay David Bolter argue that the game "nevertheless strikes the player/reader as playful, rather than menacing or laden with corporate critique".[16] Astrid Ensslin describes it as "primarily playable rather than readable".[17]

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References

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