Evidence of Everything Exploding

The third part of Jason Nelson's artgame trilogy.

Video games are a language, a grammar or linguistics of various texts. The sounds, the movement, the graphics, the rules or lack of rules, everything about a video game is a component of language.  A digital poetry game must combine all these elements, strange and interactive stanzas, crossed out and obstructed lines, sounds and texts triggered and lost during the play.  Indeed the game interface becomes a road to inhabiting the digital poem, to coaxing the reader/player into living and creating within the game/poetry space.

Using a top down, platform engine (without gravity) Evidence of Everything Exploding is a game driven digital poem exploring various historical and contemporary texts. Each level’s poetic content is built from the document’s sub-sub texts and curious consequences. With Bill Gates’ letter to the Computer Brew Club about monetizing hobby computing, we find the seeds of an empire, James Joyce is caught in an infinite loop of changing texts, Fidel Castro’s boyhood letter to the US president praising America and asking for money signals an opportunistic future.

 With ten levels, each with video poem prizes, and strange poetic narratives, this game is a sequel to “game, game, game and again game” and “I made this. You play this. We are enemies”.