Game, game, game, and again game

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Description (in English): 

Game, game, game and again game is a digital poem, retro-game, an anti-design statement and a personal exploration of the artist's changing worldview lens. Much of the western world's cultural surroundings, belief systems, and design-scapes, create the built illusion of clean lines and definitive choice, cold narrow pathways of five colors, three body sizes and encapsulated philosophy. Within net/new media art the techno-filter extends these straight lines into exacting geometries and smooth bit rates, the personal as WYSIWYG buttons. This game/artwork, while forever attached to these belief/design systems, attempts to re-introduce the hand-drawn, the messy and illogical, the human and personal creation into the digital, via a retro-game style interface, Hovering above and attached to the poorly drawn aesthetic is a personal examination of how we/I continually switch and un-switch our dominate belief systems. Moving from levels themed for faith or real estate, for chemistry or capitalism, the user triggers corrected poetry, jittering creatures and death and deathless noises. In addition each level contains short videos from the artist's childhood, representing those brief young interactions which spark out eventual beliefs. Game, game, game and again game is less a game about scoring and skill, and more an awkward and disjointed atmospheric, the self built into a jumping, rolling meander of life.

(Source: Author's description from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)

I ♥ E-Poetry entry: 
Technical notes: 

Flash

Critical writing that references this work:

Title Author Year
'Living Letterforms': The Ecological Turn in Contemporary Digital Poetics Rita Raley 2011
A Cultural Analysis of Resistances to Digital Poetries David Devanny 2019
Approaching the Real: Materiality in Digital Literature Yra van Dijk 2013
Basquiat meets Mario Brothers? Digital poet Jason Nelson on the meaning of art games Keith Stuart, Jason Nelson 2011
Beauty in code – 5 ways digital poetry combines human and computer languages David Thomas Henry Wright 2020
Comedies of Separation: Toward a Theory of the Ludic Book Brian Kim Stefans 2011
Conclusion: Whither American Fiction? Jessica Pressman 2012
Digital Poetry Leonardo L. Flores
Disasters Natural and Digital: The Secret Technologies of Jason Nelson Scott Rettberg 2010
Electronic Literature Scott Rettberg 2018
Evaluating Digital Literature: Social Networks, Selection Processes and Criteria Alexandra Saemmer 2012
I Love E-Poetry Leonardo L. Flores 2011
Immanence, Inc.: Algorithm, Flow, and the Displacement of the Real Brian Kim Stefans 2018
Intimate Mechanics: One Model of Electronic Literature Stuart Moulthrop 2016
Jason Nelsons hemmelige teknologi Scott Rettberg 2010
Language as Gameplay: toward a vocabulary for describing works of electronic literature Brian Kim Stefans 2012
Learning to Throw Like Olympia: E-Lit and the Art of Failure Illya Szilak 2014
Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound Lori Emerson 2014
Subversive Writing and the Digital Text Davin Heckman 2011
The Digital Poem against the Interface Free Lori Emerson 2012
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Multimedia: 

Game, Game, and again, Game

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Scott Rettberg