Game, Game, Game, and again Game is a digital poem and 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 quirky, 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 (2009).
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]
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]
^Nelson, Jason (2013). "Jason Nelson". blueOrange: Revue de littérature hypermédiatique (in French). Translated by Amélie Paquet. Retrieved 2022-10-16.
^Jeffries, L.B. (2008-03-11). "game, game, game, and again game, PopMatters". PopMatters. Retrieved 2022-12-27. To date, the game has gotten more than 5 million hits and that number is always rising. It takes about 15 minutes to play through, features great sound effects, quirky easter eggs, and will forever change how you think about video games. It isn't entirely appropriate to call it a video game, it isn't entirely appropriate to not call it one. It doesn't really matter either way. For the creator of game, game, game, and again game, the goal of making a video game was never the idea anyways. Gaming was simply the mode of art that expressed the message most freely.
^Wright, David Thomas Henry (16 June 2020). "Beauty in code – 5 ways digital poetry combines human and computer languages". The Conversation. Retrieved 2022-12-27. The work disrupts commercial video game design with the player not striving for a high score – but instead moving, jumping, and falling through an excessive, disjointed, poetic atmosphere.
^Ensslin, Astrid (2012). "Computer Gaming". In Bray, Joe; Gibbons, Alison; McHale, Brian (eds.). The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature. Routledge. p. 503.
