If we look at Jason Nelson’s “game, game, game, and again game,” this is made of the independent game-poem having its own entity and the additional google comments on the piece. And yet, since participants receive instructions about the movements throughout the game as the performative nature of the poem is essential, their later comments reveal the ways they experienced the game-poem in its full form: structure, procedure, images, music, and, accordingly, their remarks might become part of the poem itself. As Johanna Drucker acknowledges in Figuring the Word, “the ‘text’ of such books [with textual, visual, and tactile components] cannot be conceived of as delimited by linguistic content, literary substance; . . . Instead, the full interrelation of these elements in the production of a single textual system, a single articulate discourse, must be taken into account” (210).
]]> “car save us,
car destroy us”
(“Automotive afterlife Cars for the End and Highrises)
I have used as starting point some of the last lines of the game-poem as I considered them relevant for the intended message of the poem as a whole, and here I would like to point out the selection of the antonym verbs “save” and “destroy,” which can also be perceived as representative for themes such as“life” and “death” or, in a game environment, for “winning” or “losing.”
The title itself “game, game, game and again game” reveals the poem’s interactive nature and translates the poet’s desire to engage the reader in “the game of desciphering” the mechanism according to which it operates. Furthermore, this game structure of the poem organized by levels of challenges together with the last words of the game “so we know these are not fears—but rather open things”indirectly recall Umberto Eco’s concept of “open work,” or of “work in movement,” a work, which because of its very nature as it is actually a game, requires action on the part of the participant whose task is to follow the instructions and discover the used pattern at each level in part. In “game, game, game and again game” perceptions such as how the game’s algorithm functions enable the partaker to foresee how the poem progresses.
Structurally speaking, the second level of the poem is wonderful both in terms of imagery and musicality.The line “Oxygen is regional”placed at the bottom of the image sends back to the title and the message of hymn “three hundred and one: renting outer space oxygen” from Nelson’s previous “Hymns of the Drowning Swimmer.” As regards the navigation through the third level there is a feeling of imprisonment, of being caught in your own attempt to move on with the same easiness as previously, and this happens for two reasons. First, there is a precise connection between the actual difficult movement and the warning that is given as the text itself says, “walls hide the frameless, . . . they open windows to brick and still” and second, the overlapped images with the apartments leave no room to breath and even make life impossible. A similar theme gets reiterated at the eigth level, where once the second step is left behind, you are told that “you will never reach anything” simply because “beyond this, there is no evidence that the world is linear.” In contrast with the lack of a potential linearity there is the tenth level of the game-poem called “Some confusing type of hell.” This time, the screen is loaded with black, dense threads and the movement is done with slowness.
There is an implied sense of velocity imposed from the very beginning in the sense that the titles of each level of the game ( “obessively charmed by the sun,” “the faithful,” etc.) remain on the screen just several seconds giving a feeling of spontaneity just like the message of the game-poem says: “move around and think.” In this respect, the game structure of the poem tends to priviledge the active movement over the pasive reflection over its meaning(s). At the end of the poem what matters is simply the event in which one is taking part.
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