Jason Nelson, a familair name in this class, produced a pretty hilarious slot death game called This is How You Will Die. According to Nelson, the game takes a pared-down version of a regular online slot machine game’s code and replaces the images with 5 short descriptions that get mixed and matched to tell you how you end up dying. Not being a fan of Nelson’s work in general (I find it to be generally…well, annoying) I actually really enjoyed reading/playing this game.

One of the first things that really tickled me was just loading the game and seeing three boxes, one with your “demise credits,” one to spin the wheel, and the last to “explain death.” Only a html based slot machine game would claim to be able to explain death, though from the content given you’re provided more of an explaination of death being a “final move” rather than what death means. However, even thinking of death as a final move is ironic for this game because as long as you have enough demise credits to continue playing, death is not a final move but a continuous one, made over and over with different results. Perhaps I did not play enough to produce a “winning” result, i.e. a spin that increases your demise credits afterwards instead of simply depleting them, but in order to keep playing after 3 spins I had to keep refreshing the game page. I figured after dying a million spins worth of deaths I would at least vaguley figure out how one would score points (perhaps it was my own bias that I sensed an insinutation in the line “you need at least 10 credits to continue forecasting your death” that gaining credits was even possible), but to no avail. 28 credits, 19 credits, 10 credits, 1 credit; over and over.

Other than the outline of the game, the disjointed, yet syntactically fitting, phrases were good fun. Especially interesting is the fifth and final part of the sequence where you seemingly get a look in the world after your death. While some of these post-death prophecies have only to do with people outside of yourself (the dead one), some (like, “You are glad you are dead” seem to contradict Nelson’s very precise phrasing in the “explain death” section that “your last [motion/move/doorway/etc.] is your death.”