This is How You Will Die by Jason Nelson. Once again I partook in a Jason Nelson experience, and it was absurd, and refreshingly disorienting. The way it works in one sentence is you press a button on the right labeled “Death Spin” which throws the digital slot machine into motion, which shortly weaves together a 5 part narrative of your death  including post death happenings, as well as specific and absurd death realities and you can only find the right one if you satisfy the game’s criteria that is, you must have fewer than 10 death credits to stop. I stopped with 2 death credits and therefore could not continue to “forecast my death.” I was left with an interesting post death detail: “And sperm you donated in college accidentally impregnates a tornado victim.” Even though the author is now dead, (brutally murdered by Engl376/508  a few classes ago), I can’t help but wonder about Jason Nelson’s intentions for this piece of new media art. He seems to have an attraction to the absurd in his work, and I think that dark humor is also a component as well; I feel like he wants me to bask in the rays of confusion that the death machine generates. However, thinking of Nelson as the author allows me to make more sense of the piece; it lets me place the work in a grounded time. Therefore, maybe I should not be thinking of him at all, and truly embrace the full reduction to absurdity by participating in the slot death free of authorship; as a separate entity of the internet world capable of transporting me to a place where I can ponder paradox and existential questions. I thought about making a narrative map of the many possible death sequences, but then also questioned its effectiveness: is slot death meant to be unraveled? I don’t understand the death videos, but, they are a nice bonus to getting me to that special place.

Well, I made it to the end of the game, game, game, and again game, and, being the greedy bastard that I am, took both the winnings for MYSELF!!!! I won’t spoil the reward for you all so I will keep my little mouth shut. Let me just stay, that it was the most beautifully dysfunctional game that I have ever played. Everything in it was confusing and left me asking questions. Why am I a little fuzz ball? What is this poem that appears when I collect the various tokens in each level? What are these creepy yet intriguing/nostalgic home videos that I unlock in each level? The home videos are on loop and play over and over, I try to gather meaning from them. But I can’t; instead, I just give into the experience and travel through the game to the end, where I greedily take both winnings that the game offers me: big winnings, and small winnings.

The game seems to acting in the way of absurdity. Even though there is all this odd shit making my head hurt, I still can see a sense of narrative or progress: it’s murky, but it’s there. It’s there as I move through the game, through each of the 13 levels. The game combines poetry with video and interactive game play and weird sounds. My god, every time I press the space bar while writing this the little fuzz ball guy jumps because the game is still on in another tab and the sound is like a frog being splattered under a slow moving tractor.

I know that the poetry and the videos have context, but I have none to place them specific to them, I have only my own sense of context in which to place them. They  are here in the game for me to not understand, but to experience. The final video that I receive at the end from the big winnings option begs me to realize that there is no meaning in this  piece of new media, it’s just an experience immersed in ambivalent feeling and emotion connected with the dysfunctional. But then, the narrative at the end makes me compare it to the story of the game. Are they one in the same? I try to attach meaning to the story because that’s what we humans do. Beneath the frozen pudding. I don’t know if the story of life is hiding under the frozen pudding, but I am glad to have thought so. Jason Nelsons creation of new media was both awesome to experience and absurd.