I think Nelson is a pretty weird guy. Out of the four games I played ‘I made this. You play this. We are enemies’ the most extensively. I found the experience a little bit depressing and fruitless. I know that the purpose of Nelson’s game was for it to act as a piece of media-art, so I tried to appreciate it in that way- but I found the experience not enjoyable. Nelson stated that the game includes “scribbles and ideas from the back of my brain, way-way back in the storage room for contextual whims.”

I guess that was Nelson’s point though – one of them at least. The very title of the game suggests that there will be conflict between the player of the game and the developer of the game. After I played through the first time and went back to the home screen I noticed a button in the upper left corner labeled “game?” I placed my cursor over the button and a kind of artist statement dropped down. It included the following: “There is a conflict, an Appalachian-style battle between the game-maker and the player, the artist and those wanky enough to like art, the poet and those who sing-song themselves through bittery selfish sexual what-nots.” So that much is clear- Nelson purposefully made this game frustrating.

I understand this whole idea- Nelson wants to explore the relationship between the developer and the player. However, this annoys me. Nelson wants us to explore his ideas, his poetry, the imagery he created in the game- and then he makes the player struggle for it? He purposefully makes the experience frustrating? How conceited is that? Why does he think he is so special that would make anyone want to struggle to understand the inner workings of his brain?

Oh, I’m sorry. We aren’t supposed to understand. As Nelson says, “figuring out is for control centered hedonists and sharks with bees for hair, such fast stinging chomping machines.” So, how am I supposed to take anything from this game? Nelson’s game is clearly trying to be an art piece, and using Professor Sample’s suggestion for a definition of art – something that changes/affects you in some way that you have not experienced before – how can this game succeed?

Let me get this straight. Play the game. Struggle against the developer to get some sort of meaning out of the experience. Don’t try and understand the meaning. Sweet game.

I found this set of readings/videos/games to be extremely interesting. I thought the games were fun, and I had an especially enjoyable time playing Aisle. I found that this might be the kind of game Montfort talks about when he says that one should pause and think before labeling interactive fiction as a game. Aisle seemed to fit better into the ‘work’ category Montfort describes it rather than a game. What I assumed to be the point of the interface was to gain an understanding of the back-stories of each of the different characters you become in Aisle. I do not think the author had a particular end in mind. Montfort even says, “It would be bizarre for an interactor to claim to have won [Aisle]. Aisle reminded be a little bit of Storyteller, a game we played earlier in the semester. The point of storyteller was just to move things around in order to see different endings to the story. I think that is exactly what Aisle was trying to do.

I felt the same way after working with both ‘Storyteller’ and ‘Aisle’ – both amused but unfulfilled at the end of my session. I suppose I did feel productive, uncovering more and more endings, but in the end that was meaningless, because there was no way to tell if I had found them all (In Storyteller, the possibilities were so few this was possible, but not so in Aisle). It is impossible to even manifest my own ‘end’ or my own idea of ‘winning’ to the game. This was incredible frustrating, so much so that I could not rest until I had searched the Internet to find alternate endings that I might not have thought of. Even worse, I could not find an official walkthrough or list of possible endings. All I found was an ongoing list of endings with an invitation to add your own if one was missed.

So, I suppose I will reevaluate my claim that the point of Aisle was to uncover the different possible back-stories for your character. Perhaps this is the point of the game, although it seems debatable, because there is no way to tell whether you have discovered all the available pieces of information from the IF. If it is not the point, than I am at a loss.

On a side note, I love the idea of Interactive Fiction. A person’s game experience can be completely different from interactor to interactor – depending on how they visualize their atmosphere. Although the author seems to paint a picture of one’s surrounding, much is still left to the imagination, making a lighthearted and goofy game to one person a dark and gloomy game to another. It’s genius how these game developer’s can utilize aspects from outside the game to affect the game experience. This also makes me wonder where that type of action would be categorized in Galloway’s four different types of gameplay….

I found Montfort’s 5 level method of video game analysis to be very appropriate for the study of videogames. I think this method of analysis really gives us our first look into the debate over whether videogames are art or are something entirely different that stand alone and deserve a different kind of analysis. Montfort clearly believes that videogames deserve a separate technique for analysis of videogames since he outlined his personal method at the beginning of the article. I found it interesting, however, that in the reception and operation portion of the article, Montfort examines Combat similarly to how one would examine a piece of literature or a piece of art, identifying the theme of violence throughout the game, and explaining how the social contexts of the era influence this theme and the way in which it is presented. Even the questions Montfort attempts to answer in this section seem like questions an art critic would ask of a painting: “Is Combat narrative or dramatic? What story does Combat tell?”

Montfort does not claim that we should not analyze videogames as art or literature, however. He says that this is only one step in videogame analysis. To stop at this step would severely limit the amount of understanding we can gain from videogames. Further analysis of the interface, gameplay, game-code, etc. is required, as Montfort suggests. After reading this article, it seems Montfort sits somewhere in the middle of the argument over videogame analysis, and I have to say I sitting right next to him.