New Rules of Notice

When I first started playing the electronic literary games by Jason Nelson I was somewhat at a loss for the purpose in them. A lot of the text that was written on the screen and the random pop-ups didn’t seem to have a lot of relevance to the game itself and I found myself frustrated at playing a game just to get from point a to point b.

I think part of my frustration grew from the fact that the rules of notice that I had learned from reading the same kind of fiction for so long didn’t seem to apply to these games.When I tried to fit the rules of notice into the game, I wouldn’t get very far by stopping to try and read every single word on the screen and making sense of it. However, when I stopped applying the traditional rules of notice to the game and formulated my own based on repeated trials and errors, I would get much farther in the game. I think in this way, Nelson might be encouraging his audience to make up their own rules of notice as a way of reaching their own interpretation and meaning from all works of literature, not just electronic.

And although I don’t think Nelson wants us to try and make sense out of all of the stimuli that overwhelms us in his games-in I made this. You play this. We are enemies. he actually says “don’t try and ‘get’ it”- I do think he wants us to take notice of what is on the screen as opposed to just trying to get from point a to point b. I think he wants us to give us as much information as possible in order for us to make the most out of getting from start to finish. In fact, I think many of the games won’t allow you to finish, and so if you didn’t experience anything interesting along the way, you are left feeling cheated. In Evidence of Everything Exploding there is a level that doesn’t have any restricted pathways, nor starting and ending points. At this point, the game is testing the player to see if they are invested in the game in an exploratory sense or if they are merely concerned with “winning.” I think Nelson is encouraging his players to be exploratory and open to the experience as opposed to being singularly focused on a teleological goal.