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This post will be straightforward and humorless.  Nelson’s work makes me angry.  But I liked it.  Or I like that I don’t like it.  I didn’t like it because it is art that hates art.  As with Dada, and Warhol.  But it is art all the same.  It makes me think and I find it very funny in places.  It follows the school of Stylistic Suck – intentional or not, it doesn’t matter.  Feel free to argue otherwise.

I liked the marriage of game elements with “poetics.”  The presentation is interestingly disassociated.  Complexities abound.  Physical second-person playing in fields of disconnected prose; cut-up method applied to text, pictures, audio, and gameplay; jokes, observations, and “plots” that are ambiguous by nature of their presentation.

The player, a “you,” navigates through a game world that conflates game elements and text elements.  The player must combine rules of reading with rules of gameplay.  Text becomes enemy, text becomes goal, text becomes game environment.

Combining game and text elements makes for a fractured experience.  You just bought the (a?) farm.  Come on and meet your maker.  The levels shift randomly.  Music is discordant.  Pictures flood the screen.  It’s a stream of consciousness.  It’s fun.  Nelson is having a good time.

The work doesn’t invite interpretation.  It is ambiguous.  At some points less so than at others.  It makes digs at game design with its arbitrary elements, explosions, and expository phrases.  Spoonfed!  Jump here!  You were harmed by a game that harms you.  And as it critiques games it simultaneously challenges culture and literature.  Or pretends to.  Or encourages players to think that it does. Or does nothing at all.  Don’t try to get it.  It’s just good old fashioned fun.

The mixture of gameplay elements and reading elements could be accomplished in print, with cards, board games, print mazes and labyrinths, and so on.  Although the experience would of course be different from the electronic format.  The work is post-print in that it purposely avoids or confronts convention, although its presentation follows an artistic philosophy (Dada) that existed before both the modernist and post-modern movements.

In relation to established genres, the work doesn’t fall into easily defined categories.  But while these categories are not easily defined, they do exist and they are not new – absurdity has and always will exist, although it is often suppressed and derided, and usually very funny.