C’mon and Meet Your Maker…
Coolest flash game I’ve played in a long time… and poetic!
game, game, game and again game by Jason Nelson
Game Design Advance
Home of New York's Intellivisiongentsia
Home of New York's Intellivisiongentsia
Coolest flash game I’ve played in a long time… and poetic!
game, game, game and again game by Jason Nelson
I’m curious…..I create odd digital poems and net artworks, but my most recent wired creature, game, game, game and again game, has gone somewhat viral over the past weeks. More than any other work of mine.
Is it the game interface that pulls people in? The game play is terribly basic and the content rather abstract and nuts. But people seem to flock to this artwork.
Noticed the hits coming from your blog and was curious
about your thoughts, certainly seeing as though your are
from the aca-complex.
cheers, Jason Nelson
My thoughts are this: so much of the flash gaming b.s. we see out there right now is clean but cute, boring, and without a message. Your game has hit a nerve, which is odd considering your game mechanics are awful by traditional standards… but what you’ve got is something fresh that meets a certain craving online gamers have. I love the look and messy feel (including the sounds), the video is both cool and different, and the messages presented through your text are refreshing because it’s finally a game trying to articulate something. Well done. What are you going to do for your encore?
ps: I showed it to a game designer I work with and his response was “whoa, it’s like Fear and Loathing in my internet browser.” That’s a compliment.
What it succeeds in doing, and what I think makes it so attractive to so many, is that it’s an artistic work that relies on a vocabulary of basic video game tropes (moving, jumping, warping, enemies, secrets). Beyond this though, it maintains itself as a game, making it a deconstruction of the tropes it uses that still works within the medium. This puts it a notch above the works of people like Cory Arcangel, or Jodi, who use video games and comment on them, but in doing so break the very things that make them games in the first place. This is the reason that I, and so many others, find your game very refreshing.