From an aesthetic perspective, game, game, game and again game is the antithesis of minimalism - its look is cluttered, packed with fragments of often-unrelated text, imagery, and short video clips designed to obscure the game itself. At the same time, its gameplay counterbalances the visual complexity with absolute simplicity. Even beyond the simplistic arrow-keys-and-space-bar control system, the object of each level is the same - maneuver your dot along the path to the door. The entirety of the game's challenge is in seeing your way through the collage of visual and textual detritus. Heavy-handed sermonizing and willfully esoteric poetry aside, game, game, game and again game works as an intriguing demonstration of the versatility of minimalist gameplay - simply by altering the path taken and swapping out the art/text assets, the basic task of guiding a dot to a door can become a comment on drug-induced confusion, a demonstration of the capitalist cycle, or a chronicle of one dot's rise and fall.
Artist: Jason Nelson
Medium: Internet browser game (http://www.secrettechnology.com/gamegame/agame.html)
Year: 2007
Artist Statement:
"My goal was: how can I transform my own crazy writings and ideas into an artwork that the public, your average 18 year old kid, could engage with. And a game format seemed like the most logical idea....Most games have specific goals and consequences, competitions, and scores. But with my work, I might have consequences in the vein of responses to user actions, but I find the notions of competition and score to be largely societal conceptions, false premises for cultural conquest."
Bibliography:
http://jayisgames.com/archives/2007/05/game_game_game_and_again_game.php
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/multimedia/reviews/55649/game-game-game-and-again-game/
http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2007/11/wildness-in-corner-discussion-with.html
http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/litarture/86650/1
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