User:Lijil/Game and again

Game, Game, Game, and again Game is a digital poem and game by Jason Nelson, first published on the web in 2008. The poem is simultaneously played and read as it takes the form of a quirky, hand-drawn online platform game. It has been translated into French by Amélie Paquet for Revue Blueorange.

Gameplay and reading experience
Although the game uses game mechanics familiar from simple platform games, the hand-drawn graphics and the integration of poetic lines and phrases draw attention to the literary and aesthetic features of the experience. Rather than striving for a high score, the player is "moving, jumping, and falling through an excessive, disjointed, poetic atmosphere".

Game, Game, Game, and again Game has "high interpretive difficulty from a minimal mechanical difficulty", Patrick Jagoda argues. It is not difficult to play the game, he writes: "the game includes relatively few enemies and obstacles, avoids substantial punitive measures for the avatar’s death, and gives the player an unlimited number of lives". However, it is difficult to interpret the meaning of the game while playing it. For instance, the level names are often long and subtitled, but disappear quickly, cheating the reader-player of the "slow reflectiveness that is both possible and encouraged in print-based poetry".

In their introduction to the work for its inclusion in the Electronic Literature Collection Vol. 2, the editors describe set thus: "By usurping the well-known conventions of video game play, in this case, the run-and-leap paradigm familiar since Donkey Kong, Nelson has found a way to lure the user through his many levels of writing, drawings and old home movies with a simple but effective reward, increased survival."