My proposal:
“Can You Can Play?” Metaludicity and Surrealist
Hyperattention in Jason Nelson’s Poetry Games
Astrid
Ensslin, University of Alberta
Abstract
Literary
gaming (Ensslin 2014a) happens at the creative interface between hyperattentive
gameplay and deep-attentive close reading (Hayles 2007). Literary game
designers experiment with the question of whether hyper and deep attention are
indeed compatible, and they do so by juxtaposing creatively the readerly and
playerly elements of a text/game. In this sense, literary games evoke a ludic
metazone by foregrounding (poetic) language and other forms of semiotic
expressivity, thus producing a variety of artefacts that inhabit various loci
on the spectrum between ludic digital literature and literary computer game
(Ensslin 2014b).
In this
talk I’m going to focus on the poetry games of American digital poet and
artist, Jason Nelson. In his ludic oeuvre he translates the clash between close
reading and gameplay into an array of diversely surreal gaming interfaces that
literally play with and undermine the rules of game design but also those of
language and other semiotic modes. I will show that underlying his puzzling and
often “annoying” (Alfredsson 2016) interfaces are concise techno-, socio- and
ludocritical messages that emerge procedurally through kinetic, cognitive and
curiously fun-oriented engagement with the ‘codes’ of his works.
References:
Alfredsson,
J. (2016), Personal Correspondence, June 29th, 2016.
Ensslin, A.
(2014a) Literary Gaming. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Ensslin,
Astrid (2014b) ‘”Womping” the Metazone of Festival Dada: Jason Nelson’s Evidence of Everything Exploding’, in
Marcel Cornis-Pope (ed.) New Literary
Hybrids in the Age of Multimedia Expression: Crossing Borders, Crossing Genres,
pp. 221-231. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hayles, N. K. (2007) "Hyper and Deep Attention: The
Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes." Profession 2007: 187-99.