I immensely enjoyed game, game, game and again game on several fronts. On the level as a simple browser flash game, it held the proper components: stages, challenges and goals, both short term and long term. The objective was to move the main character, the black MS Paint fuzzball, from one end of a level to another to reach a square brown door. Part of this journey relied on solving a few puzzles, but each level provided a level of entertainment by providing things to collect along the way.
This was where game, game, game and again game was at its most interesting. In every level, there were certain objects that by touching them, new images or words would appear on the screen. By giving the player the ability to choose whether or not to come in contact with these objects, the game also allowed the players to choose what level of exposure they desired to game, game, game and again game’s texts.
I played the game several times through and each time chose a different style of gameplay. The first time through, I was completely exploratory and tested every object in every level I came across. This strategy yielded both bad and good results, such as the ability to visually identify every “enemy” or hazard in the game, though this ability came at the price of dying basically every time.
On the second and third time through, I tried different approaches. During the second trial, I skipped every bit of information I could and played the hypertext as nothing more than a simple browser flash game, nothing more. With that particular experiment, I found game, game, game and again game still very entertaining, as if the game was founded on the creator’s subconscious and relied on the surreal to create a fun experience.
Finally, during the third trial, I attempted to be picky and choosy in order to unveil the various hidden texts and messages in this hypertext and then attempt to ascertain their meaning. Unfortunately, this proved more frustrating than fulfilling, because it soon became apparent that the texts were not semantically connected to one another at all; rather, it was their lack of logical meaning that made them relatives. But therein lay the message of game, game, game and again game, as outlined in the creator’s “about” section: that many cultural or religious considerations and texts are convoluted, and overall very meaningless when taken out of their context and replaced with new words. In many ways, this reminded me of Lewis Carrol’s Jabberwockey, as well as the hypertext engine we discussed at the beginning of the semester that operated on that concept.