Critical Play and Alchemical Aesthetics in Jason Nelson’s Poem-Games

In this well-played presentation, I will comment on a playthrough of Jason Nelson’s 2013 “Nothing You Have Done Deserves Such Praise” (NYHDDSP), one of a series of works situated at the juncture of poetry, digital art, and video game. NYHDDSP possesses a frenetic aesthetic experience in which the player encounters explosions, eruptions, wandering paramecia, decomposing text, flickering neurons, and hyperbolic narrators. Self-described as “anti-design statements,” Nelson’s games embrace messiness over polish and playfully serious pointlessness over the exploitative late-capitalistic logics of major label gaming. The game pursues this critique through what I call its alchemical aesthetics. To parse the enigmatic draw of Nelson’s strange games, I put them in dialogue with late medieval and early modern alchemical treatises. Premodern alchemical treatises promise textual, material, and affective traversals and transformations. Similarly, the various elements of Nelson’s poem-games combine to generate strange aesthetic admixtures that ask players to interrogate their assumptions about what video games can do and what they might be for. This well-played presentation, moreover, suggests the fecundity of juxtaposing contemporary digital materials with premodern alchemical aesthetics to think about gaming, play, and contemporary cultural critique.