Nothing You Have Done Deserves Such Praise

May 2013

Supported by National Endowment for the Arts

Video games are a language, a grammar or linguistics of various texts. The sounds, the movement, the graphics, the rules or lack of rules, everything about a video game is a component of language. A digital poetry game must combine all these elements, strange and interactive stanzas, crossed out and obstructed lines, sounds and texts triggered and lost during the play. Indeed the game interface becomes a road to inhabiting the digital poem, to coaxing the reader/player into living and creating within the game/poetry space.

Nothing You Have Done Deserves Such Praise is an art/ poetry/ adventuring game, a playland for exploring our ever-present desire for constant and over-blown rewards. Our worlds (digital and breathing) are filled with needless and unearned praise, we are built to love exploding trophies for fifth place. This art/poetry game satisfies your compliment addiction by celebrating your walking/jumping/falling through strange and wondrous anatomical lands.

This Flash work has been emulated with Conifer by the Electronic Literature Lab in July 2021. To view this emulation
click here.

TAXONOMY

REQUIREMENTS

It needs a Flash Plugin within Chrome, set at Full Screen using as large a monitor as possible. If you could create a monitor the size of Rhode Island that would be ideal. Otherwise something big enough so the work shines and the oddities spin forth brightly. Big loud speakers with a bass boaster will rumble most properly. You could also use fancy headphones that add grumble and tone to my quirky noisey musics. Make the room dark, let the light of the work shine and scare passerbys. A video card, yes one of those. Otherwise prepare for a chug, chug and another chug. And an equally powerful processor. But by the time some future half robot, half super smart horse decides to study this game, it will use the power of their hooves, code falling in galloping thumps.