A Slow Year

by Ian Bogost

A collection of four one kilobyte games for the Atari Video Computer System, one for each season, about the experience of observing things. Neither action nor strategy, each game requires a different kind of sedate observation and methodical input. Accompanying the game are two essays about the commonalities between videogames and poetry, as well as 1024 machined haiku, poetry generated by computer, 8 bits worth for each season.

Genres: Games, Poetry, Video Games

139 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Ian Bogost is a video game designer, critic and researcher. He holds a joint professorship in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication and in Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he is the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts Distinguished Chair in Media Studies.

He is the author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism and Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames as well as the co-author of Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System and Newsgames: Journalism at Play. Bogost also released Cow Clicker, a satire and critique of the influx of social network games. His game, A Slow Year, won two awards, Vanguard and Virtuoso, at IndieCade 2010.

Reviews

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gads, I don't know how to rate this book. If you grew up in the 70s, and are into 8-bit avant-garde, then this might (might) be for you.

Bogost has programmed four Atari 2600 games, one for each season of the year. (The 2600 game system only had 128 bytes of RAM, and 4K ROM.) He explains why he has made these sort of slow-paced experiential poetry games that only the constrained minimalism of the 2600 could facilitate. The instructions for the games are given in haiku. To get an idea of the content, one game involves slowly savoring a cup of coffee as its temperature drops until you seen dawn through the window. I played the games on Windows 7, but it supposedly works on Mac OS as well.

Also included as a tie in to the games are 4 sets of 256 stochastically generated haikus. While random, they're constrained enough to be compelling, but free enough to be varied. I found myself reading into a few of them more deeply than I ought, given their construction.

A very niche market for this book.

[C · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hmmm. What to say of this interesting book/game?

First of all, it is primarily about (and *is) poetry and video games. If those two things interest you (I'd like to think I'm not entirely alone in those shared interests), this is probably right up your alley. Of course, that is a niche within a niche at this point, but I'm glad someone wrote about it.

But due to the nature of the book/game combo, some things work while others don't (at least for me).

The first section of the book that deals with poetry and game programming was absolutely fascinating to me, particularly the discussion of imagism and game design. Unfortunately, that section was entirely too short for me.

The next section of the book (really, the bulk of it) is comprised of machine-collated haiku divided into four sections as the four seasons to mirror the four seasonal sections of the included game. I found most of these haiku to be forgettable (as you would expect, I suppose).

The games themselves didn't really work for me, either. In large part, that is a problem with me rather than with them. I found myself trying to force myself to "play" them as they were intended rather than playing for score. Years and years of simple score playing has forced me into a certain linearity, I suppose... I also had several crashes when trying to run them. I wish I had been able to get ahold of the limited edition Atari cartridge version...