Atari, the letterpress of art-game design

Game critic and designer Ian Bogost’s latest project, A Slow Year, takes an poetic approach to the art-game. Exploring the texture of the eighties-era Atari 2600, A Slow Year consists of four games, one for each season of the year, accompanied by a book-length collection of computer-generated poems, which calls Bogost calls “machined haiku.” Clearly, Bogost’s work plays with the nostalgia many gamers of a certain age feel for the mid-eighties system (with Nick Montfort, Bogost wrote Racing the Beam, a study of the technological and cultural ground broken by the Atari 2600). But Bogost also makes a bold claim for the intrinsic aesthetic appeal of older systems, arguing that constraining technologies may produce timeless forms. “Just as we might still choose to write a sonnet,” Bogost points out, or “take a black and white photograph, paint with oil on canvas, or construct relief prints with a letterpress, so we can also choose to write new games for a machine like the Atari.”

A Slow Year sells for $19.95 on CD for Mac and Windows with accompanying book; a sumptuous boxed limited edition with an Atari game cassette can be had for $500 as well.