99 Exercises in Play
Patrick LeMieux
99 Exercises in Play
Unity game for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux
Dimensions variable
Currently in development, forthcoming 2015
Based on the constrained writing of the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle or “Oulipo” like Raymond Queneau’s Exercises de style (1947) and alongside serial experiments like Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth’s Five Obstructions (2003) and Matt Madden’s 99 Ways to Tell a Story (2005), 99 Exercises in Play features World 1-1 from the original Super Mario Bros. (1985) as a constraint for producing ninety-nine different metagames. An “Oujeupo” project that engages the serial history of a single level, in 99 Exercises in Play, Mario finds himself stretched, sqaushed, duplicated, displaced, slowed down, sped up, zoomed in, or zoomed out in order to reveal the kinds of metagames that constantly occur outside any individual’s experience of the Mushroom Kingdom.