Metagame 4

99 Exercises in Style

Based on the constrained writing of the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, and specifically Raymond Queneau’s Exercises de style (1947), as well as the serial experiments of 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, squashed, duplicated, displaced, slowed down, sped up, zoomed in, or zoomed out in order to reveal the kinds of metagames that constantly occurs outside any individual’s experience of the Mushroom Kingdom (see Figure 4.10). To download 99 Exercises in Play, go to http://manifold.umn.edu/99exercises.