Play-read or read-play, however you approach it and whoever you identify with, you’ll become entangled in a struggle for accurate recall, attention and the search for meaning. Inevitably, it’s a contrary game – there can be no winners.

I began creating Rememori about a year ago, when my father was in the later stages of Alzheimer’s Disease but still living at home, being cared for by my mother. I finished the work a few days ago, coincidentally just as my father moved from a hospital ward into a Nursing Care Home. On the face of it, the main reason why it’s taken so long to make is because I took time out to work on other projects. During that period my father had a third massive stroke and the prognosis didn’t look good. So for a while, I think I was reluctant to return to the piece. I’m glad I did. There can be no happy endings in situations like these but, now that we have him settled in our preferred Care Home, there’s a sense of respite. I think the work reflects that, certainly in the later stages of the game.

Although drawn from personal research and experience, Rememori is not factual nor biographical – it’s a playable poem or poetic game created in Flash. For facts that speak of a wider context, here’s a quote from the Alzheimer’s Disease International’s World Alzheimer Report 2009:

An estimated 35.6 million people worldwide will be living with dementia in 2010. This number is estimated to nearly double every 20 years, to 65.7 million in 2030, and 115.4 million in 2050. Much of the increase is clearly attributable to increases in the numbers of people with dementia in low and middle income countries.

Modified image of brain: source thanks to Wellcome Library, London.

Newly co-published by Furtherfield and The Hyperliterature Exchange: a review of The Path, a “short horror game” by Tale of Tales (Michael Samyn and Auriea Harvey), based on the story of Little Red Riding Hood.

“The two best-known versions of the tale are by Charles Perrault and the Grimm Brothers – but there are numerous others. Sometimes Red Riding Hood meets not a wolf but an ogre; sometimes, when she gets to the house, she is fed various parts of a dismembered grandmother. Samyn and Harvey retain the gruesomeness, the allusions to dismemberment, and the violent sexuality which feature in many earlier versions, and the symbolism which lurks beneath the surface of Red Riding Hood in all its various manifestations comes through particularly strongly.”

To read the whole article, go here.
or here.
- Edward Picot