This is How You Will Die
This is How You Will Die is an interactive digital poetry and art game created by Jason Nelson, a new media artist, digital poet, and lecturer. Released in 2005, the game combines elements of poetry, digital art, and chance-based mechanics to explore the concept of death and the unpredictability of life.
The work enacts a slot machine predicting how the reader will die, and has been described as "an aleatoric gambling machine predicting the cause, nature, and aftermath of the player's death." Leonardo Flores writes that the "playful interfaces and darkly humorous tone serve as a kind of sugar coating for serious themes and personal exploration". Scott Rettberg argues that "the combinatory element is effective here because the arbitrary nature of the random element is, in fact, no less arbitrary, and no less absurd, than mortality itself."