Game Poems

1) "Poetry may be playful in nature, but not all games feel poetic, and in my experience the videogames that feel most poetic are often those that have least in common with traditional games. My interest is not so much in considering poetry in light of play, but in considering (and making) videogames in light of poetry."

2) "Where fiction is concerned with what happens next, lyric poetry is concerned with what happens now."

3) "While we will be working toward a loose definition that might help us to identify and discuss 'game poems,' the point is not primarily to properly interpret or categorize these games, or get at their True Meaning, but rather to see if a close lyric reading can enhance our appreciation for any given game; whether considering these games as game poems can give us something to think about, something to talk about."

4) "Poetic address is one example of how lyric poems tend to exist in a kind of ritual space: they don't describe events so much as they exist to be events: to be performed and reperformed in what Muriel Rukeyser calls 'a ritual moment, a moment of proof.'"

5) "I have always thought of the game as a poem, and the original end-text as nothing more than a bit of context, but an explicit (and forced) indication of context always carries with it the danger of diminishing a poem's ambiguity and breaking the ritual moment on which lyric poetry tends to rely. [...] To illustrate my point: people have sometimes told me that Loneliness is a failure of a game because people cannot make sense of its central meaning without knowing the game's title."

6) "Following in the footsteps of literary theorist Stanley Fish, I would argue that categories like 'game poems' and 'digital poetry' are best thought of as related modes of paying attention rather than as objective taxonomical frameworks, and that every different mode of attention can offer us unique insights into the things we encounter."

7) "Conceived through the lens of lyric poetry that we have been utilizing, we might say that game poems are artifacts positioned as videogames that are short and subjective, make use of poetic address, exist in a ritual space, are hyperbolic, are bound to metaphor, and juxtapose signified meaning with material meaning (keeping in mind that, as in the case of lyric poetry, all of these characteristics are simply tendencies). We might summarize such a conception of game poems as 'videogames with lyric characteristics.'"

8) "From the videogame poet's standpoint, we might draw an analogy from a game's code to the ink that marks the page as a traditional poet writes down a poem on paper. The ink matters: it leaves a material trace that is relevant to the nature of poetry, and the words themselves cannot exist on the page without it; beyond this, the ink is deeply entangled with important questions of politics, economics, and ideology: where did it come from, how was it attained, what ideological structures are embedded with it on the page?"

9) "[From] the visual and auditory levels down to input mappings and operational logics, I seek to carve out new metaphors, recast established signifiers, and open avenues for new meaning. [...] Through this kind of use of explicit and shifting symbolism, I attempt to enrich and enliven depictions of squares in videogames."

10) "A blue circle moves across a blank screen, finds a sunflower, and the world turns yellow: bleep bleep. That's a game poem."