P. 147

QuoteChapter 15
Why We Need Game Poems:
A Brief Conclusion

This chapter opens by tricking the reader. There are many quotes about the value of poetry, presented as though they are quotes about the author's 'game poems'. He owns up to the trickery immediately. OK. I'm not impressed; all these quotes are too vague and not about the material, not useful, the 2020s equivalent of "but can a game make you cry?" "ya games can be art"

Yes, games can cause us to feel things! They can mean things to people!

I'm going to read the conclusion (chapter 15), then the introduction, and I think that's it.

I am going back to the table of contents.

Noooo I literally am not going to subject myself to the rest of this chapter, I'm sorry Magnuson

Put another way, I am so deathly uninterested in a form built only on top of, in response to, to subvert, traditional games. I want to go deeper, to the Center -- not further out to the periphery to the collateral art created in the wake.

Perhaps Magnuson is merely describing an art form I'm not that interested in, while I am looking for some other older form, something that escapes games for the sake of themselves (whether seeking to 'intervene' or not), some 'luminous ground' from which games are born and not homunculi born on top of the ground of games themselves.

P. 100

QuoteVideogames have established visual and auditory vernaculars that are ripe for poetic intervention

P. 104

Quote. . . my central thesis. . . the core material of the videogame poet is the language of videogames: a vast tangled web of visual, auditory, and procedural signifiers, with all of their established ways of signifying. . .

Oh, hmm. I hate it. I'm not denying that there's truth to it, but I find the suggestion of a lens like this is too reactive, and much too insular. How could the core material of an art form ever be the cultural detritus of the art form itself? No, absolutely not.

Chapter 11 starts by defining, or providing a rather definitional lens for, poetry. This is a bad omen for me. I'm going to stop commenting and just soak in the whole chapter, see what I think of it by the end.

The 10th chapter is rather definition-y as well. "What is the material of the videogame poet?" A question without clear answers. Next chapter.

EDIT: alright, let me engage more seriously. In this chapter Magnuson brings up many interesting elements and attempts to take them seriously (code, platform, experience) but then (frustratingly) attempts to set some of these aside: "I cannot see these things as describing the fundamental material of the videogame poet." (94)

I love my newfound comfort in navigating books freely. In the case of this book, I quickly browsed the table of contents and discovered that it was divided into two major parts:

PART I. What Is a "Game Poem"? and PART II. Making Game Poems in Practice

I've long been sick to death of getting stuck in definitions! So I was very happy to skip part 1, which would have surely frustrated me, straight into part 2, into which all the important definitional flotsam will have found its way regardless, I'm sure.

P. 11

Quote. . . my great teacher, Elvin Semrad, had taught us to be skeptical about textbooks. We had only one real textbook, he said: our patients. We should trust only what we could learn from them--and from our own experience. This sounds so simple, but even as Semrad pushed us to rely upon self-knowledge, he also warned us how difficult that process really is, since human beings are experts in wishful thinking and obscuring the truth. I remember him saying: "The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves."

This advice takes what I already believe and meaningfully deepens it. This is great, and I look forward to more from this book.

Such criticism of Fromsoft. I agree with it very much... It's funny, the parallels being drawn, beautiful really. The company fighting against entropy, losing some spark along the way.

Oh, we're talking about the endings of these games now.

Quote from: 25:17. . . what did you expect? You're trying to outrun entropy itself. How long do you think that can continue?

Quote from: 22:49. . . the brutality of leaving the player to find their own way and their own interpretation of the journey.

Oh, wow, Kat played Starseed Pilgrim and The Void only recently, and they still endure.

Quote from: 20:45The Void is about the search for meaning because every moment of playing it is a search for meaning. It is one long, difficulty journey through the dark, with almost no hope and very little guidance. Reminds me of some other worlds I used to know.

Cut to Demons Souls. Oh, that beautiful music.