droqen's forum-shaped notebook

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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

I am going back to the table of contents.

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

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!

P. 150

Quotewhen I think about my own practice . . . these are the games I want to make; these are the games I want to play.

Strong echoes with Jack's first letter (https://letterclub.games/2021/05/01/haiku-games/):

QuoteI want to describe to you a kind of game that I like to play, and a kind of game that I want to play.

This is a great lens! I think we should be asking ourselves and each other these questions. Jack goes on to be open and describe something difficult, something vague, something incomplete. Magnuson's words don't resonate with me, but I am glad he is looking for answers, making statements with which I can fight in private like this.

Unsent message to Paradise:

Quotei skimmed Game Poems in the way that i skim books and i didn't really get too much out of it, but that was fine. what really got me riled up was this one quote, this attempt by magnuson to sum up his self-described 'central thesis':

> that 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 (both denotatively and connotatively) in relation to one another and to the world at large.

the title of this thread is '**the art form of reacting to game culture**' bc i'm curious about other takes on it. i am... i feel that lately i have been moving further away from this, less and less interested in reacting to game culture. it's like... surely there is something interesting about game poems aside from the pieces of other games that compose them ugh

almost 2 years later -- i'm chanting "kill gameplay" (how reactive can you get?) and rereading Game Poems because i might have made a 'game poem' anthology and i really love it -- and i'm not sure whether my old take on this book might have changed. excited to find out!

Quote. . something compact and potent that can be experienced and reexperienced at short notice and surrounded with time for reflection.

This is the description that sent me running for my newforum; in my (heavy!) skimming, I had missed this, though the language is also not what I would choose. I constructed TEOG to house things that had this shape comfortably (experience and reexperience the potency of these game poems freely, as you would with objects found in a book), and i was looking for some idea of "density" but I suppose here 'compact' and 'potent' will have to do. What I wanted more of, really, was a claim that the game poem is not wasteful. It does what is necessary (but necessary for what, is hard to say). Here even 'density' fails, and the author's words then fall even further from my target.

And the last bit resonates with emergence.

Quote. . . if the games I make are not traditional games, then what are they? How should I talk about my work in light of existing forms, frameworks, and traditions?

Magnuson explores the categorizations available; "videogames" as a subcategory of "games" which he finds, and I find similarly, "limiting." (He also says, "useful.")

Quote. . . neither [the existing 'narrative' perspective nor the 'gameplay' one] seems completely satisfactory when it comes to identifying why the games "work"

He takes perspectives on his own game Loneliness as examples:

QuoteStudied as a traditional game, Loneliness is not particularly interesting. . .
it lacks any attempt at "fun balanced gameplay". . .
those simple rules and mechanics it does have aren't very exciting and innovative. . . .
Speaking as Loneliness' creator, I was aware of (and intentional about) making something that could be positioned at the outer edges of videogames as a medium . . . but was never really attempting to make a "good" game in the process.

Quote. . . [narrative-focused analysis, too,] leaves room for additional insight. . . .
the game is so. . . sparse on anything that might be considered plot or character development.
We can say that there are a few (only slightly different) miniature plot arcs embedded in the game--but are they interesting plot arcs?
[Do I] find the story being told . . . worth conveying to others[?]
And again. . . I was never attempting to tell a good "story" . . .

So, Magnuson explains that these lenses are incomplete, but does say that he has also found them "helpful and relevant in thinking about my own work". Then goes into these features of poetry, specifically lyric poetry, which I infer he is claiming better "[capture] how I most often think about my games, or similar games by other creators"

Note that the list below is as minimal as possible, I have taken exact wording but excluded such qualifiers as 'generally' and 'often'. Understand that the following list has been so threshed. Lyric poems...

Quote- are . . . short
- are . . . intimate and personal
- express or explore complex emotions
- explore meaning in the moments and in the loose ends of life that don't necessarily have a nice narrative arc
- attempt to slow the reader down, give pause, prompt reflection

Quote. . . this list . . . provides an opening for considering [certain] games as artifacts that are not defined strictly (or primarily) by narrative, or by rhetoric, or by gameplay--or even by interaction or computation.

These are all formal, structural definitions and readings; I must say that the obvious direction that I see Magnuson not going in is defining these artifacts by the list that is given. The effect, the emotional intention, the shape of the creator's relationship to the work.

Quote. . . poetry is . . . a mode of intervention that can exist in any medium.

I want to know more about this.

Quote(An idea that we will explore in the second part of this book.)

Oh, excellent.