HANDMADEDEATHLABYRINTH issue 0

[droqen]

I was reflecting on HANDMADEDEATHLABYRINTH issue 0 in the shower while thinking about haiku games and thinking about war on the games industry. Here are my thoughts.

HMDL is a joke wrapped in a videogame.

I think a lot about videogames and also the industry or whatever, and I had the idea for HMDL a long long time ago. It is a joke of the form, "What if [GAME YOU KNOW], but then [SURPRISE]?"

There's a problem there. I wanted to make that game, I really did, but the joke is at the expense of the game that I wanted to make, reducing it to a joke . . . or worse than that, I think, reducing it to a mere act of passing.

An act of passing. I need to unpack that, but it's the crux of the entire reflection.

There is a book called Game Poems that I love to complain about, but I find myself exploring it and quoting it over and over again. Anyway, here is the part that I will complain about today, or rail against:

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 [pg break] 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).

Specifically, "positioned as videogames."

. . . 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.

What I am about to say is not targeted at Game Poems but around it:

HANDMADEDE-
ATHLABYRINTH
issue 0 expended
too much effort
PASSING as a vid-
eogame.

. . . intervention in the established language of videogames can be pursued with intention, and that we might consider such work (for lack of other present alternatives) the special domain of the videogame poet, and the game poem.

I think a great deal of my resistance to Game Poems, as a text, has come from a desire to shed videogames entirely, and even the role of "intervener" in videogames is not one I desire. I wish for my shedding to be entire, complete.

In practice I think Magnuson is correct. Or, rather, Magnuson's thesis does direct its fangs towards me and my practice; mine, too, is an act of game poetry. I do not want to save videogames. I do not want to change videogames. I just want to make my art. But I cannot avoid the relationship that what I do has to videogames. Through attempting to make videogames and finding some kind of subsidiary practice made of the same parts, it would be accurate to say that my "core material" "is the language of videogames".

Oh, I'm losing my point. I'll post this and think about anything else I have to say afterwards.

[droqen]

"Passing" as a videogame.

I will own the fact that I use the language of videogames, that I am steeped in it, that I know and understand it. HOWEVER, I have no interest (anymore) in 'intervening' in videogames. I do not wish to speak to or about the language of videogames. I speak in it because it is so much of what I know. I use videogames.

My point about HMDL issue 0 is that when I made it I had not realized/decided this yet. I was... trying to make a videogame that functions as a videogame. I was using the language of the videogame but I was also adhering to the value of the videogame.

No more.

[droqen]

War on videogames: How can I extract value from this venue, from this industry, to my own ends? That is the question.

I have no interest in passing except as absolutely necessary in order to achieve my goals, which I will explore in another thread.