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Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice
Scholars, critics, and creators describe certain videogames as being “poetic,” yet what that means or why it matters is rarely discussed. In Game Videogame Design as Lyric Practice, independent game designer Jordan Magnuson explores the convergences between game making and lyric poetry and makes the surprising proposition that videogames can operate as a kind of poetry apart from any reliance on linguistic signs or symbols. This rigorous and accessible short book first examines characteristics of lyric poetry and explores how certain videogames can be appreciated more fully when read in light of the lyric tradition—that is, when read as “game poems.” Magnuson then lays groundwork for those wishing to make game poems in practice, providing practical tips and pointers along with tools and resources. Rather than propose a monolithic framework or draw a sharp line between videogame poems and poets and their nonpoetic counterparts, Game Poems brings to light new insights for videogames and for poetry by promoting creative dialogue between disparate fields. The result is a lively account of poetic game-making praxis. “Everyone who loves the true power of games will benefit from the treasure trove of insights in Game Poems .” — Jesse Schell, author of The Art of Game Design “Magnuson shines a sensitive and incisive light on small, often moving, videogames.” — D. Fox Harrell, Ph.D., Professor of Digital Media, Computing, and Artificial Intelligence, MIT “[ Game Poems ] tells a new story about games— that games can be lyrical, beautiful, emotionally challenging—to inspire creators and critics alike.” —Noah Wardrip-Fruin, author of How Pac-Man Eats
“Even as the news swells with impending doom for creativity, writing, and text itself, this literate and crafty book pursues poetry not through implacable algorithms but in concrete and personal play. It should be an indispensable guide for anyone who aims to maintain the true, human promise of technical poetics.”— Stuart Moulthrop , coauthor of Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narratives
“For far too long videogames have flourished – and commanded both capital and attention – in a kind of counterculture that they seem to have created as if ex nihilo for themselves and their players. But we are these players, and their culture has always been integrated with all of our own. In this evenhanded artist-scholar’s ars poetica Jordan Magnuson respects the material cultural specificity of videogames while regarding them through the ‘lens of poetry’ in order to discover – and help create – a practice and an art of Game Poems within the wider field. Magnuson formally, int(erv)entionally embraces this art as lyrically poetic.”— John Cayley , Brown University
“In Game Poems , Magnuson listens carefully to videogames, and hears them speak to questions of art, language, and meaning that connect our written past to our software future. Read this book and you will hear it too.”— Frank Lantz , Director, NYU Game Center
“Jordan Magnuson has created a work that ties together the worlds of poetry and videogames in a deep and enlightening way. For those of us who care about the potential of poetic games, Jordan greatly improves the language of how we talk about them and expands our ability to see what this unique form can become. This is one of my favorite books on game design and I apologize in advance to those whom I will end up cornering and not being able to stop talking to about it.”— Benjamin Ellinger , Game Design Program Director, DigiPen Institute of Technology
“A groundbreaking and accessible book that helps us think about games as poems. With patient tenacity, Magnuson teases out what he felt for years as he engaged in his own pr
“Even as the news swells with impending doom for creativity, writing, and text itself, this literate and crafty book pursues poetry not through implacable algorithms but in concrete and personal play. It should be an indispensable guide for anyone who aims to maintain the true, human promise of technical poetics.”— Stuart Moulthrop , coauthor of Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narratives
“For far too long videogames have flourished – and commanded both capital and attention – in a kind of counterculture that they seem to have created as if ex nihilo for themselves and their players. But we are these players, and their culture has always been integrated with all of our own. In this evenhanded artist-scholar’s ars poetica Jordan Magnuson respects the material cultural specificity of videogames while regarding them through the ‘lens of poetry’ in order to discover – and help create – a practice and an art of Game Poems within the wider field. Magnuson formally, int(erv)entionally embraces this art as lyrically poetic.”— John Cayley , Brown University
“In Game Poems , Magnuson listens carefully to videogames, and hears them speak to questions of art, language, and meaning that connect our written past to our software future. Read this book and you will hear it too.”— Frank Lantz , Director, NYU Game Center
“Jordan Magnuson has created a work that ties together the worlds of poetry and videogames in a deep and enlightening way. For those of us who care about the potential of poetic games, Jordan greatly improves the language of how we talk about them and expands our ability to see what this unique form can become. This is one of my favorite books on game design and I apologize in advance to those whom I will end up cornering and not being able to stop talking to about it.”— Benjamin Ellinger , Game Design Program Director, DigiPen Institute of Technology
“A groundbreaking and accessible book that helps us think about games as poems. With patient tenacity, Magnuson teases out what he felt for years as he engaged in his own pr
224 pages, Paperback
Published May 12, 2023
23 people are currently reading
52 people want to read
About the author
Jordan Magnuson
1 book26 followersHi, I'm Jordan! I'm an independent game maker and new media scholar with a particular interest in using the most basic elements of computation, interaction, and graphical representation to enhance meaning and impact in videogames.
I've been making little art games, "notgames," and game poems for many years now, and recently wrote a book about the connections I see between videogames and lyric poetry. Check out Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice - the book is open access, so electronic editions are free!
I've been making little art games, "notgames," and game poems for many years now, and recently wrote a book about the connections I see between videogames and lyric poetry. Check out Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice - the book is open access, so electronic editions are free!
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
July 22, 2023
A book that helped me understand both poetry and videogames better. The chapter on the creative process is applicable no matter your medium. Jordan makes the idea of creating a game poem relevant, interesting and like something I should try to do this morning.
November 7, 2024
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."
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."
July 16, 2025
A book about video games through the lens of poetry should be right up my alley. I have a degree in both literature/creative writing and game development so Game Poems seemed almost tailor-made for me.
The book explores the world of abstract video games, with the author coining the term “game poems” to describe games that embody poetic qualities. The opening chapter dives into a postmodern debate about what a poem even is, spending many pages circling the definition without ever fully landing on one (understandably so). Still, I couldn’t help but feel this section overstayed its welcome and might have benefited from a more concise treatment.
The book becomes more engaging when it shifts from theory to practice, discussing games, both the author’s and others’, that exemplify the "game poem" concept. These case studies provide real-world grounding for an otherwise abstract idea.
At my most cynical, I couldn’t shake the sense that the book sometimes veered into self-promotion, positioning the author as the “Game Poet” and subtly spotlighting his own work under the guise of theory-building.
That said, the book is also undeniably inspiring. The author's personal reflections, creative process, and contextualization of his work offer valuable insights. These moments: subjective, reflective, and rooted in lived experience are where the book shines.
Ultimately, I think Game Poems would have been stronger had it leaned further into its artistic and experiential side, rather than trying to bolster its legitimacy through weak academic theory that often felt like it said very little. When the book embraces its creative core, it provides a far more compelling look at the poetic potential of video games.
The book explores the world of abstract video games, with the author coining the term “game poems” to describe games that embody poetic qualities. The opening chapter dives into a postmodern debate about what a poem even is, spending many pages circling the definition without ever fully landing on one (understandably so). Still, I couldn’t help but feel this section overstayed its welcome and might have benefited from a more concise treatment.
The book becomes more engaging when it shifts from theory to practice, discussing games, both the author’s and others’, that exemplify the "game poem" concept. These case studies provide real-world grounding for an otherwise abstract idea.
At my most cynical, I couldn’t shake the sense that the book sometimes veered into self-promotion, positioning the author as the “Game Poet” and subtly spotlighting his own work under the guise of theory-building.
That said, the book is also undeniably inspiring. The author's personal reflections, creative process, and contextualization of his work offer valuable insights. These moments: subjective, reflective, and rooted in lived experience are where the book shines.
Ultimately, I think Game Poems would have been stronger had it leaned further into its artistic and experiential side, rather than trying to bolster its legitimacy through weak academic theory that often felt like it said very little. When the book embraces its creative core, it provides a far more compelling look at the poetic potential of video games.
June 4, 2023
Muy buen punto de partida que nos invita a reflexionar sobre la lírica, la poesía y su relación con los videojuegos. Muchas de estas cosas no son la primera vez que las leo, o que las pienso, pero tal vez sí en relación a la poesía, más que a una cuestión netamente literaria, como diría el propio autor.
Definitivamente una lectura recomendada para mis contemporáneos y que estaré adjuntando a mis alumnos.
Definitivamente una lectura recomendada para mis contemporáneos y que estaré adjuntando a mis alumnos.
August 30, 2023
To many, poetry is a dying – or dead – art form. Few people sit down at night to open their favorite poet’s chapbook with the latest streaming service at hand or their favorite videogame console sitting nearby. Spectacle seems to be the cultural norm, and this can be no more evident than in videogames: when the latest and greatest offers 60+ hours of spine-tingling excitement, why would someone want to launch a smaller-form game about expressions such as love, death, loneliness, or even God? But, as Jordan Magnuson, in his new book Games as Poems, shows, poems have always been an integral piece of forming human culture. Poems have the ability to get right to the heart of the matter and, in fact, pierce the heart of the reader. Poems can be a form of cultural resistance, and even launch revolutions. Magnuson’s book highlights what it means to use the medium of game design as poetry. Magnuson presents several examples of the intricacies of poetry in general, as well as work that fuses the ideals of poetry with game design. Magnuson succinctly examines how the imagination, rhythm, intensity, style – and brevity – of poetry can enlighten the game design process in order to form possibility spaces within videogames that are pointed and powerful.
July 2, 2023
I've played videogames my whole life, and I like all kinds, but some of my favorites in recent memory are very short and poignant. If judged by the traditional yardstick of what makes a game "good", they may fall short in various ways--they may not have any sense of challenge, or they might not have a particularly engrossing story, they might not have deep mechanics--yet there is something about them that stays with me for months or years in ways that the games I spend dozens of hours playing usually don't do.
This book attempts to explore this new territory. It stops short of hand-wringing over definitions, which I like, because its aim is to imagine what this new medium is capable of--what kinds of thoughts and feelings it can evoke--rather than to "carve out" some kind of niche in the world of academia. As a non-academic, I appreciate this.
The book also opened my eyes to a lot of games in this genre that I was previously unaware of. In that sense, it's like a guided tour.
My favorite part of the book, though, is the second half, in which the author encourages the reader to create their own game poems, along with guidelines on how to do so, such as encouraging the use of platforms like Bitsy or PICO-8 that impose creative constraints. As I had been reading the book, thoughts about what kind of game poems I might write percolated in the back of my mind, and the author's infectious encouragement near the book's conclusion finally compelled me to write my own game poem.
An unexpected side effect of the book is that it actually motivated me to learn more about poetry (the old-fashioned, written kind). I've always felt intimidated by that medium, as thought I'm somehow not cultured enough to understand it, but Game Poems convinced me that I might be wrong. I've since picked up a book it mentions, Mary Oliver's "A Poetry Handbook", and while I'm still mildly terrified by the medium, it's growing on me.
If you're unsure whether this book is for you, I recommend playing some of the freely-available game poems mentioned by the author: Jason Rohrer's "Passage", the author's own "Loneliness" (you can also check out his Gametrekking Omnibus on Steam), or "The Graveyard". If none of those strike a chord with you, this book probably won't either. But if you find any of them intriguing, I think you'll get a lot out of this book--perhaps you'll even write a game poem of your own.
This book attempts to explore this new territory. It stops short of hand-wringing over definitions, which I like, because its aim is to imagine what this new medium is capable of--what kinds of thoughts and feelings it can evoke--rather than to "carve out" some kind of niche in the world of academia. As a non-academic, I appreciate this.
The book also opened my eyes to a lot of games in this genre that I was previously unaware of. In that sense, it's like a guided tour.
My favorite part of the book, though, is the second half, in which the author encourages the reader to create their own game poems, along with guidelines on how to do so, such as encouraging the use of platforms like Bitsy or PICO-8 that impose creative constraints. As I had been reading the book, thoughts about what kind of game poems I might write percolated in the back of my mind, and the author's infectious encouragement near the book's conclusion finally compelled me to write my own game poem.
An unexpected side effect of the book is that it actually motivated me to learn more about poetry (the old-fashioned, written kind). I've always felt intimidated by that medium, as thought I'm somehow not cultured enough to understand it, but Game Poems convinced me that I might be wrong. I've since picked up a book it mentions, Mary Oliver's "A Poetry Handbook", and while I'm still mildly terrified by the medium, it's growing on me.
If you're unsure whether this book is for you, I recommend playing some of the freely-available game poems mentioned by the author: Jason Rohrer's "Passage", the author's own "Loneliness" (you can also check out his Gametrekking Omnibus on Steam), or "The Graveyard". If none of those strike a chord with you, this book probably won't either. But if you find any of them intriguing, I think you'll get a lot out of this book--perhaps you'll even write a game poem of your own.
December 29, 2023
I picked this up free on Amazon. I assumed it would be a book with poems about games but it isn't the case. The book is written in an often verbose way, more like an essay on the subject of what the author calls "Game Poems" and is full of references, so much so, that 40% of the book is dedicated to the References, Bibliography and Appendix.
A summary later in the book states:
"We have identified game poems as a loose category (defined by family resemblance rather than hard boundaries) of games that are generally short and subjective, make use of poetic address, exist in a ritual space, are hyperbolic and bound to metaphor, and juxtapose signified meaning with material meaning."
I found it hard to understand what a "Game Poem" really is, but it sounds like it refers to those arty games that these days are often presented in a way that people dub them "walking simulators"; limited gameplay and a focus on story or a strong message. The author says they are "an aspiring poet whose medium is videogames".
The author mentions very simplistic experiences where the game is presented with a limited amount of pixels and colour palette (Passage, Loneliness, Dys4ia). Some of the games the author mentions are their own creations. I think it would be easier for the reader to relate to the content if more popular games were chosen. There are fleeting references to Canabalt, and a random image of Shovel Knight, and writing about this calibre of games would be the better choice.
I think it's a pretentious book about the pretentious side of video games, and was hard to take anything from it.
"In other words, the differences in meaning of the signs reveals phantasms - each meaning involves shared epistemic and image spaces and each meaning can be revealed by contrasting different phantasms."
"Most commercial FPSs, for instance, rely on indexical-inspired representation and established conventions so heavily that there is little if any conscious semiotic interpretation going on for those well trained on the genre: you are this person, running through this environment, carrying this gun... that is that." (at least this quote translated what they were saying)
A summary later in the book states:
"We have identified game poems as a loose category (defined by family resemblance rather than hard boundaries) of games that are generally short and subjective, make use of poetic address, exist in a ritual space, are hyperbolic and bound to metaphor, and juxtapose signified meaning with material meaning."
I found it hard to understand what a "Game Poem" really is, but it sounds like it refers to those arty games that these days are often presented in a way that people dub them "walking simulators"; limited gameplay and a focus on story or a strong message. The author says they are "an aspiring poet whose medium is videogames".
The author mentions very simplistic experiences where the game is presented with a limited amount of pixels and colour palette (Passage, Loneliness, Dys4ia). Some of the games the author mentions are their own creations. I think it would be easier for the reader to relate to the content if more popular games were chosen. There are fleeting references to Canabalt, and a random image of Shovel Knight, and writing about this calibre of games would be the better choice.
I think it's a pretentious book about the pretentious side of video games, and was hard to take anything from it.
"In other words, the differences in meaning of the signs reveals phantasms - each meaning involves shared epistemic and image spaces and each meaning can be revealed by contrasting different phantasms."
"Most commercial FPSs, for instance, rely on indexical-inspired representation and established conventions so heavily that there is little if any conscious semiotic interpretation going on for those well trained on the genre: you are this person, running through this environment, carrying this gun... that is that." (at least this quote translated what they were saying)
June 25, 2023
Loved the intention. Not the execution.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews