Kindle Notes & Highlights
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October 17 - November 22, 2025
Rather, they are games about slowing down and paying attention, being present in the moment, sitting with some particular emotion, encountering the other. For
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.
As Antonio Machado writes in his Proverbios y cantares: “The you of my song does not refer to you, partner; that you is me.”
“Poetic effect,” writes Umberto Eco, is “the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.”
Can videogames utilize metaphor and ambiguous imagery to provide some of the same satisfaction as lyric poems?
“One can argue that it is the rhythm above all that makes lyrics attractive, seductive, and memorable,”
making videogames is a very messy
T.S. Eliot’s reflection that limitations aid creativity to be largely true.
In one version of the dream of virtual reality, no conscious semiotic interpretation will have to take place in the mind of the player: the Page 109 →spaceship is a spaceship; the sword is a sword; the hand you see is your hand. There is no need of or desire for metaphor in such a world; every representation is simply taken, literally, for the thing represented.
Our real illiteracy is not the ignorance to read and write…but the inability to create.
You don’t need to know how to program or have any previous experience with game design. Go search for “how to make a game in Bitsy”2 and make a tiny terrible game poem before the sun goes down. Or maybe your tiny game poem will be great. I don’t know. But allow it to be terrible.
Adam Had ’em.
Rather than looking at constraints as a hinderance, try to see them as an asset, as many poets have advocated.4 Constrained game engines resist literalism and naturally lend themselves to symbolism and metaphor, which are useful features for a poet (see Chapter 7, Chapter 13) because they force you to consider how you might express your idea using simple comparisons and the most basic elements of interaction and representation.
You would learn very little in this world if you were not allowed to imitate. And to repeat your imitations until some solid grounding in the skill was achieved and the slight but wonderful difference—that made you you and no one else—could assert itself…. I think if imitation were encouraged much would be learned well that is now learned partially and haphazardly.
When I consider making a game poem, I am pressed by questions such as these: How do I make a game about the little moment of fleeting beauty and existential longing encountered on an empty soccer field on my last day of teaching at a countryside middle school? How do I make a game that captures something of what it feels like to walk through the Choeung Ek killing fields of Cambodia, and all the overwhelming emotions that are stirred up? How do I make a game about the inexplicable sacredness found in the mundane task of caring for the gravesite of a deceased loved one? How do I make a game
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Alice Walker says that videogames are “the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness”;
We need videogames that remind us of what it means to be human in the face of the posthuman and the inhuman. And we need videogames that remind us that we still have the capacity to love, and the capacity to forgive. In short, we need videogames that embody “the subtlety, elegance, and hunger of the human spirit,” as Mark Strand and Eavan Boland write. We need videogames that, in the words of Dylan Thomas, are able to make our “toenails twinkle.”
