Game Poems, Doors to IF of the Moment

Poetic theorist and academic Earl Miner once wrote that “...the distinguishing features of lyric are a presence and intensity that make it, in a double sense, the literature of the moment.” This places poetry, or at least lyric poetry, in contrast with narrative texts. The term “narrative” often brings connotations concerning how we consider a work, typically involving its progression from “beat to beat” or what the piece may hold at its core as a theme. Poetry is less concerned with the conveyance of narrative and more with the conveyance of emotion. Lyric poetry, traditionally, is an observation of a moment, a feeling, even part of an idea. It is, by its very nature, an intimate thing. Many poems are written as conversations with the self or a catalog of personal thought, not as direct relations between speaker and audience. As philosopher John Stuart Mill observed, it’s not about what is told to us but rather about what we overhear.

In his recent book, Game Poems, Jordan Magnuson advocates for a characterization of video games that allows for distinctly poetic readings. Magnuson’s examples are very carefully positioned not as the basis for a canon, but as the basis for conversation. He specifically notes that games featured within the book are typically light on or utterly devoid of text, attempting to open the way to talk about how the playing of a game is a critical component in its positioning as a poetic text. Within the context of Magnuson’s examples, traditional Interactive Fiction—based as heavily and traditionally on text as it is—may not qualify. However, as Magnuson himself makes clear, the pursuit of objective categorization can limit the ways in which we observe the world around us. 

Poetry is a type of fiction in that it is a recording of subjective reality, whether it be directly communicating the thoughts of the writer or filtering them through a separate poetic voice. I argue that, as a result, a digital poem that features both text and interactivity is a type of “Interactive Fiction” in the traditional sense.

Doors is a short experience authored by Caelyn Sandel, published in 2015. Built with Twine, Doors features ten screens, each a pairing of an image and a snippet of text, accompanied by a haunting, singular piece of music. Hyperlinks allow the player to move from one screen to another and back, creating an effect similar to the traditional contrapuntal. This is to say, reading and re-reading passages in a player-chosen succession can create new meaning within the work, or expand on the evident themes of isolation, self-loathing, fear, and persistence.

The structure of the piece allows for the player to loop back to the second screen and proceed in a different order if so desired, with no clear ending. Indeed, the poem only ends when the player themselves decides that it has reached a conclusion. Interestingly, the player can never return to the initial screen of the piece, meaning that the opening line of the poem is static and never repeated verbatim.

To illustrate, presented here are two possible “paths” the player can take through Doors, rendered as traditional stanzas to show the separation of screens:

Reading 1:

These Doors

I walk through

locked myself out
These Doors

I walk through

mess that I am
These Doors

I walk through

it’s not safe out here
but neither are These Doors

through hurt and apathy

dreams get crushed out here

through hurt and apathy

apathy and hurt, and

everything feels numb out here

Reading 2:

These Doors

I walk through

it’s not safe out here
but neither are These Doors

through hurt and apathy

everything feels numb out here.

Reading 1 is representative of a “complete” playing, where every screen is sought out and seen by the player. Reading 2, by comparison, is a shorter, speedier reading wherein the player continues until they encounter the first repetition of a screen. Either is valid and one would be hard-pressed to necessarily recommend one over the other. By the same notion, it is difficult to say that one “version” of Doors conveys its themes better than the other.

This repetition and self-directed reading ties into one of the seven characteristics of a Game Poem as defined by Magnuson. Namely, that game poems are a ritual space rather than a narrative space. The participation of the reader is fundamental to the work. As we see from the examples above, that participation certainly can render a wholly different piece to be read than another player may experience.

It is precisely that interactivity which makes the "game" part of a game poem so critical to how it conveys its meaning. Whether that be how one navigates E1M1 in DOOM or when one chooses to finish reading Doors. They depend on us to “complete” the experience set down by the creator/s. The difference is that navigating DOOM involves the communication of defined objectives while a game poem like Doors may lack a sense of defined structure. Like poetry, Doors silently asks us to overhear the thoughts of the speaker. We are less concerned with the moment-to-moment play of the piece and instead challenged to consider it in its entirety as one literary body.

Doors is appropriately named not only because of its subject matter, but because of its place in a growing field where Interactive Fiction, video games as a whole, and digital poetry intersect. It serves as a gateway through which one can reckon with conveying poetic address to a reader/player, uncomplicated by the arguable lines along which genres diverge. It’s a piece that is wholly contained, can be experienced in its “complete” form within a minute or an hour, and asks nothing directly of its audience rather than to sit, click, and ponder. 

I am left considering Doors how Miner described the effect of the lyric. He called it "the mysterious power of this simple, brief, and primal genre." Doors is certainly simple, brief, and primal--and that essence it shares with lyric poetry is what makes it truly beautiful.