Game on

Have you ever played a poetry game? Ever experienced the thrill of building a high-rise collaborative Jenga poem, which creates its meaning by removing word-blocks, leaving the victor standing tall over the remaining text that asks to be read out loud? Or stepped foot inside a Minecraft poem, such as Victoria Bennett and Adam Clarke’s “My Mother’s House”, where poetic language dovetails with the craftable landscape of the world’s most famous computer game?

If the answer is “no”, then it’s time to join the fun. And for publishers who are interested in innovation, more than fun: here is a hybrid form of literature with huge potential for engaging the next generation of readers and creatives. Clarke defines Minecraft as a “malleable thing that we can present ideas through”, which makes the important point that rather than waiting for the next generation of readers to come to you, you get into their space and connect with them. 

Poetry games have always been present in literature. Simias of Rhodes (c 300 BC) created a series of visual poems – shaped as an egg and an axe – that were probably intended to be written on to those actual objects and held. Since the birth of literature there has been this urge to manipulate poetry with the hands. In the Jacobean period, George Herbert’s The Temple (1633) came out of nowhere, a platformer of a book, conceived as a built world that the reader could walk through. The Surrealists couldn’t help themselves, with their noirish gaming intuition, creating the game “Exquisite Corpse” for light entertainment and putting poet Robert Desnos into a hypnotic state so he could recite poems from the unconscious. We are now fortunate to be living in an age where this human desire to create poems that can be played are being realised in ways we could have only imagined before, across digital and analogue, putting us on the verge of a poetic revolution for the young. This is the metre-verse. 

With the current Arts Council England mission stating ‘Let’s Create’, and clear signs from young people that they want to be the creators of the world they live in, it’s time to rethink the top-down approach to literature 

How do I know this? I have a contact on the inside – Nick Murray: producer, artist, writer and curator of the National Poetry Library’s current exhibition, “Poetry Games”. Nick has cut his teeth in the worlds of gaming and literature and is a luminary figure in the realm of gaming poetry. “I hope that by playing these poems and reading these games,” Murray says, “people will have a glimpse of the wider world of both art forms. The ways that someone can read a poem are the same ways that one can read a game, and the ways that one could play a game are the same ways that someone can play a poem.”

What’s so exciting about poetry games is that Nick has found the sweet spot between digital and analogue, presenting an exhibition which is about 50% of each. When walking into the space you’re met with a three-metre-wide visual poem called “If We Were Allowed To Visit”, by poet Gemma Mahadeo and game designer Ian MacLarty. A seascape of black text invites you to swim inside, taking the controller to immerse in a world that includes a house and a sky made of words. As you move through the game’s environment, the poems are rearranged into the shapes of the objects they’re about, each frame becoming a new generative poem. This is what James Joyce must have had in mind with his “Ithaca” section of Ulysses or the cyclical nature of Finnegans Wake, with its ever-generating meanings and river drift. When Laurence Sterne added a blank page to Tristram Shandy, inviting readers to add their own thoughts, it was a nod to what the literature of the future could do; that is, be immense participatory fun for readers who were not simply recipients but co-creators. With the current Arts Council England mission stating “Let’s Create”, and clear signs from young people that they want to be the creators of the world they live in, it’s time to rethink the top-down approach to literature. 

A few independent presses are at the fore, with Trickhouse Press publishing The Oulipo Puzzle Book series and Sidekick recently releasing Roll Again: A Book of Games to Play. I can even offer the idea for a year-long Poetry Advent Calendar where every window opens on to something more lasting than a chocolate: a mini-poem from the National Poetry Library collection. Any takers? The edition comes with a vegan option.    

Poetry games make poetry seem less difficult and demonstrate that games don’t have to be light entertainment. They are the ultimate bridge between anyone who might have missed the hook of literature, or ever been put off by words printed on a page. If you can’t make the National Poetry Library exhibition, take a cue from artist-poet Astra Papachristodoulou and write a word on each of your Jenga blocks to play at home this Christmas. There’s no better over-indulgence than playing a game that generates a poem – it’s the good feeling that keeps on giving. 

Poetry Games continues at the National Poetry Library until 15th January 2023.