What are you doing across Monday 7th to Tuesday 8th September? If your answer isn't "weaving sick rhymes for PlayStation's former indie gaming boss Shuhei Yoshida and original TIGsource founder Jordan Magnuson", then begone, for we are no longer friends.
Magnuson and Yoshida are among the judges on a forthcoming game jam organised by the UK's National Film & Television School. It's dedicated to the "videogame poem" - an "emergent short-form personal expression that challenges traditional boundaries between art forms," as the organisers define it on the Itch.io page.
The jam is being led by Magnuson, who has made a name for himself over the years since TIGsource (a forum community that facilitated the creation of Minecraft, Fez and Papers, Please) as the maker of shortform games that borrow from the realm of poetics. Magnuson has written a whole open access book about Game Poems, which breaks the concept down into organising principles such as brevity, subjectivity and ritual performance, obtained through study of poets like Goethe, T.S. Eliot, and Emily Dickinson. Discussing his own projects alongside work from Anna Anthropy, Pippin Barr, Nick Montford and others, Magnuson then offers some practical exercises for budding game poets, together with an appendix of tools.
I'm still finishing Magnuson's book myself, but I'm enjoying it. I think there's a slight tendency to run poets together according to a chapter theme without fully acknowledging some wildly different historical contexts, but then again, the book is intended partly as an overview for an under-studied field - better to go broad. In general, I think it accomplishes the tricky feat of sifting points of compatibility from some ornate and disagreeable artworks, without leaving 'the general reader' in the dust. It's in-depth, but also friendly work.
Magnuson opens by describing poetry as "not a form so much as a mode of intervention that can exist in any medium", written or otherwise, which is close to how I like to think about poetry myself. It's a virulent creative-critical ruleset, a hungry bastard ghost, saturating and wrapping its coils other media as it pleases.
I confess, I've got a whole interview with Magnuson and Yoshida in the can - the basis for a longer feature on game poems. That feature was supposed to go up last month, but then Gamescom rolled over us like a salty porridge tsunami, so we bumped it to this week, and then I came down with a throat bug. Next week, then? Let's put a line under it. Amongst other things, publishing after the NFTS jam will mean that I can discuss some of the contributions.
There are a few other very clever custards on the judging panel: Cash DeCuir, narrative designer, writer and voice director for Disco Elysium; John Lau, game designer and lead producer on South of the Circle; Claudio Pollina, game designer and professor at Rome University of Fine Arts; and Jenna Jovi, a screenwriter and narrative designer who has worked across videogames and film.
Magnuson is giving a seminar at 11am UK time on Monday to introduce the jam – you can watch it on Zoom. The actual theme of the jam will be revealed at the end of the seminar. One stipulation is that any work you submit has to be playable in a browser. Go on, versify! If you are dead to the enchantment of poesy, they're also handing out Steam giftcards to the winners.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/former-playstation-indie-boss-shuhei-yoshida-and-the-founder-of-tigsource-are-throwing-a-game-poem-jam-that-challenges-traditional-boundaries-between-art-forms
