Sometimes I Wonder About The Other Me is a 2D platformer created by "small game" developer Luis "Ludipe" Díaz Peralta, whose other works include A Place For The Unwilling. It's broken into a handful of single screen maps. On each screen, there's a Mario-brand exclamation mark block that burps a text fragment, forming an overarching monologue that begins with the title phrase. As you move between screens, you come to a signpost pointing left and right. Heading in either direction leads to a splitscreen area, with the player controlling duplicate characters. As you guide your charges rightward, one half of the screen flakes away to darkness. The remaining character returns to the starting screen, there to wonder anew about the Other Me.
Modest though it may seem, I find Lupide's game a more gripping invocation of "choice" than many of the sliding-door questlines I've experienced in, say, blockbuster fantasy RPGs with branching narratives. Ludipe's project doesn't offer two or more distinctly imagined, completable scenarios; instead, it's haunted by alternatives it can't stop overwriting. It's about the rhythmic and mocking re-enactment of What If, opening and closing possibility in one movement. As such, it also warps the concept of 'replay value'. This isn't the bang-for-buck, one-more-go framing of classic videogame review appraisals, or the habit-forming seasonal "cadences" of latter-day live service. "Sometime" is time without structure: it is contemplative, speculative, uneconomical, always available and not quite there.
All of which may owe something to Lupide's project being a "game poem", as described by the designer and academic Jordan Magnuson in his open access book Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice. In Magnuson's terms, a game poem can offer a "ritual space" and a "forum" for ambiguous participation in an event or feeling, rather than being a medium for the transmission of statements, representations and 'content' at large. Sometimes I Wonder About The Other Me was, in fact, created for Magnuson's recent Game Poem jam, co-organised by the UK's National Film and Television School, with a panel of judges that includes former PlayStation Indies boss Shuhei Yoshida.
The jam ran on 7th-8th September with the loose theme "the other one", attracting around 90 submissions in 24 hours. I think the choice of theme has been very useful, in that it speaks to how videogames and poems might continue to be productively and critically estranged, even as they grow closer.
You might know Magnuson as the original founder of TIGSource, back in 2005 - a spawning ground for Minecraft, QWOP, Fez and other eccentric indie projects that have become household names. Over the years since, Magnuson has created a series of shortform games that he now characterises as poetic exercises: these include Loneliness, in which black squares move in half-recognisable patterns against a darkening cloudscape, until scattered by the player's approach.
In his book, Magnuson offers up "game poem" 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". The book is built around unpacking each of these broad criteria, chapter by chapter, identifying common ground between various videogames and older works of written poetry. It invokes a gossipy menagerie of devs, scribblers, and scholars: Anna Anthropy, Maya Angelou, Jason Rohrer, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, and Pippin Barr, to name a few.
Magnuson's focus is on English language 'lyric' poetry from Europe and North America, but he does make room for comparable literature from other regions, such as Japanese haiku, together with more 'experimental', non-lyric poetry such as the computational verse of Stephanie Strickland, one of my own favourite e-bards. I'm not sure Magnuson's book will strike you as a radical account of poetry, if you're familiar with people like Strickland, and the likes of Rohrer's Passage may seem well-worn subject matter, if you're a veteran of the trenches of Are Games Art? But I like how the book gently, methodically unpicks many of the prevailing market conventions around poems and videogames: the primacy of narrative design and mimesis in blockbuster development, for example, or more simply, the idea that poetry should consist of words on a page. In putting the two disciplines together, you could argue, Magnuson politely proposes to tear them apart.
Early on, Magnuson characterises poetry as "not a medium so much as a form, and not a form so much as a mode of intervention that can exist in any medium". In the same paragraph, he cautions that it is not "always popular to use methods and techniques from old media to 'colonize' new media". Having written a little about videogame poetics myself, I think I'm maybe more spiteful on this front than Magnuson. I'd say that gaming could benefit from being "colonised" by poetry, just a bit: specifically, the wealthier levels of the industry that preach the cultural stature of games as the one, true 'interactive artform', while overworking, impoverishing and stifling the people who make them. Lupide's project above demonstrates how the poetic "mode of intervention" can put the torch to some of the industry's favoured idols.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/the-other-one-jordan-magnusons-game-poem-jam-is-a-fascinating-collection-of-chimeras
