Playable poems now come with peer review

Game Poems is a magazine you play. Issue #1, "First Moves," is 13 short games readable in the browser like pages—most of them under five minutes, made in everything from Bitsy and GB Studio to Unity and Godot, by a contributor list that runs from Pippin Barr to poets, scholars, and lead designers at AAA studios. Last week the magazine surfaced in Amsterdam, where the Rijksakademie's [untitled games event] featured Melanie Wigger's Vincent, from the issue, on its program.

Founding editor Jordan Magnuson—who started TIGSource in 2005, wrote Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice for Amherst College Press, and now teaches at Winchester School of Art—has borrowed the literary journal whole: a rotating editorial collective, blind peer review by volunteer first readers, up to 10 open-call selections per issue, a published artist statement beside every game, CC BY 4.0 open access, and a £100 honorarium for Issue #1 contributors funded through a University of Southampton grant. Issue #2, on the soft theme "Videogames Inside," closed its call in July and is in review now. The magazine's position is precise: game poems need not contain words at all—the poetry is in the mechanics, the constraint, the short lyric span.

The phrase has history here. In 2011 we covered a Georgia Tech professor's $500 bespoke "game poems," boxed like art editions; in 2016, Pippin Barr brought concrete poetry to life. The idea that a game can be a poem is old. A magazine willing to referee the claim, poem by poem, is new.