Versus Mode
A poet’s toolkit points to a deeper understanding of play.
“Because you cannot fight the way the older boys can... you watch from afar, hand in your pocket fingering coins. If you never find this place you can tell yourself you’ve known it in other forms.”
— R.A. Villanueva, “Between Worth & the Church of the Transfiguration”
Games and literature have always been tight, but the creative bloom of videogames (and argument over their status as “Art”) has rekindled this relationship. Consider Ian Bogost’s A Slow Year, described by the author as a chapbook of “game poems.” Bogost, a game designer and Georgia Tech professor, released a work that is a direct confrontation between videogames and poetry, embracing the limitations of a single kilobyte to try and convey the same subliminal lyricism of the seasons through code that poets like John Keats and William Carlos Williams wrought with verse.
