“Indie Gaming” exist and this sub-genre seems to be following the typical indie-anything trajectory:
-A small group of loosely collected developers make games that are exciting and raw and weird. They have no hope of cross-over success. And that is beside the point.
-A major press organization finds a name for this aggregate product and roughly defines what it is and what it is not.
-Some products achieve cross-over success.
-Things claiming to be indie games flood the market in the secret hopes that they will be cross-over successes.
-The whole definition collapses. And why not?
Anyway, there’s a whole lot of stuff to wade through and some of it is doing some very intriguing things with text. A lot of digital-poem text/image interface beasts I’ve run into in the past have a lot of fun by betraying our expectation that anything on a computer screen should have a rational interface. They are “difficult.”
Meanwhile, on the other side of the digital poem / video game divide, those from game development backgrounds have been working to complicate traditional notions of the game and, often, linearity by having outcomes depend on manipulations / responses to language.
I don’t know if its “poetry,” but I sure as hell wish I was fooling around with this stuff when I was twelve instead of playing Wall-Street Kid.
A few examples:
Paolo Pedecini’s Logos/Ergon, a “fast-paced nonlinear visual poem” which deconstructs video game tropes. This is from wickedly subversive Molleindustria.
There’s nothing more beautiful than a dead girl. Poe & Daniel Benmurgui agree.
Here lines of poetry become platforms, objects for your character to navigate. Compelling premise executed dumbly.
Maybe I’ll make my Introduction to Creative Writing Kids play with these.
Thanks to Geoff for pointing me to Logos/Ergon.
