Inside the “Game Poem” Movement Reimagining What Video Games Can Say

What happens when you treat a video game less like a product and more like a poem? That question sat at the heart of a recent 24-hour game jam that drew roughly 90 submissions from developers experimenting with a format increasingly known as game poems — short, deliberately uneconomical works that trade blockbuster spectacle for ambiguity, mood, and metaphor.

The jam, held on September 7th and 8th, was organized around a deceptively simple prompt: “the other one.” It was co-run by the UK’s National Film and Television School and overseen by a panel that included Shuhei Yoshida, the former head of PlayStation Indies, lending a surprising amount of industry weight to what is otherwise a fairly underground corner of game design. The event was the brainchild of designer and academic Jordan Magnuson, who has spent years arguing that some games function more like lyric poetry than like interactive fiction or systems-driven entertainment.

What Exactly Are Game Poems?

Magnuson lays out his thinking in an open-access book, Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice, in which he defines the category loosely — “by family resemblance rather than hard boundaries” — as games that tend to be short and subjective, that use poetic address, that exist in something like a ritual space, and that lean on hyperbole and metaphor rather than straightforward storytelling. Crucially, these works juxtapose what they literally represent with what they materially are as pieces of software, blurring the line between signified meaning and the mechanical reality of play.

That framing deliberately pushes against the dominant conventions of mainstream development, where narrative design and realism tend to rule. Magnuson’s pitch is that poetry isn’t really a medium at all, but a “mode of intervention” that can surface inside any medium — including one built from code, controllers, and pixels. He’s careful, too, about the risk of imposing old literary habits onto a newer art form, warning against the impulse to “colonize” games with techniques lifted wholesale from print poetry.

To make his case, Magnuson’s book pulls together an eclectic cast of reference points, moving from game design figures like Anna Anthropy, Jason Rohrer, and Pippin Barr to poets such as Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, and Maya Angelou, while also gesturing toward Japanese haiku traditions and the computational verse of writers like Stephanie Strickland. The result is less a manifesto than a patient argument: that the instincts guiding a handful of experimental developers overlap, more than anyone usually admits, with the instincts guiding poets.

A Jam Built Around Doubling and Loss

One of the standout entries from the jam, Sometimes I Wonder About The Other Me, illustrates the idea in practice. Created by developer Luis “Ludipe” Díaz Peralta, it’s a small 2D platformer broken into single-screen vignettes, each triggering a fragment of an ongoing monologue when the player bumps a Mario-style block. Eventually the player reaches a fork and controls duplicate characters moving through a split screen; whichever direction they choose, one half of the screen simply fades to darkness, and the surviving character loops back to wonder again about its lost double.

There’s no branching plot to complete, no alternate ending waiting to be unlocked — just a repeating gesture of choice and erasure. It’s a markedly different use of player agency than the “sliding door” decision trees common in big-budget role-playing games, and it resists conventional ideas about replay value. Rather than rewarding repetition with new content, the game offers something closer to contemplation: open-ended, unresolved, and oddly moving precisely because it refuses to resolve.

Magnuson’s own earlier work points in a similar direction. In a piece called Loneliness, black squares drift across a darkening landscape in patterns that are only half-legible, scattering the moment the player gets close — a piece of interactive art that behaves more like a mood than a mechanic.

Why This Matters Beyond the Indie Scene

It would be easy to dismiss game poems as a fringe curiosity, the kind of thing that only matters to academics and die-hard indie enthusiasts. But the jam’s scale — 90 submissions in a single day, judged by a figure with genuine mainstream industry credibility — suggests the idea is gaining traction beyond the circles that have long debated whether games can be “art” in the first place.

Magnuson’s project also traces back to a more famous legacy: he founded TIGSource back in 2005, an online community that incubated now-iconic independent titles, including early conversations around what would become Minecraft, alongside oddities like QWOP and Fez. That lineage matters, because it underscores how much of today’s innovative, boundary-pushing game design — the kind that eventually reshapes what mainstream audiences expect — tends to start in small, experimental spaces like this one.

Whether or not “game poem” becomes a term with staying power, the jam and Magnuson’s book both make a convincing case that video games don’t have to choose between being systems to master and stories to follow. Sometimes, as Ludipe’s splitscreen wanderer suggests, a game can simply ask a player to sit with a feeling, loop back, and wonder — no walkthrough required.