Nick Murray wrote about slow games and stripping away the inessentials for The London Magazine. Read the full article online here.
“The ways that someone can read a poem are the same ways that one can read a game, and the ways that one could play a game are the same ways that someone can play a poem. It doesn’t even need to be explicitly a ‘poetry game’.”
Game, in comparison to its considerably older and more established sibling Film, is still a mere fledgling at seventy years old, give or take. The landscape of game for much of that time has been in finding its feet and testing the space around it. But now game is welcomed as a mainstream artform. There are games being collected at the British Library, and on display at galleries around the world! What was once a no-man’s land (or only man’s land) has become a network of thriving communities. Much of this is down to the recent boom in game-making tools. Where once a budding game-maker would have to learn a whole new language in Python, Java or HTML, now game engines allow creators to draw, write and piece together a game in a matter of minutes without having to type a single digit. Around the mainstream super-cities of games like Fortnite and Call of Duty, there are frontier communities of game-makers, pockets of creativity testing the boundaries of game and seeing what games can be beyond a cursor that explodes things. It is within these utopic neighbourhoods that poetry games reside… Read on…