Incorporating chance and randomness into poetry creates an entirely separate genre named “combinatory poetics.” This medium, as articulated in Electronic Literature, poses several challenges that are foreign to regular poetry. Cohesion between the various words as they shift is the key feature that authors must learn to navigate. Within the trillions of combination, each one must result in a coherent line.
The lack of a rigid direction in which the reader must go allows a much greater reader involvement than print poetry. The randomness opens the work up to the apophenia humans so greatly covet. By filling in the interpretive space with her own ideas, the reader is able to find her own different meaning every time the work reloads.
The two games assigned for today pressed against the limits of that covetousness. “This Is How You Die” was engaging for the first few spins. After only about four turns, I started to see repetitions. Despite the game’s lack of intriguing aesthetics and much interesting content, the topic of death was enough to keep spinning until the end. The second game, “Taroko Gorge”, in contrast, had no concrete them as interesting as death to incentivize user engagement. Thus I found myself quickly losing focus.
Where the textbook reading and the two games interact, I believe, appears in the capacity of the reader/player to engage in the game. Some topics, such as mortality, strike a nerve so central to the human identity that the reader is unable to resist reloading the game. While the nature aspect in “Taroko Gorge ” initially piques the reader’s curiosity, it fails to maintain it throughout the various editions. Neither of the two games have any plot, per se, but the subject matter of the first separates it from the second. Does user involvement require a certain level of substantive plot? Or, do topics alone separate the games we do engage with from those we do not. Does mankind find comfort in structure or ambiguity? What happens when a game enlists both?