Before I talk about ludokinetic literature (and, more specifically, ludokinetic poetry) I want to outline a general position that informs my interest in this area. Reading, writing and playing are important, socially constructive activities – I recommend them all individually. They are, however, more valuable the more they blur into one another.

To expand on that statement: where ‘playing’ equates to solving contrived problems, imaginative escapism or general mucking about (or a mixture of all three), each participant is either a sportsperson, a dallier or a daydreamer. Where writing is done purely to give pleasure or express something, the writer’s role is that of entertainer or custodian of their own feelings. And where reading means being in thrall to a story or style, or absorbing a spectacle, the reader acts the part of punter or consumer. But where these activities cross over – to the extent that playing involves reading, and reading involves writing, and writing involves playing – any person taking part must act as discoverer. They become caught up in the business of finding things out.

I think it’s to the good that as many of us as possible get to be discoverers. That’s how I’ve come to take an interest in what I term ‘ludokinetic literature’, meaning any literature that engages the reader in gameplay – and hence to some extent in the writing process itself. When I talk about ‘gameplay’, I don’t just mean interactivity in the sense of something being manipulable; I mean imbuing the reader with a sense of responsibility, implicating them in the outcome of a text. When they reach the conclusion of a story or poem, they should be thinking, “I made this happen.”

There’s no straightforward rule as to how this is achieved. To some extent, the responsibility the reader feels may be illusory. Adventure gamebooks use a branching narrative structure, with some branches leading to a ‘bad’ ending, to convince their young readers that they have the power to change the course of the story, even though every outcome is pre-written. Usborne’s Puzzle Adventures (a series of children's books published in the 1990s) confront both the reader and the story's protagonist with an illustrated problem at every turn of the page. The reader, acting out the part of the protagonist, must solve the puzzle before they move forward in the story.

Both of these mechanisms are iterated and expanded extensively in the medium of video games, but they also have relatives in poetry and literary fiction. Italo Calvino’s 1979 novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller has a ludokinetic quality to its early chapters; it casts ‘You’ as the protagonist, and issues a series of instructions – though there’s no reason for the reader to actually carry them out. Raymond Queneau is among those poets who have experimented with multiple-option poetry, his Un conte à votre façon appearing in 1967, a decade before Choose Your Own Adventure founder R. A. Montgomery’s Sugar Cane Island.

Poetry and Games

I’ve arrived far too late in the day to have anything new to say about ludokinetic stories. These are already covered by the terms ‘interactive fiction’, ‘hyperfiction’ and ‘multiple-choice narrative’. Much has been written about them, and they continue to flourish as an artform. But what of ludokinetic poetry? This – and more generally, the crossover between games and poems – has been the chief subject of my research for some years. It’s a crossover that builds on existing parallels; both videogames and poetry, at their best, exemplify G. K. Chesterton’s pronouncement that “the largest wilderness looks larger seen through a window”. They imply vastness and depth beyond an apparently confined space. They combine a degree of fussy technicality with a predilection for being mysterious, and both have a tactile appeal – games because their worlds respond to cybernetic interaction, poems because they emphasise the physical character of language. As such, they ask to be traversed, rather than merely absorbed.

This remains a minority perspective. The main reason for a present lack of ludokinetic poetry, I suspect, is that the poem makes a central figure of the poet while the videogame (and games more generally) make a central figure of the player. There is therefore an implied contest between these two figures in terms of who gets to work the levers and produce meaning.

Making hybrids

In the mid-2000s, my long-term collaborator Kirsten Irving and I began a series of projects that were designed to narrow the gap between games and poems. First, we printed Dr Fulminare’s Bard Games, a mini-zine of poems which borrowed the rules of board games as the basis for their formal structure (poems as domino games, as jenga towers, as rounds of battleships). Then we moved onto poems that imported ideas and content from video games (think ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ but on Donkey Kong Country Returns). We invited submissions of such poems for two anthologies: Coin Opera and its much larger, crowd-funded sequel, Coin Opera 2: Fulminare’s Revenge, the latter of which included work by many UK poets who would go on to be feted.

(As a bonus booklet for early purchasers, I also wrote, designed and printed Super Treasure Arcade, a set of micro-poems, each based on a single game released in a particular year, starting from 1971.)

These experiments operated on the basis that adapting game material for use in literary works established a system of exchange, and a kinship – though I was still struggling to put my finger on exactly what this meant when I spoke about the subject briefly in an interview with Georgia Mann on BBC Radio 4 in 2016:

By then, we had begun to think in terms of the emergent quality of video games (that is, the sense that events are unfolding live and unscripted before your eyes). How could that be made a feature of written poems? We experimented with two-player collaborative-competitive poems, where a pair of poets vie for control, each operating under a separate constraint. We also started playing around with procedural generation. Another short pamphlet, Core Samples, used javascript to randomise the content of poems in the same way virtual terrain is generated in games like Minecraft, while an earlier experiment, Pantoum, retrod the ground of Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes, but as a digital text.

The question we started to ask ourselves was: what transforms a reader into a player?

Playable poems

Loss Pequeño Glazier describes the process of poetry’s expansion into digital-interactive space as extending “the physicality of reading”. That is to say, it is an experiential augmentation; readers become physically involved in shaping and moving through the poem, beyond the point of holding a book and turning the page. The more they have to do, the more dedicated they become to pursuing an outcome. We began dabbling in this area by creating digital versions of ordinary print poems broken up into stages, including Doomdark’s Revenge by Kate Potts, which we had previously published in Coin Opera 2.

This was released as part of a series of ‘play-poems’ produced in Twine, an online tool for writing interactive texts. We played around with slide presentation software to similar effect; this fusion of two of my own poems, Meat and Mustard, uses a free CSS resource called impress.js. (Meat in particular seemed to lend itself to interactive adaptation, since each line has within it a hidden word).

But these examples were missing something fundamental. As I embarked on my PhD research project, which was focussed on poem-game interplay, I began to formulate a theory of ludicity (or ‘game-ness’) that centred on responsibility; that is, a game implicates a player, rather than merely enabling them. Thus far we had struggled to cross into this territory, though one of our light-hearted play-poem constructions, Shag versus Cormorant, had touched on it by rewarding the reader with one of two different poems (and an accompanying illustration) depending on their responses to a range of questions.

The term ‘ludokinetic poem’ suggested itself to me when, as part of my research, I found I wanted to identify a new type of interactive poem, distinct from those that gave the reader no role to play, no persona that was integrated to the text. A ludokinetic poem, I decided, should in some way recognise that the reader is present. It should imply or directly state that they are an actor within the world of the poem.

One of the works I developed as a test case was Dicecave, a metaphysical undersea wreck-diving poem that drew inspiration from both Colossal Cave Adventure (1976), one of the first text adventure games and the precursor to the modern adventure game genre, and Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A Roll of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance) (1897), an early modernist poem which anticipated free verse and concrete poetry. Dicecave has no end point, and its beginning stanza is randomised; there is a secret message to uncover, but otherwise the poem only permits the reader to move from area to area via flickering ‘portal words’. However, in moving between these areas (which are also the stanzas of the poem), the reader is implicitly acting the part of a disorientated undersea diver, lost in the wreck. If they are able to see themselves in that way, then they have become the player of a game as well as the reader of a poem.

Poetry Games and Intertextual Mutation

A ludokinetic poem is literature first and foremost – literature with gameplay embedded. But a poem-game hybrid might equally be a game first and foremost. ‘Poetry games’, as I envisage them, incorporate poetry as a major building block in a game-world – not necessarily as a directly interactive element, but certainly as a principle component of the game’s internal system of meaning. At the time of writing, I have only made very minor forays into this territory.

Meanwhile, I use a more convoluted term – ‘ludo-poetic intertextual mutation’ – to describe games that play around with existing poems, and poems that play around with existing games, recycling or remarking on their content in order to expand on or re-make their meaning. Not ludokinetic, then, but a closely related area that could end up becoming even more expansive. See Calum Rodger’s ‘Rock, Star, North’, a 20-minute poetic travelogue set inside the world of Grand Theft Auto V, or one of my own efforts, ‘The Lookout’, performed in the video below by Guy Clark. This poem was rooted in the experience of playing as a thief in the 2014 game Monaco: What’s Yours is Mine, but in the process of writing both character and the setting were substantially changed.

The Sticking Point

The cultural separation of poetry from games remains stark. I would argue that it is representative of the cultural separation of meaning from pleasure, and of purpose from play. Liam Murray and John Maher write compellingly on the devaluation of fantasy in digital game properties, where it is often divorced from its political and psychological function and offered as pure escapism. Video games in particular are viewed, by vocal sections of both fans and critics, as glorious nonsense, free of application to the real world.

At the same time, mainstream literary culture sidelines – or side-eyes, perhaps, more accurately – fantasy and play, deeming it a distraction from the serious pursuit of truth. Murray and Maher have an apt term for that property of games and other popular media which makes traditional critics queasy: “scurrility ... that which is demeaned, impoverished, hidden, secret and guilty.”

This is a sad state of affairs. These two realms – that of making sense, and of exciting the senses – are inevitably interwoven. Moreover, serious literature’s retreat from fantasy leaves a vast imaginative realm to be plundered by primarily commercial and hobbyist interests, where the desire is to avoid reality rather than find ways of addressing it. Traffic between literature and games exists, and has always existed, but the resistance to it is stifling.

I therefore make the case for ludokinetic poetry and other forms of game-poem hybridity as an opportunity for growth in both mediums. There is great potential for a doubling up of the power both poetry and gameplay possess to cause us to reorientate ourselves, to make ourselves pliant and nimble – able to rethink the constrictions of place and identity that are imposed upon us.

— J.S. (May, 2020)