A-Side / B-Side: On Games as Split EPs and Slam Poems
Phantom Interviews #4
I’ve been exploring the idea of game poems, a term introduced in my earlier interview with Jordan Magnuson. Since then, I’ve spoken with other creators whose work blends games and poetic expression — and this conversation is part of that ongoing journey.
This time, I sat down with Samuli Pietikäinen — better known online as comfiedev — whose work lives at the intersection of the audiovisual and the literary, of play and pace, of space and speech.
Their recently released Concrete Spaces is a bilingual interactive poetry anthology that embraces spoken word rhythm and spatial disorientation, while The Olisinpa Split offers two short, sharp pieces paying homage to the spirit of “split EPs” in music culture. In both projects, Samuli dismantles the expectations of traditional gameplay, creating digital artefacts that are both introspective and strikingly contemporary.
We spoke about poetic interactivity, Finnish-English bilingualism, and what it means to design games that resist being “games” at all.
👻 Let’s start with your interactive poetry anthology, Concrete Spaces. You have said it “plays with creating and destroying spatial expectations, spoken word inspired pacing, and bilinguality”. I am really curious; how did you approach translating the rhythm and energy of spoken word into digital form?
Great question, I've always been fascinated with spoken poetry, and I'd argue that to some extent most of my work does capture bits and pieces of it, directly or indirectly. However, there's a few key aspects that make Concrete Spaces a bit more realized in this case.
The game's dialogue consists of single lines, that shortly after placement, get erased. This conscious choice was used to capture that fleeting nature of spoken word, which is why there's never a moment in the game where you're able to view multiple lines at the same time. It all exists in this constant state of reconstruction.
Positioning, and movements are also concepts that I played with while designing the game, as the different lines never get displayed in the same places. You, as the player, are in charge of discovering the poetry, one row at a time.
The game also plays with the narrative 'weights' of the lines. Some lines take longer to get erased; giving the player varying amounts of time to reflect and think. These small, yet purposeful design decisions made for a small experimental art project, that I'm hoping some people will find engaging.
👻 Still regarding that bilingual expression in Concrete Spaces. How do English and Finnish function in your work, as both assume roles greater than language?
Yeah, so the bilingualism in my work is rarely just an aesthetic choice, even if aesthetics are still a prominent factor in the decision making! I believe that using multiple languages can be a nice and new way of presenting narrative notions to the player. Even if it does limit the potential player pool.
At the start of this year, I released a game called 'Hengähtänet', which dances around bilingualism in a more substantial way. The game sheds light on its different speakers through the use of multiple languages. It was an interesting experiment, but there's still some other things I'm hoping to do in this field.
In Concrete Spaces the use of languages takes a different role, as most of the time these languages exist separated from each other. This was done as an attempt to test the waters in making something that's exclusively written in my mother tongue, and I'm eager to explore that more soon... hopefully! There's still a few instances where languages overlap in the game though, if you're wondering.
👻 The Olisinpa Split is another really interesting project, which draws inspiration from split EPs, packaging two distinct games (sides A and B) into a shared release. What connected the A-side (Burn the Scrapman) and the B-side (I’m Not Stanley Parable) in your mind? And why revisit this music-inspired format?
This whole side project was largely made while I was suffering from a high fever, so a big portion of it is in-fact a 'fever dream'... but the ideas for both of the games did exist before the proper development process! Very rarely do you stumble upon games that take advantage of intertextuality, especially in the context of other games, which quickly got the narrative ball rolling for me. The whole concept of making a game about another game is fascinating, and I'm happy to have experimented with it!
The underground rap scene in Finland has always been a massive inspiration and passion for me, and cassette tapes are still a somewhat prominent form of distribution there, which has made me want to apply some of that aesthetic in video game format. It was also clear to me that if I wanted to pursue a project like this, it'd have to a) be released physically, and b) take advantage of the 'split EP' concept.
It does sadden me that there's not enough innovation in the 'wrapper' part of indie games, and most games operate on the very similar formula of " menu -> play -> lose -> quit", which was another thing that drove me to this approach. Both of the games get opened at the same time, and you can play through them in the order of your choosing, which was intended to act as a way of breaking that usual formula. Beware folks, there's a new wrapper in town. Yeah.
👻 You mentioned working on an interactive digital restoration of a 50-year-old Finnish wild berry booklet. That sounds fascinating! What’s the motivation behind that project? Do you already have a plan on what this is going to look like?
Yeah! It's a project that I pick up around once a month, just for fun. The booklet I was referring to was found for a euro at a second hand store, and I immediately fell in love with it. It felt like a zine before that whole culture was even born. It'd be nice to digitalize it, and let other people experience a forgotten relic. I'm convinced that this, if anything, is actually lost media. This is just one of the many art projects that I'm juggling with currently, I've yet to have anything finished just yet, but I'm hoping to release more work soon. Preferably for free.
👻 Are there any games, books, movies or other media that have been on your mind lately, or that have influenced you and your work?
A lot of my work is influenced heavily by written literature. There's one book in particular that I owe a lot of gratitude towards, Matti Pentikäinen's Aavaavaa. The book explores bilingual poetry in ways that I've never really experienced elsewhere. It's really remarkable! Pentikäinen has also influenced the contemporary rap group Ceebrolistics, which continues on that same experimental field, but in the form of music.
Another artist that I always bring up is Richard Hofmeier. His games are like no other. Period.
You can check out comfiedev’s itch.io here!
— The ghost that has been haunting game poets,
almoghost.exe (or André Almo if you’re feeling serious) 👻
Good interview!
😍