"You take a game like Pong, for example, and you make 50 variations of it. One of Pippin Barr’s games is just called Pongs. And he used the original Pong game, and its mechanics, to create a game about refugees instead of table tennis."
this snippet of the interview is mind blowing. i never played the game, but i feel like the original Pong mechanics is used as a... metaphor?
I thought I would reading a text about putting a layer of poetry over the gaming stuff, and the poetry would be something metalinguistical. I mean, like Guitar Hero is not a musical game, but a game based in music that already existed. or like The Last of Us, that also gamefied playing chords on an acoustic guitar... This is not about gamifying poetry, it is something deeper!
Game mechanics can have the same logic and affection properties in the same way that poetry or music do! if one is able to create a metonymy, or an euphemism, even irony only with a set of game mechanics structures, it could create a game poem!
It's crazy, the backend developer, looking into the terminals and writing the chunks of codes would become the artist itself! MINDBLOWING
Yes, that was also my first thought when I read the term "game poem". The amount of possibilities in game development got way bigger for me after understanding what the concept truly was. I really can't recommend Jordan's book enough! It's an amazing read. His curated game poems' collection is also a great example of what he's talking about.
Thanks for the lovely read. So many ideas to get lost in. But especially timely for personal reasons is that of not-game. To break the bounds which contains it. Applies to everything.
"You take a game like Pong, for example, and you make 50 variations of it. One of Pippin Barr’s games is just called Pongs. And he used the original Pong game, and its mechanics, to create a game about refugees instead of table tennis."
this snippet of the interview is mind blowing. i never played the game, but i feel like the original Pong mechanics is used as a... metaphor?
I thought I would reading a text about putting a layer of poetry over the gaming stuff, and the poetry would be something metalinguistical. I mean, like Guitar Hero is not a musical game, but a game based in music that already existed. or like The Last of Us, that also gamefied playing chords on an acoustic guitar... This is not about gamifying poetry, it is something deeper!
Game mechanics can have the same logic and affection properties in the same way that poetry or music do! if one is able to create a metonymy, or an euphemism, even irony only with a set of game mechanics structures, it could create a game poem!
It's crazy, the backend developer, looking into the terminals and writing the chunks of codes would become the artist itself! MINDBLOWING
Yes, that was also my first thought when I read the term "game poem". The amount of possibilities in game development got way bigger for me after understanding what the concept truly was. I really can't recommend Jordan's book enough! It's an amazing read. His curated game poems' collection is also a great example of what he's talking about.
Thanks for the lovely read. So many ideas to get lost in. But especially timely for personal reasons is that of not-game. To break the bounds which contains it. Applies to everything.
Oh, I'm so so happy you liked this interview! And I agree, I usually think about how these hard bounds around different media are limiting.
Thanks for the super thoughtful interview, Andre! Let's grab coffee together sometime. <3
Sure thing, this’d be lovely!
❤️