Game Poems, Issue #1: First Moves

Game Poems, Issue #1: First Moves is a playable magazine created to highlight the poetic potential of short-form videogames and explore unusual modes of authoring and framing play-based experiences. Rather than a compilation of standalone games, the issue is designed to be seen as an authored experience in which multiple short works function together within a shared framing device to challenge and push out conceptions of how videogames might be experienced, and what they are for. Developed through an open call and peer review process, Issue #1 brings together thirteen short experimental videogames by an international group of artists, poets, scholars, and game designers. Each contribution was created in dialogue with a shared theme and editorial framework, and is presented within a custom interface that shapes how the works are encountered, read, and played. Game Poems uses the literary magazine format as a key compositional strategy for repositioning game-making as a poetic practice: the sequencing, paratexts, visual design, and framing all play a role in guiding players through a particular kind of experience. We see multiplicity in this context not as aggregation, but as a crucial dimension of form, which is why the issue is intended to be engaged with in full as a single work.