1 The Book and the Maze

At the bottom of page 40 of The Abominable Snowman by R.A. Montgomery I am abruptly given a choice. The page addresses me directly, as “you”. It tells me that I am in a Tibetan monastery drinking yak-butter tea with a monk. There is the sound of bell-ringing in the distance, and wind shuffling the pine trees. After sitting in silence “for what seems like hours, listening with [my] whole being,” the monk at last invites me to go on a journey. If I wish to comply, I must turn to page 51. If, on the other hand, I decide that I am “not prepared to change [my] life forever,” I should turn to page 63. While there is nothing strange about a media artefact claiming to be able to change my life forever, it is rare that one should offer the means of doing so through a simple turn of the page. Merely by making this claim, and despite my awareness that The Abominable Snowman is only a game, Montgomery imbues the act of page-turning with a significance beyond the merely functional; it becomes a way of confirming that the “you” in the text is me, that I have a presence in the book, that I am not only reading but playing.

The structure of this kind of “game book” – that of a maze with multiple routes, many leading to unsatisfying endings – was seemingly envisaged by Jorges Luis Borges in his 1941 short story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” a text frequently cited in the field of game studies. In the story, the Sinologist Stephen Albert claims to have solved the mystery of what became of the two great projects conceived by a famous Chinese governor, Ts’ui Pen:

Ts’ui Pen must have said once: I am withdrawing to write a book. And another time: I am withdrawing to construct a labyrinth. Every one imagined two works; to no one did it occur that the book and the maze were one and the same thing. (Borges 2000, 50)

This concept has been described as the blueprint for the hypertext novel (Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort 2003), and hence for the narrative video game. 1980s text adventure video games, the more sophisticated relations of adventure game-books, evolved into games with graphical interfaces, in which the second-person address is replaced with a visible avatar, the digital incarnation of the player’s presence in the game, and the number of options available to the player is expanded far beyond the ability to choose between forking paths.

At the same time, when I read The Abominable Snowman, I am reminded of the way I make my way through a book of poetry, and even through an individual poem. Very rarely do I start from the first page and read the subsequent pages in numerical order. Very rarely do I start on the first line of a poem and read the subsequent lines from left to right and top to bottom, without going back or jumping ahead. In the case of both book and poem, I tend to begin with a fly-by, passing quickly over pages and lines, seeing what catches my attention, trying to get a sense of the shape of the whole. When I am part way through, I will often return to an earlier point, or linger, or peek a few lines on. If there is a pattern of rhymes, I will make my way back and forth across that pattern, or linger in one place, looping back around to the start of a fragment that has impressed or baffled me. There are poems, I realise, that I have never finished reading, because I become repeatedly tangled up in one part of them. There are those I begin over and over, from the top, since I get lost part of the way through. When I do sit down with a poetry book and make the effort to start at the start and end at the end, I inevitably feel that I have missed things in the middle, that I must go back and reread. In fact, most of the poetry books I have ever read remain, in one sense of another, unfinished, even those where I have taken time to absorb every word. They retain a charge where novels give up almost the entirety of themselves in the culmination of plot. Stephen Albert’s description of Ts’ui Pen’s great project as “a labyrinth of symbols” seems a fitting description of a poem.

In this chapter, therefore, I mean to investigate more fully the idea of a conceptual and experiential overlap between poetry and video games, by way of a review of key critical concepts in literary theory and game studies. What I aim to uncover is one or more core similarities between what a poem is and what a video game is, how they are interacted with, how they are read, played with and consumed. This will form the basis for further examination of poem-game interplay and hybridity later in the book, as well as for the practical experiments that make up part of my investigation. The chapter will follow a simple three-part structure: first, an account of poetry and of the poem, at a very general level; second, an account of the video game in a similar manner; third, a discussion of play theory, what it means to play and for a text to play or be played, and what perspectives on play may be sensibly applied to our interactions with poetry and video games. From these I will draw conclusions about the ways the two are linked in terms of how we experience and conceive of each.

1.1 What is a Poem?

In his Poetics, Aristotle responds to Plato’s condemnation of poets as insidious falsifiers by characterising lyric poetry as an imitative form combining rhythm, language and harmony, the overall purpose of which is to accurately represent human endeavours. Much later, in the early seventeenth century, Thomas Campion set out to demonstrate, in Observations in the Art of English Poesie, that poetry is “the chiefe beginner and maintayner of eloquence, not only helping the eare with the acquaintance of sweet numbers, but also raysing the mind to a more high and lofty conceite” (1602, para 1 of 44). It achieves this due to being made by “Simmetry and proportion,” just as music is, and just as the world is, in Campion’s reckoning.

Later still there are the famous definitions by William Wordsworth (“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity”) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (“the best words in the best order”, as quoted in Henry Nelson Coleridge’s Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge), both in the nineteenth century. In 1944, in his Introduction to The Wedge, William Carlos Williams wrote:

A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words … As in all machines its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character. In a poem this movement is distinguished in each case by the character of the speech from which it arises. (Williams 2009, para 9 of 15)

I choose to highlight these because between them, they account for much of the popular understanding of poetry’s place and purpose, while also appearing to contradict and talk over one another. It is difficult to imagine an alien, faced with this array of descriptions, being able to discern that Aristotle, Campion and Williams are all talking about the same thing.

This functional and conceptual instability is tentatively embraced by many poetry practitioners, as well as those who think deeply about the medium, though there are periodic resurgences in strict adherence to Wordsworth’s creed of spontaneous overflow or Aristotle’s stipulation of verisimilitude. Perloff chronicles two periods in twentieth-century English-language poetry – the period dominated by the modernism of Eliot and Pound, and the counterculture of the 1960s – when the doctrine of natural or common speech came to the fore, such that poets would aim to make the poem a convincing impression of raw communication from the mind or mouth of a thinking and feeling person. Perloff (1991) convincingly analyses the results as mere simulations of the natural, increasingly prone to borrowing their effects from televisual media.

As it has become harder to sustain a belief in literary naturality, or in language that speaks to a universal human condition, the public attitude toward poetry has turned toward gentle bewilderment, and poets have increasingly made a pastime out of defending and redefining their art. Pithy or easy explanations tend to be rejected – major poets instead write entire books that recast the poem in new light (Maxwell 2012; Paterson 2018), while newcomers are routinely invited to develop their own personal definition.

Let us suppose that this in itself speaks to something fundamental about poetry’s character, that its reason for being is malleable, equivocal, even provocatively unforthcoming, in a way that paradoxically speaks to its value, as expressed by Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska:

Poetry –

but what is poetry anyway?

More than one rickety answer

has tumbled since that question first was raised.

But I just keep on not knowing, and I cling to that

like a redemptive handrail. (Szymborska 1996, 14 – 19)