Difficult Poetry

The aspiration of HAIKU GAMES to be like haiku, like this one specific form of poetry, is often inspirational to me in and of itself. It’s a place I like to return to.

Is the poet responsible for being understood?

By way of @johnnemann (a Twitter user, a real person)’s tweet, “Here’s what I have to say about game difficulty: more games should be challenging like a book or a movie or a sculpture is challenging“, I found my way to the below article. (Apparently twitter and comments sections are good for something now and then, after all.)

The Pleasures of John Ashbery’s “Difficult” Poetry

I won’t be referring to the article in any major way, but I enjoyed the read, so I’ve enshrined it here in case you’re inclined to read it.

It is not unique to poetry that you can skip over difficult passages but I think the poem tends to have a more innovative-videogame-design-like difficulty, in that a poem revels in its own form more often than not, even invents its own form and expects the reader to play along, crucially an act which requires, first, learning how to play along.

It’s interesting to ask how a videogame might be challenging like a book or movie, but I think it’s equally interesting to consider how books, movies, and poetry might be challenging like a videogame, and what that means: they cannot hide words or scenes, but can rely on a player‘s sense of comprehension in a way that is analogous to how a game relies on a player’s sense of comprehension of the mechanics.

(I will probably be using that word a bit more in the future.)