Videogames, Consciousness and Poetic Form

A Tribe Essay on How I Use Form

Beginning in Bits and Bytes

Growing up, I enjoyed videogames a lot. Not the likes of the latest shooters or graphical masterpieces, but of classic and retro videogames. I always found pixel and low-poly art to have a certain charm, while the simplicity of the ideas and mechanics seemed wonderful in creating raw and engaging entertainment experiences. I enjoyed it when new games took inspiration from the limitations of these titles but combined them with the wisdom of game design lessons compiled from a few decades of experimentation. Delver is a great example if this - taking the fast-paced nature of games like Quake with the dungeon crawling nature of Rogue, all tied up with fantasy pixel art and a blocky aesthetic.

Then, I discovered something even more interesting - that people were still creating their own games for old consoles that had long been discontinued from production. An example that really caught my interest was the work of Morphcat Games and, in particular, their game “Micro Mages”, which was made for the NES with the same constraints as the original Super Mario Brothers. They did a great mini-documentary on their process, and why they were attracted to creating a game that could fit within the limitations of the original Nintendo Entertainment System.

So why am I - someone who works primarily in poetry - talking about niche videogames?

For me, all of these games do an excellent job at embodying the principle of creative constraint - the idea that, by putting certain restrictions around how we create a piece of art or entertainment, we inspire ourselves to maximise what we are able to accomplish within those constraints and create something incredible. It is perhaps the opposite of thinking “outside the box” - instead of running from obstacles, we embrace them.

I suspect that part of what drew me to those videogames in the first place is in their embrace of creative constraint - an idea that I find particularly attractive and, in some ways, fundamental to life. I want to use this piece to explore the implications of creative constraints in poetic form and the way in which I utilise form in my writing to accentuate various qualities in a way I might not be able to otherwise.