The Poetry of Virtual Worlds – Guest Post by Greg Bem

“This was written with Forbidden West in mind”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945) emphasized the role of the body in human experience:

Insofar as, when I reflect on the essence of subjectivity, I find it bound up with that of the body and that of the world, this is because my existence as subjectivity is merely one with my existence as a body and with the existence of the world, and because the subject that I am, when taken concretely, is inseparable from this body and this world.

(Doyle, New Opportunities for Artistic Practice in Virtual Worlds, 2015, pages 93-94)

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But what of multiple worlds

and worlds within worlds

Cognition a gray sweater

that illuminates nothingness

when flames (worlds) arrive.

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You were killed by lava. You were killed by a serpent. You were killed by ______.

The disclaimers will continue. Death becomes a spiral outwards and upwards, a lesson, a reincarnation.

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Where there is world there is life, and where there is life there is death, and it’s impossible not to know rebirth in this model, this statement that humans have imposed upon themselves.

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Who was the first to say “Game Over” is a misnomer?

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Who was the first to turn life into lives, to give “extra,” to provide a plurality to our relationship? To keep us hijacked, smiling, blissful, tethered into a “this could always become and become more”?

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Death as joy.

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The way we die, or log off, or quit. Exit to the main menu. Exit to desktop. The intrinsic meeting the ecstatic: it is all temporary, we will be back.

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I begin sitting down. My body disappears. I begin in a place. There is no more weight. There is no more shapes. The ether fills. Eyes take over. Vision.

The screen moves from absence to presence. The ground loads. The sky loads. Shapes begin to populate. And I am breathing. And there is a flicker of breath, a digital soul shifts position, in the movement in front of me. If I stare just long enough, I am in conversation. This entity in front of me is a character. And we are beginning to dance.

Each moment entering into a world is incredibly special, a welcoming in, a beckoning. I can almost feel the waves of air parting between me and a world as the hand slices through in urgency. Come, be with us, come, explore with us.

A sprig of grass bounces back and forth. A small mammal makes a cry as it darts away into the horizon. Clouds silently expand and diminish in algorithmic intelligence.

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Each moment entering into a world. Each moment entering. This sense of load, save, load, save. The returning, the coming back. There is always a coming back.

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Under layers of pixels my beating heart is sustained and low for ages. Waiting for the crisis to crack, the heart getting massaged by mouse click and key tap.

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Shift feet on carpet, plastic foot rest, plastic cover. Easy for wheels to slide. Easy for rotation, getting settled in, getting up and exploding out into the everything that exists beneath the hood.

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This is not about what I do, it is all about how I am.

Stand up.

More coffee.

Sit down.

And stand up.

Ice cream.

Sit down.

And stand up.

Snacks.

Sit down.

Stand up.

Water.

Sit down.

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There is something about the stack of beers that used to pile up around his desk as he ground through MOBAs and MMOs for hours every night. I’ll always remember that altar of numbness. Though I called it a glass cathedral. Was it bigger than him? The individual? Was it bigger than us? Was it emblematic of all the followers of the subtle, brutal, intensely ever-present escapism?

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Who are we when we’re running around arenas together? Fighting complacency, finding the will to live. Is this modeling? Crafting new models? Designing the new approach? Quake leads to parkour. Bunny hopping leads to summiting peaks. There is time travel; dissonance between discovery and translation.

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On the verge of turning forty, I know my breath is what I’ve held in place for countless hours. Countless becomes dozens. Becomes hundreds. Becomes thousands.

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And yearning to imagine more, always yearning to image. I can see you, oh androgynous anonymous, with your thousands of hour in your nook of cyber love, co-existing. You bring the soul shiver just by contributing.

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Electrical requirements. Taking so much for granted. And when the device breaks, the power stops, there is great sorrow. And when it all returns, there is great joy.

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Why does leaving not have a fading away, a deconstruction, a slow removal of objects until we are left with the faint outlines of a skybox and a giant, ever after void?

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Early MMOs, find a place to sit, and sit there. Then, and only then, can you properly log off.

And if you don’t follow the rules, what happens? Will your “progress” go “unsaved”?

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K makes a game that involves a pit. One can jump out of it, but they need to learn how to jump. I didn’t learn how to jump. I died in the pit. “You were killed by lava.” Or something. And I feel the vague sense that learning is the next step. There is no need. There is no “necessity.” It is not “You must learn how to jump.” It is simply is the unabashed next step.

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Or I could never return. I could leave. I could escape the escape. For another option. An alternative method. Excitement is matched and balanced with anxiety: to embrace nuance, to give and to take, to accept and to reject. Humanity continues to impose its limitations, including choice.

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The future will be permutations upon permutations. The future will be all options at once. The future will be beyond “extra lives” to “infinite lives.” Infinite living will be the next surge, the next spike.

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Will we then be forced to move into limitation as a future future iteration? To remember that linearity always had its benefits, its quaking benefits, its beginning and end, its sense of level, leveling, finite structure, rigidity as a great exclamation?

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We may still find ourselves loading into the space, the flow of endorphins twin spirals between screen and body of player, the real of the in real life is equal parts virtual, a concoction, a cocktail, of here and everywhere, of linear and open, of possibility and action. The long form list of dualities that builds pressure and enhances the techno relationship ad infinitum.

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There’s time to clear our heads with all of this. Beneath the logistics and the observations, there is a literary subtext. There is a reason beneath it all, beneath all the questions, the individuals, the collectives, the objectively disconnected and isolated. Deconstruction bedamned, it needs only be to continue being, the narrative is a tapestry, the story is a web of stories, it is storied, it has happened, and that is enough.

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Greg Bem is a poet, publisher, and librarian in Spokane, Washington. A lifelong gamer and game enthusiast, one of his current creative writing projects is a book-length lyrical essay on virtual worlds and performance. An additional sequence is available in the 2025 issue of LEGENDS, the Spokane Community College literary magazine. Earlier in his timeline, he published a game studies blog, and many of his other creative projects can be found at gregbem.com.