bookwarmgames Guest Lecture

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.

bookwarmgames Games in Literature

What Remains: From the Poems of Hannah Arendt to What Remains of Edith Finch

Illuminations and ruminations on what remains at the end of the week, the game, the century.

When I go looking for one thing and come up with another, and another, and… well, after awhile I almost can’t carry it all; I have to call it a day (a week, etc.), throw it together as best I can for the moment (see the present post), and let it go back out into the world, hoping another will find it as well–and will find it interesting, with any luck. Or at the very least, I’ll circle back to it one of these days to contemplate it anew in all its rich associations and, with the benefit of this open-ended time to come, will understand it a little better at last.

For example, the original point of departure here was meant to be a passage in Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, placed at the end of Illuminations, a volume of essays and reflections edited by Hannah Arendt:

The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called “historical materialism” is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight. (253)

Of course this passage leapt out at me, as it has for countless readers, for many reasons. Marxists of the Frankfurt school and AI prognosticators, Christian apologists and modern-day techno-charlatans alike, in all their combinations and permutations, will find in Benjamin a provocative thought partner. In my case, the drawing together of the imagery of play and theology makes for an endlessly fascinating analogy. I am a poor chess player and a slovenly scholar, but I do love to “imagine a philosophical counterpart” to games, and particularly love to wax philosophical about the ways in which their mechanics interact with their stories.

As for this particular image of “The Chess-Playing Turk,” its “story is told,” among other places, in a section bearing that name in Philip Pullman’s little-known early novel, Galatea:

In the next room were a number of curious automata, such as the famous Chess-Playing Turk designed by the Baron Von Kempelen, which sat cross-legged at a cabinet too full of intricate machinery to conceal a person, and which had defeated the finest chess-players of its time. There was also a machine called the Temple of the Arts, consisting of an automated view of Gibraltar, with moving warships, a platoon of tiny soldiers marching up and down, and a band of mechanical musicians, playing suitable tunes. There was an orange tree which blossomed and bore perfect painted fruit in less than a minute. There was a duck which quacked, breathed, ate and drank. There was a life-size automaton fluteplayer made by Jacques de Vaucanson which, according to its label, performed so realistically that many learned men had thought that it was human. (211)

Advertising poster for a show of Vaucanson’s automata (wikipedia)

Though written in the ’70s, Pullman’s unsuccessful novel, with its shades of magic realism and its author’s avowed admiration for the mystical quest narrative of A Voyage to Arcturus on full display, remains prescient for its surfacing of the question of the role of “the work of art in the age of mechanical [and electronic] reproduction”.

Add to this the fact that the title of Benjamin’s book is also that of Rimbaud’s, and then of Britten’s song cycle based on Rimbaud’s Illuminations, as I learned when I went looking for the searchable text on archive.org (and the search terms threw up the EarthBound player’s guide, somehow, as well. As ever, EB is in good canonical company–though maybe that’s just based on my own search history).

As the program notes have it:

Britten was deeply affected by the emotional intensity of these prose poems and decided to set them to music as soon as he had read them.  As the soprano Sophie Wyss, the dedicatee of the cycle, recalled:  “He was so full of this poetry he just could not stop talking about it, I suspect he must have seen a copy of Rimbaud’s works while he was recently staying with [W.H.] Auden in Birmingham.”

Britten chose a sentence from one of the poems as the motto for his cycle:  “J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage” (“I alone have the key to this savage parade”).  This sentence also provides the “key” to Britten’s view of Rimbaud’s poetry:  only the artist, observing the world from the outside, can hope to make sense of the “savage parade” that is life.

Having just played through the end of the first disc of Final Fantasy VIII, with its own “savage parade” and botched assassination attempt on the Sorceress, I can well understand the impression produced by being “so full of this poetry [I] just could not stop talking about it”–podcasting about it, in my case, with my friend Alexander Schmid. But I draw the line at this notion of being alone in having the key; for it is only through our dialogues, on the contrary, that I feel like I begin to be able to process the meaning of such a densely woven text.

I certainly don’t have a clue about what Rimbaud might be up to, and lovely as Britten’s songs are, I doubt he is the first or the best interpreter of the poet, either in terms of music or meaning. If, as the program notes say, artists alone think themselves able to interpret the world, so much the worse for them; though we may benefit from the confidence embodied in such art as they are thereby moved to produce, it sounds like a terribly solipsistic and lonely activity. To observe the effect of such a belief in the case of Rimbaud’s life, it appears to be part of what drove him to seek exile and enterprise in the desert, giving up poetry for salesmanship.

Klee’s Angelus Novus, Benjamin’s “angel of history” (wikipedia)

Though you never know. Lost poems may yet come to light. Or like Kierkegaard’s knight of faith, perhaps Rimbaud carried the heart of his poetry with him through a superficially ordinary life of infinite resignation. My own opinion, to which I stubbornly cling with a fierce devotion, is that these knights are inside us all, hidden better than the chess-player theologian under the mechanical turk’s table, and opening us like the Silenus of Socrates in The Symposium (and memorably related in Rabelais’ Prologue). When the time is right, we are all “found to contain images of gods”. In that light, the speaker of Rimbaud’s line may well be this precious cargo, and his famous line “I is another” can be brought to bear in this connection as well. In which case I heartily agree: no one else could possibly hold the key to the “savage parade” of life.

In dusting off these reflections years later for a belated spring break post in this year of myth in games, I was actuated by another chance discovery: one of my favorite podcasts, Backlisted, just released an episode discussing What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt. Give it a listen! Arendt, besides editing the collection of Benjamin’s essays, is the author of more than one of the 20th century’s classic works of philosophy, and has bequeathed us the clearest and most cutting precis of her time: “the banality of evil”–though, as the podcast mentions, its meaning, and the work in which it is formulated, Eichmann in Jerusalem, is contested.

I can’t be the only one to have noticed the resonances of What Remains of Edith Finch in the title chosen by the editors of Arendt’s poetry, and echoes of Osip Mandelshtam, of Reginald Gibbons, of Hölderlin and Heidegger…

Last but not least, in the spirit of Dirt newsletter’s weekly tab round-up, since I was recommending they look at Backlisted, too, here is a bit of what remains in my browser:

The Digital Antiquarian, recommended by Dylan Holmes, is well worth a read. Mixing up What Remains of Edith Finch (which I did watch a full playthrough of) and Dear Esther (which I didn’t yet, though it’s the one Dylan actually wrote about and recommended in our conversations), like “memory and desire” in April, “the cruelest month” to Eliot’s speaker, perhaps, though that title by common consent is given to March here in Spokane, I finally sat down to read what he had to say about JRPGs and was captivated as much by the comments as the articles’ content. Posters suggest links to a number of papers on localization, games as carriers of Japanese culture and values and cuteness, as locus of reflections on design and affect, and in a wonderful bit of synchronicity, to Beyond Role and Play, a book on LARP including a chapter that riffs on Don Quixote. There’s also a FF series retrospective for the completionist.

What else? I still need to submit a proposal to this CFP, and break down and buy MJ Gallagher’s book, and maybe this one on “Deep Games” by Doris Rusch, and actually read some more Arendt, including her poems—

This is the arrival:

Bread is no longer called bread

and wine in a foreign language changes the conversation.

–and the rest of Kentucky Route Zero, and Dear Esther, and the use of an invented Latin-ish language in FFVIII. I should submit a question for The Bible Project on the Tao and the Exodus Way. I should write more about Philip Pullman, the wheel of fortune as game show and ancient motif, saving as economic and theological image, Christmas subsumed, the spectral in Marx and the invisible hand in Smith…

Or what about this strange constellation of Benjamin’s bon mots on the theme of “backdrops”:

On the other hand, this heaven is only background; to explore it according to its own laws would be like framing the painted backdrop of the stage and hanging it in a picture gallery. (121)

 In his “Salon of 1859” Baudelaire lets the landscapes pass in review, concluding with this admission: “I long for the return of the dioramas whose enormous, crude magic subjects me to the spell of a useful illusion. I prefer looking at the backdrop paintings of the stage where I find my favorite dreams treated with consummate skill and tragic concision. Those things, so completely false, are for that very reason much closer to the truth, whereas the majority of our landscape painters are liars, precisely because they fail to lie.” (191)

?

Let it be said of me, as Arendt does of Benjamin in her introductory essay: “Well, he did not succeed in consolidating anything, and success would hardly have been possible.”

bookwarmgames Games in Literature

The Tale of Genji (Gloves): Gilgamesh, Benkei, and Basho in Final Fantasy

Playing fast and loose as usual with the connections, often tenuous but ever-present, between games and literature, this time let’s nevertheless open with a fairly straightforward question: Why are the Genji Gloves a recurring peak item in the Final Fantasy series?

And a little reading and searching provides at least three possible literary references.

Continue reading “The Tale of Genji (Gloves): Gilgamesh, Benkei, and Basho in Final Fantasy” →
bookwarmgames Current Semester

Alyse Knorr Conversation and World Wisdom Traditions / PS: Moonlight and Living

What all we’ve been up to

It may not look like much. Sorry about that! The lack of new posts around here lately will not, I hope, have discouraged you from browsing some of the archives in the meantime. Reading around in the links, podcasts, and resources we’ve put together over the years, there should be no shortage of secrets to find and people to meet. But I think there’s more going on even now at our humble Video Game Academy than it might appear. And it’s not for nothing that we are still here.

Over a summer extended with paternity leave on the front end and now quickly licking at the heels of fall, I’ve been able to read and re-read some good stuff, that is by listening on Libby audiobooks but occasionally holding an actual book (usually also from the library) with my free hand that’s not holding the child, or more often than either, just on archive.org on my phone. Still threading my way through Spariosu, I subject Ben to my takes on that and Omeros, and Alex and Danny get my thoughts on Ulysses, Lea my questions about Either/Or. So I keep up with a couple of book groups, formal and informal, and I’ve started up again writing reviews, including a couple new ones, on The Pixels. Their push for Hawaii aid is well worth your consideration.

Ben, too, has been pitching in and accumulating wisdom. While preparing a new course in World Wisdom Traditions, the Professor’s rolling along with the Pentateuch piece of his larger hermeneutical-ethical project. Between that and moving house, he took some time out to make a new video: Replaying Assassin’s Creed, 2012-2014. And to go by the site stats, a decent audience is out there awaiting his next journal on Lobotomy Corporation…

As far as Twitch videos, I’ve shifted away from game playthroughs back to more text-based discussions. The current series is on William James’ Talks to Teachers and other foundational books for teachers and students. We’ll look at Douglass’ Narrative of the Life next, still making the connection to video games with the ways in which the theme of learning to read comes through in JRPGs like EarthBound and Dragon Quest.

Podcast-wise, here’s a conversation with ⁠Alyse Knorr⁠, ‘achiever’ (to cite her Super Mario Bros 3, where I first encountered her work and reviewed it for ⁠The Pixels⁠). In which we discuss:

– ⁠Sweetbitter Podcast⁠, with new episodes coming soon about Mary Magdalen and a fourth season in the works

– Switchback Books, which she edits with her wife

– Regis University, where she teaches alongside colleagues such as Russ Arnold

– her poetry, research, and the novel she’s writing

For all you completionists: we talk about meaning and connection, truth and beauty, compassion, collaboration, and community; love poetry; queering religion and the reclamation of faith in a Jesus who speaks truth to power; spirituality and mystery; God (or goodness) as the still small voice; falling in love; taking inspiration from her students’ energy; ⁠Annotated Glass⁠ and Sappho fragment 31; coming out of the postmodern moment when sincere feeling was the most uncool thing; ‘⁠Bright Star⁠,’ Keats, Eliot, Carson’s Autobiography of Red; Gilgamesh and Enheduanna; ‘⁠Anatomy Exam⁠‘; Garcia Marquez; style and form, lyric and epic, ancient and sacred, emotion and bodily sensation, and finding new ways to render them, borrowing lines without knowing it; how form emerges and helps generate lines and line breaks; checking out legs at the library; respecting the uselessness of her art and the usefulness of her students’ (nursing); the act of naming; birdwatching as a mom of an infant; going from Edenic nescience to that corrupted knowledge place; naming the world; ⁠Ardor⁠, a book of eco-queer domestic life and love; ⁠Every Last Thing⁠, a book of tantrums and embarrassed apologies…

Does the poet hope for some response? Or is it nothing but a gift, this act of writing and learning from others’ experience and one’s own? To think about love, sincerity, earnestness? To celebrate queer joy as a political, radical act?

⁠Micaela Tore’s MA thesis on Copper Mother⁠; editing women and nonbinary authors; Gandalf the cat; the Voyager Golden Record (and around here you’ll get a musical interlude from ⁠moonbowmusic⁠); the poets’ communal economy; editing and publishing poetry vs. prose, ie. at Boss Fight; the contest model; video game books with Gabe Durham, their upcoming Minesweeper, Xenogears, Animal Crossing; being an ideal reader; her SMB3 and GoldenEye 007 projects, memoir and journalism and creative writing; Nintendo interviews and how the limits of poetry, like early technology, feed creativity.

Topophilia: ⁠Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘The Map’⁠; ⁠Henry Jenkins’ ‘Complete Freedom of Movement’⁠; ⁠Sean Fenty’s nostalgia piece in Playing the Past⁠. The completionist impulse; worlds in games, in Anchorage, in the self; secret areas, heroes and princesses; Miyamoto’s childhood explorations; the Bishop archives; growing up in the South; lines on the map; exile and the Garden; Dante; ways of incorporating games in classes.

Video Games and Meaning: topics, problems, persuasion and social justice: ⁠Hair Nah⁠ and microaggressions; Oregon Trail and colonialism; Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin; Passage; citizen science; This War of Mine; Papers, Please; Train; Anna Anthropy’s Dys4ia, Queers in Love at End of World, and ZZT. Her new novel (agents, check it out), a post-apocalyptic story of love and a journey; Dhalgren; Ico; too much stuff, not enough people.

Alyse also recommends Merlin for birdwatching; “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock,” by TS Eliot; “Married,” “Alone,” “In Dispraise of Poetry,” and “Failing and Flying,” by Jack Gilbert.

Teaching-wise, I’m working on a collaborative research project with MG Prezioso, who studies literary enjoyment and understanding. Joe and I still have our liberal arts and leadership segments under the banner of the Thoughtful Dad, just not lately managing to record much.

Life-wise, back from visiting family. The Baltimore Aquarium, crowded as heck. Steve and his wife came down from Philadelphia (congrats you two!). DC museums with crying kids and a flash flood in the streets. Braving it all with the folks and Auntie Oli. Rehoboth Beach for a couple of days. Then back to Spokane, just trying to breathe through the smoke.

PS. On the flight home, I watched Living and Moonlight. Each on its own is very good. Together, they pair beautifully around the theme of play. In the one, a remake of Ikiru (itself based on The Death of Ivan Illich), we get renditions of ‘The Rowan Tree‘ and musings on the metaphor of play, with dying like a mother calling her children home. In the other, a movie that is almost too good to believe it found a way to exist, much like Everything Everywhere All in that at Once though different in practically every other way, we see one of those children who sits out of the game, almost, before being brought back in by a friend and making another kind of play all their own. Their song: ‘Hello Stranger,’ by Barbara Lewis.