The Odd Communion: TRPGs, Poetry, Videogames, virtualworlds and more Andrea Coates

My next project for Pittsburgh is to have writers write about videogames. In general I think pop culture subject matter makes a poem fresh. It's relatable and it's not flowers or valleys and like I spend 2/3 of my day staring at a screen, so.

I live in a world most defined by the commercialsprawl thing that Andrea Coates talks about here*. Products, logos, not necessarily all bent to sell me things because the machine throws sparks, too. Nothing's perfect, and not too many people are at the helm.

In this popmedia sprawl lies video games, commercial structures included. Is it just my particular ///sidenote: check out this Andrea quote and the future of Alt Lit as it does not exist sadly:

http://www.fvckthemedia.com/issue43/feminarkist

In this popmedia sprawl, as I was saying, exists a fun and potentially valid future venue of art called gaming; the ultimate V.R. experience which is as well the future "3d experience" of other various digital medias. To a lesser extent, i.e. the poetry's equivalent, lies role-playing games, those on the tabletop, involving paper and pencils.////

///Ok, for the record, here's my life experience right now: I loaded up, on my twin brother's advice, the Donald Glover short film "Clapping For The Wrong Reasons" to watch as I wrote this piece. Somehow the video ended up paused and an Andrea Coates poem, Dear Shane Smith, started playing on Soundcloud in a background tab. Little did I know of any of this, as I thought the still image of Don Glover lying in bed while Andrea Coates' growly revolutionary message played in the background was, having not recognized the voice of A.C., that this was the actual Don Glover film. I thought it was pretty good.    ....All this while I try to type and simultaneously load up the Arcane Kids' faux-virtual-reality Soundcloud/Unity webdevice.... My computer threatens to crash. All my blogging may delete. I'm running a Chromebook which has very little RAM. You may begin to get a sense of the strained techno-interpersonal connections of my life. A.C. begins screaming as I try to pause the Don Glover movie which doesn't seem to be actually playing, the whole façade begins falling apart as the computer does crash, and I'm left with a digital silence at least along with my writing which was not deleted. This as I sit in my parent's house 1 year after a 5-year college english-degree completion with little-to-nothing to do during my 15-hour workweek. I can't write poetry because no one cares. I type up a blogspot.////

The obsession that has entered my life lately is the rpgs as made by Zak Smith, Patrick Stuart, James Raggi: Lamenations of the Flame Princess. A stripped-down version of D&D meant to semi-emulate original-edition D&D but built with more horror in mind. Kinda eldritch, kinda disempowering, kinda simple character creation to replace the dead characters who died fighting that evil thing at 1st level.

I find communion in these objects -- gametexts, online virtual webtoys, and yeah I guess videogames themselves-- when they occasionally create cohesion between individuals, as opposed to the more regular solitary cohesion between individual and produkt. I mean the online gaming experience, with its modulated microphone voices ringing through virtual death machines, these, your friends. I also mean sitting around a table and bullshitting about what you're going to do to a white dragon. There's dice involved, in virtual reality too, and these mechanical components seem to strain-- usefully-- against the more nuanced and forgiving social interactions. You can commit a player to death on the back of lady luck, and similarity, you can stomp a public server of noobs** if you've mastered the art of clicking and clacking fast enough. 

Poetry in these circumstances I think doesn't lie with the storywriting behind the gametexts- virtual or not- or with the social interactions, or with the mechanical interactions. I think the poetry connection lies in the making of love to a machine.  The obsequity of man serving machine, machine pleasing human, in an endless loop for hours. This in a possibly ritualistic formal setting between you and your friends. This is the kinda poetry I'm after, making sense of this digital-mechanical-psychological connection which bounces back and forth in my living room for days at a time. It's an odd communion.

~poetryburgh

*Note that this, the article I wanna talk about, wherein A.C. takes down Tao Lin for  a kind of rampant commercialism which both emodies his work as well as the environment we live in (as millennials, or really everyone on earth), this article has been been made private on Andrea's former blog. This too is the condition of internet literature: temporary publications. Everything is accessible but for limited times! It's hard not to feel as if I'm standing by the edge of grinding pit, digital publications being as vulnerable as they are... some of my favorite writing lost forever... As well it would probably be a good blog post to write about the increasing ability of artists themselves to sequester their own work from the free-online space.

**outdated...