Synopsis for Games as Art or Artifact – Poetry as a game

The Internet contains many examples of interactive poetry or new poetry. That is poems that a player must interactively explore, most usually they are made in Flash but there exist other forms as well such as hypertext and video. These examples of poetic games allow the player to explore a poem interactively as you would a game. The game play is experiential whereby the players explore the poetic environment towards the end goal of constructing their own meaning. Each poem allows the player freedom to explore the poetic environment to such an extent that the player will find their own way through the interactive poetic environment in a non-linear fashion. In this paper I discuss and analyze some examples of these poetic games and the resulting experience for the player.