Game Poems of Place and Encounter
Jordan Magnuson, Fulbright Scholar 2024-2025 at Digital Culture, shows a small selection of his works.
Main content
“Game Poems of Place and Encounter” features three short videogame works dating from 2011 to 2024 that investigate aspects of place and encounter through the lens of simple videogame components and technologies. By eschewing traditional gaming expectations like fast reactions, clear rules and objects, and traditional mechanics in favor of simple meditative experiences bound to metaphor, ritual space, and rhythm, these works position themselves as “videogame poems”--a concept explored in Magnuson’s 2023 book, Game Poems.
All three works feature walking and traversal as a key gameplay mechanic tied to pacing, rhythm, and the exploration of place. The Kindness of Strangers (2011) utilizes a classic maze structure familiar from many videogames to represent the challenges and joys of navigating through unfamiliar territory with the help of strangers met along the way. As Magnuson reflected in 2011, this work uses photos and voiceover to capture the “particular texture” of his individual day-to-day experience of traveling through Taiwan for the first time. As one of Magnuson’s first explicitly autoethnographic games about encountering a new place, this work laid the foundation for future projects of this kind, including Magnuson’s current project of making games inspired by his experiences in Norway--the first of which is With Magnus to Norway.
With Magnus to Norway (2024) is a videogame installation work that features recognizable 8-bit aesthetics and a repurposed dance pad controller, and builds on the groundwork laid by The Kindness of Strangers, as well as several of Magnuson’s early experiments with 8-bit “walking simulators.” These experiments date back to his 2010 Flash game, Walk or Die, and extend through games such as Everyone Forgets (2022), which is also on display. As with much of Magnuson’s work, these games challenge the conventional narrative of videogames by reimagining the possibilities of early gaming technology. With Magnus to Norway invites participants to experience a reflective, poetic journey that was never realized during the early console period: a contemplative walk through nature with a growing child, that is simultaneously a journey towards an ancestral homeland.
Short Bio
Jordan Magnuson is an experimental game creator and new media artist with a particular interest in using basic videogame technologies to craft alternative gameplay experiences. Jordan is currently Senior Lecturer in Games and Media Art at the University of Southampton, and 2024-25 Fulbright Scholar in Digital Culture at UiB.
