Getting started with a new idea...

I have for a long time thought there should be a way, or some ways, to give people a poetry experience using game engines...

A bit of history: poetry probably started back in prehistory, and was recited, live, by poets to a listening audience - call this "poetry 1.0".  Poetry 2.0 is words printed on the page, and these two still provide 99.9% of all poetry experiences.  There are some mild variations, like poetry recorded on a CD or poetry recited in a VLog, but basically these two are it.  (And then there is songs, which are sort of the same, sort of different...)

There two distinct modes of experience going on there.  Poetry you listen to is delivered at the speed that the poet speaks, and will move on without you.  Recordings (and songs) also have this property.  Poetry you read is a little less anchored in time, your eyes can skip ahead, pause, go back and read a part again...

The game engine experience might be able to provide some different modes again, or perhaps something intermediate to the two.  It might enable us to get inside the poem, explore environments related to it, experience background information at the same time as the original words.  It might allow us to customise this poem to our own desires, or needs, or even play in a sandpit where we can construct poetry variations of out very own...

I've tried to get into this a few times, and I have always bounced hard, and the problem is...

...that a game engine is simply too powerful; it can do too much; there are too few constraints.  Putting a poem on a page, the constraints are obvious: 2D, black and white (usually), arrange the words in lines (usually), don't print any words on top of one another (usually) and so on.  In a game engine, we can take a stab at representing almost anything we can imagine...  The event horizon of a black hole: sure!  A crowded subway train: fine!  A dimension portal with "a host of golden daffodils" pouring out of it zapping everybody in sight with joy-of-lonely-solitude-oh-look-at-the-FLOWERS rays: no problem.

I am not saying all of those are easy, but they are all within the reach of a decent game engine.  And so... so... this is a problem!  It is all but impossible to work out how to structure your poetry experience, if everything is possible.  One needs some ground rules, some start point...  (and to get technical one may also need conventions, and tropes, genres, styles etc...)

However I have now HAD AN IDEA which is basically cutting poems in half, vertically and allowing the user/reader/player (<-- see, we don't even have the terminology all sorted yet) to recombine them at will, to explore a sort of "poem space" in which many different poems can be found.  There will be no wrong (and no right) answers to this.  It is not a puzzle game where you have to reassemble the Seven Lost Poems of Thraldor in order to open a gate and avenge your mentor...

Rather, there will be many many different "poem-like" arrangements which you can achieve, and the overall poem, or possibly "meta poem" is formed from an exploration of those:  What can you make it say?  What can you not make it say?  What concepts keep stubbornly coming up next to one another?

---

This is the idea.  And I have a few other subordinate ideas about clever additional things one might do with it, but no point mentioning those while it is all vapourware.

And so to the video.  I have been putting together an early prototype for this, basically so far I have just generated some pages with the most-boring placeholder text on them.  You can't really see it, but the text is getting automatically laid out (which is important if we're going to be authoring a lot of it, we don't want to have to hit the game editor every time a new rhyme occurs to us) and additionally, I have some (relatively crude) dragging and dropping of the "sheets" (<-- just what I chose to call them).

So far, so not massively impressive.  Lots still to do:

• I need "left" and "right" texts to snap together when close enough
• Rotation is still janky
• I need a store for sheets we aren't using at the moment...
• ...and more than a totally blank grey canvas to place them on when we are.
• I need to texture the sheets like they were real pieces of paper, cards, flyers that came through your letterbox

Early days, but I have made a start...