“Poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost,” says Mary Oliver. I would suggest that we need game poems in the world for the same reason that we need poetry in general: because we are cold, and we need videogames that are fires.

We need videogames born of waiting, silence, and deep listening. We need videogames that speak the language of our contemporary lives, yet are able to hold themselves above our lives’ monstrous current. We need videogames that are able to see beyond our latest obsessions and fetishes to the truths that connect us across time and space. We need videogames about God and intractable mystery. We need videogames that call out oppression and injustice in all their myriad forms. We need videogames that remind us of what it means to be human in the face of the posthuman and the inhuman. And we need videogames that remind us that we still have the capacity to love, and the capacity to forgive.

In short, we need videogames that embody “the subtlety, elegance, and hunger of the human spirit,” as Mark Strand and Eavan Boland write. We need videogames that, in the words of Dylan Thomas, are able to make our “toenails twinkle.”

— Game Poems by Jordan Magnuson (Page 150)