Recently, I wrote about some books I got for Christmas, including Colin Cremin’s book Exploring Videogames with Deleuze and Guattari: Towards an Affective Theory of Form, Upstream by Mary Oliver, and Parker J. Palmer’s book Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. They are all, perhaps, interconnected in unexpected ways. To illustrate this, here are some quotes from these books, woven together in to a fragment of a found poem. Can you tell which quotes are from which books?

“We have a strange conceit in our culture
that simply because we have said something,
we understand what it means”
“untidy approximations
of what they are about.”

“It is an invitation to take flight
that also extends to the reader,
to explore different worlds
and create new ones".

“Now I become myself”
“No, not a place: a becoming.
A becoming that exceeds image, analogy and metaphor.”
“Attention is the being of devotion.”
“The mind acts like a filter
to retrain only
sensations useful to it.”

“Sometimes the desire to be lost again,
as long ago,
comes over me
like a vapor”
“adaptive to the task of liberating desire –
desire being a generative force.”

As I’ve thought about this, I wrote another poetic fragment, this one is my own musings on what I’ve been reading, and isn’t “found”.

We are the characters in a cosmic video game.
We find our meaning
and purpose
in doing
what we were designed to do.

We live and move and have our being
seeking the Designer
not knowing the moves,
the rules,
or the way
and only finding them
by exploration
and experimentation.

One final thought for today. As I read about Deleuze, Guattari, and video games, I am struck by the discussions about realism. Many of the most complex video games are the highly realistic first person shooter games. Often, it seems, realism is something people aim for in video games. Yet other games, especially casual games, tend more towards abstraction without being visually compelling or complex. What might an abstract visually compelling complex video game be like? What might it be like as a multi-player game, an abstract community art video game?