Poems, games, and things
I have a new game out! It’s a tiny one, made for Neo-twiny Jam 2026, which requires all entries to be 500 words or fewer. My game, which clocked in at 499 words, is basically a television inspired by Kentucky Route Zero and the music of Belbury Poly. It’s a companion to “I am inventing [ ]
Rosebush article: I have recently published an article in The Rosebush, Parser poetics in Portrait with Wolf. It s about Drew Cookʻs 2025 Spring Thing Back Garden game Portrait with Wolf, a game that is part parser; part poem, while at the same time being neither parser nor poem. The article tries to unpack what PwW [ ]
When I visited Ouvroir, filmmaker Chris Marker’s archipelago in Second Life, it was night. A handful of stars were visible, and the ocean was calm except for a few inlets where waves were breaking in the wrong direction. Guillaume the cat implored me to dance but instead, I fell through the floor. Nobody else was [ ]
I made three small games this summer as a way of avoiding my larger WIP. The games are Querent, a tiny, humorous game of spirit communication created for the second annual Really Bad IF Jam. What was most fun: Writing a self-absorbed rogue. What was most challenging: Getting the timed text just right: a long [ ]
I never really understood writing workshops when I was in my MFA program. I was too arrogant to really listen to people’s feedback on my work, and, when giving feedback to classmates, I got so tied up trying to balance praise with critical feedback that I never really took the time to experience the piece [ ]
Weather Room: A wind-up toy is a random weather generator created for Neo-Twiny Jam 2024. I did the writing and “coding” and my friend Jesse Perlstein did the sound. This game arose from my thinking about automata and diorama games. I’m excited to share that it’s just come out in Indiepocalypse #57, a monthly compilation [ ]
There was an amusing thread on intfiction.org a few years back titled “That darn cat keeps opening doors!” The OP was working on an Inform 7 game, and had created a cat who they wanted to wander randomly from room to room. But rather than going only through open doors like a real cat would, [ ]
I’ve thought of most of my previous projects as “writing experiments.” Provizora Parko is the first project I’ve thought of primarily as a “game” that is, in terms of the conventions, vocabulary, player behaviors and expectations of video games, not literature. If I were to position it on Astrid Ensslin s L-L (literary-ludic) spectrum, it would be [ ]
I just finished Provizora Parko, a surreal wandering game where you explore a (semi) abandoned bird park. It s a back garden entry in the 2024 Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction, and it was inspired by the animated film Ñokto de la Galaksia Fervojo/Night on the Galactic Railroad, and Paradise Park in Mānoa. I hope [ ]
In The Weird and the Eerie, critic Mark Fisher explores the sense of something’s being simultaneously unsettling and fascinating. “Weird” and “eerie,” according to Fisher, are the feelings you get when, in World on a Wire, Stiller realizes that what he thought was the “real world” is actually a simulation controlled by a “realer” world; [ ]