The Other One: Jordan Magnuson's Game Poem jam is a fascinating collection of chimeras

Luis 'Ludipe' Díaz Peralta’s 2D platformer Sometimes I Wonder About The Other Me presents a fragmented monologue through Mario-brand exclamation mark blocks, where players guide duplicate characters through splitscreen areas that dissolve into darkness, leaving only one character to restart the cycle. The game’s structure emphasizes the erasure of alternatives rather than offering distinct branching paths, framing replay value as a contemplative, speculative act rather than a mechanical or economic one. The project was created for Jordan Magnuson’s Game Poem jam, co-organized by the UK’s National Film and Television School, which attracted around 90 submissions over 24 hours under the theme 'the other one'.

Jordan Magnuson, founder of TIGSource and organizer of the jam, describes 'game poems' as short, subjective works that function as ritual spaces, using poetic address and metaphor to juxtapose signified and material meaning, drawing parallels to lyric poetry and experimental verse. Magnuson’s open-access book Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice explores these ideas, invoking figures like Anna Anthropy, Maya Angelou, and Robert Frost to illustrate how games and poetry can interrogate each other’s conventions. The book argues that poetry is not confined to words on a page but can exist as a mode of intervention across any medium.

The jam’s submissions included works like The Other Line by the Sunfarer team, where players control a block navigating two queues that only advance when unobserved, accompanied by mocking audio cues, and The Imago by Cassandra Chowdhury and Damon Stea, where players label insects on a corkboard while a narrative unfolds in a notepad. These entries reflect the event’s focus on ambiguity and unresolved tension, rejecting polished, market-driven design in favor of jarring, self-aware experimentation.

Magnuson’s project critiques the industry’s emphasis on narrative design and mimesis in blockbuster development, proposing that poetry’s methods could 'colonize' gaming to challenge its labor practices and cultural pretensions. The jam’s loose theme encouraged submissions that estranged games and poems, fostering works that prioritize metaphor and materiality over traditional gameplay or thematic resolution.