Game Poems — Press Kit

Quick facts

• Project: Game Poems (playable online literary magazine)
• Format: Browser-based magazine / games collection. Games launch directly within the magazine / browser. Planned Steam release.
• Current issue: Issue #1 — First Moves
• Publication date: January 2026 (Issue #1)
• Founding Editor & Publisher: Jordan Magnuson
• License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)
• Website: www.gamepoems.com
• Contact: [email protected]
• Audience & Distribution: Game Poems is intended for readers and players across independent games, digital literature, poetry, and game studies. The magazine is distributed freely online and shared through academic networks, festivals, and arts events, as well as on mainstream gamer-facing platforms such as Itch.io and Steam.

Vision

Rather than treating games as illustrations of written text, Game Poems approaches videogame making itself as a poetic practice. Each contribution is a small, self-contained interactive work—designed to be played in a few minutes—that explores personal experience, constraint, ambiguity, and lyric expression through game mechanics, images, sound, and interaction. Each issue is curated by a rotating editorial collective of game designers, poets, artists, and scholars, and is published under a permissive Creative Commons licence.

Issue #1 — First Moves

Issue #1 presents a collection of new short-form videogames made by an international group of contributors including poets, scholars, students, indie developers, and lead designers at AAA game studios—each exploring different perspectives on what a game poem might be, in conversation with this issue’s theme of “First Moves.” Works were selected through an open call and peer review process.

Contributors: Brendan Allen, Gregory Avery-Weir, Pippin Barr, Kaitlin Bonfiglio, Caitlin DeRosa, Roman Gvozdev, Tereza Kotěšovcová, Geoffrey Mugford, Adam Pype & Viktor Kraus, Ash Rezvani, Brittany Westlund & Kate Lloyd, Isaque Sanches, Melanie Wigger, Yifan Yuan.

Download all screenshots for Issue #1 (.zip)

Early Responses

Early responses to Game Poems from the independent games and digital literature community:

"I adore this."
— Rami Ismael, independent game developer & industry ambassador (link)

"You simply must check it out... it's about time game poems became a compilation."
— Nathalie Lawhead, creator of Everything is Going to Be OK and Mackerelmedia Fish (link)

"A great idea."
— Jon Ingold, co-creator of 80 Days, Heaven's Vault, and Overboard (link)

"Marvelous... lives up to the dream of publications that manage to include (and be about) interactive/games stuff."
— Pippin Barr, creator of The Artist Is Present and A Series of Gunshots (and magazine contributor) (link)

"You should set aside an hour or so and play through these games."
— Andrew Baillie, founder and curator of Indiepocalypse (and on the magazine advisory board) (link)

"Should you be someone who finds small solace in poetry and who, like me, is convinced that the work compiled in publications like the HTML Review is a beautiful and occasionally-moving combination of prose and poetry and code, then you will, like me, adore Game Poems."
— Web Curios (link)

People and Partners

Founding Editor & Publisher: Jordan Magnuson.

Editorial Collective: Gregory Avery-Weir, Jarory de Jesus, Farhanaz “Joy” Kassee-Elahee, Jordan Magnuson, Jon Stone, Agata Waszkiewicz.

Production Team: Jordan Magnuson, John Domenico Calvelli, Matt Griffin.

Advisory Board: Andrew Baillie, Hannah Brooks-Motl, Kavi Duvvoori, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Shelby Wilson.

Friends & Partners: Winchester Poetry Festival; Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton; Nordic Multimedia Poetry Festival (Oslo Flermediale); Bournemouth Writing Festival; Oslo Queer Art and Culture Center (SKOKS); Play Praxis (London).

First Readers: Alex Adams, June Audirac, Tex Barnes, Art Baum, Stanley W. Baxton, Torien Cafferata, Alex Calderwood, Pedro Cardoso, Jerram Carr, Gary Chadwick, Eva Chang, Wei Ting Chia, Angeliki Chrysanthi, Kavi Duvvoori, Anna Eyler, Rafael Fajardo, Cyril Focht, Melanie Fussenegger, Claudia Garza, Drew Genel, Vidya Giri, Matt Griffin, Aren Guralp, Haochen Han, Farfama Hargaaya, Anna Kucerova, Zihan Liu, Shanel Locke, Christoffer Lundberg, Hélène Lupa, Tanel Marran, Thomas Martin, Terhi Marttila, Nat Mesnard, Leon Noel Micheel, Zeynab Mirzadeh, Alex Mitchell, Óscar A. Montiel, Devinne Moses, Ignacio Puccini, Tim Samoff, Drice Ducongé dos Santos, Yvens Rebouças Serpa, Zhang Sicheng, Dawn Sueoka, Alexander Swords, Vania Castagnino Ugolotti, Semkan Uragan, Yohanna Joseph Waliya, Afra Willems, Khalil Zeigler.

License

Game Poems is distributed under a CC BY 4.0 license. You are free to copy and redistribute the magazine and the games published within it, as long as you give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.