Artist Statement
SONGS FOR GIANTS is a short, interactive essay built in Twine, Bitsy, and Glitch that offers reflections and prompts on lyric games—a genre of analog games that, as Torner (2020) writes, are more “incitements” than playable
systems. This essay weaves together personal anecdotes, myth, minigames, and scholarship to paint an opaque portrait of the analog microgame scene.
In Chapter I: A Eulogy for Giants, I define the lyric game (and its relatives) and encourage a reimagining of “play” that gets smaller and smaller. Through “roleplaying poemoirs” I cite key scholarship and argue for a reinvention
of roleplaying games that decenters play itself. What do we do with games that are not meant to be played? Read them? Remake them? Hold them?
In Chapter II: How Close Are the Wolves?, I prompt the player through several Bitsy minigames to reflect on the ways that game mechanics and genealogies often center conventional, big-brand games. I ask what happens when we
let games become small—single pages, or a paper fortune, or even a single word.
Finally, in Chapter III: Unplayable, I provide three “prompts” for users to make/hack/generate their own microgames. Through the first prompt, users can create and print their own one-word RPG. Through the second prompt, users
can remix a one-sentence lyric game adapted from Maria Mison and Jay Dragon’s 101 Games for Survival. Finally, in the third prompt (hosted on Glitch), users have an opportunity to generate absurd, one-page RPGs.
My hope is that this essay (and accompanying prompts) will incite a reimagining of the scope of play and imagine the possibilities of the microscopic—appreciating games that are so tiny they are almost unplayable. Such a reinvention
opens space for a broader sphere of play and making.
