https://www.spencerchang.me/pacman-poem/
insta post ❽-bite is a subversion of the classic pacman, where instead of eating food, the player eats words to make their own poem. The words come from a very limited word bank, but because they are curated to be multipurpose, the limited word set and constraints of movement on the grid provide a lot of fun playability. Poems save automatically (local to your browser) and can be optionally submitted to the public gallery. Pseudonyms and first names and pet names live together with the map of the moves they took to create their poems.
An 8-ball is reimagined as an 8-bit game reimagined as a poetry machine. Readers play the game using their arrow keys to move the 8-ball around to consume words. Rather than collecting points like in Pacman, readers eat words and punctuations to create their own poem, which automatically fills in the space below the grid. The grid is filled with a select number of random words from a pre-filled work bank for each part of speech, including punctuation, and the game is over when all words have been consumed. Replay variety is amplified through randomization and words that multitask in sentence function (e.g. as both verb and noun), despite a limited word bank. Toying with consumption (eight=ate), luck (8-ball), constraint (the 4 directions), and poetic composition (with 8 words in a grid of 16), 8-Bite is a playful poetic contraption that literally makes you eat your words. How do you win a game of poetry? What happens when luck is a functional constraint on beauty?
What does it mean to create poetry by eating your words (taking things back) in an irretractable gameplay?
A game and poem originally created with @silkpunkbaby for the 8th issue of taper (https://taper.badquar.to/), a computational poetry magazine.
play for yourself at https://www.spencerchang.me/pacman-poem/
Bios Kelsey Chen is an expert of the makeshift. Mediums that are currently capturing much of Kelsey’s time and attention include wood, ceramics, and conversation. She is doing her PhD in Modern Thought at Literature at Stanford, investigating discourses of the future, especially in science-fiction, speculative art, and solarpunk. She is dreaming with Verses (verses.xyz), an art-technology collective invested in thinking through and scaffolding interdependent digital futures through poetic technical artifacts. Her work can be found at www.kelschen.com and she is @silkpunkbot on Twitter.
Spencer Chang is a creative technologist who enjoys creating bridges at the seams. He cares about community-cultivated technology for empowering intimacy, creativity, and play, the kind that feels like home-cooked software that is sustainable in the long-term. Currently, he’s tinkering with agencyful tools, poetic software, soulful speculations of futures through his work at Coda, Verses, and his digital home. He also exists on Twitter at @spencerc99.
tweet thread
1/ sharing the submission for taper 8 that I made with @silkpunkbot
It’s a subversion of the classic pacman, where instead of eating food, the player eats words to make their own poem.
https://spencerchang.me/pacman-poem
2/ The words come from a very limited word bank, but because they are curated to be multipurpose, the limited word set and constraints of movement on the grid provide a lot of fun playability. I’m really interested in how constraints can enable creativity, especially with writing (which @matthewwsiu has and is doing great work looking into)
3/ A small version of this was accepted in the magazine, but the full version is available on my website, where you have a history of all the games you’ve made and the ability to submit to a public gallery.
4/ It currently just goes into this public gallery but planning on having that auto-sync to the website, where you’ll be able to use the info that people submit as “game cartridges”
Imagine loading the initial board state and seeing what poem you end up with instead.
5/ Give it a try and submit some poems! Would love to see what y’all make :)