THREE VERSES by sphere, kernelfusion, desktop_trash
THREE VERSES is an adventure game / first person dungeoncrawler / typing game based on poetry. Having shed your corporeal form, you must now escape purgatory by completing the simple task of delivering verses from deities to struggling poets.
WRITINGS & FURTHER READ’N
Writing was probably the most difficult thing to do confidently in such a short period of time. Grinding out a silly looking guy in blender is a day’s work, and the recognition of whether it ‘works’ is more or less immediate. But for a game based on poetry, i could not for the life of me write a line that i felt was good enough to keep in the game. Since there was so much else to do, and we had just under two months to do it, i decided it was probably best to stick with works which i knew for sure already ‘worked.’ so as i went thru my bookshelf to find stanzas that stuck with me, it felt right when i noticed three verses from three different authors which adapted John 1:1: “in the beginning was the word, and the word was with god, and the word was god.” i thought, ‘ oh yea, this is a game about gods and words.’
So the writings used for the poets, more or less verbatim, are as follows:
Ashley, Robert. Perfect Lives: an opera, Burning Books, 1991 (orig. 1983).
Borrowable digital print available here: https://archive.org/details/perfectlivesoper0000ashl/mode/2up
This libretto is for the television opera aired on BBC4 in 1984:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSpD6vBWwJR7TqW2mZeWVGz4t506maAMX
excerpt 1: “The Park,” p. 7.
Appears as Side A of Private Parts (1977):
excerpt 2: “The Bar,” p. 63.
Also produced as an LP (1980):
Several of my favorite pieces of written and recorded media have come from this sprawling and often confusing opera. I consider it the single most influential art i have encountered, first finding it as a poet, carrying its lessons into making music, and now into game development (failing miserably each time). My personal recommendation is to begin with the 1977 record. If you like it a lot, you’ll be able to appreciate the strange operatic voice ashley uses for the rest of his career. I still prefer the pieces in his ‘speaking voice’ register personally, but the television opera itself is fantastic. Secondary recommendations from him are the wolf man for nice saturated tape noise, ‘…there were men and there were women’ for a repetitive spoken piece, and automatic writing for quiet ambience. See also blue gene tyranny, who composed most of the music for ashley’s work during this time period.
Gysin, Brion. “Permuted Poems, c. 1970.” PERMUTATIONS, DABA, 2022. p. 57-68.
A particularly long permutation. For more information on permutation poems, both historical and
algorithmic studies, see https://davidpocknee.ricercata.org/gysin/
Gysin is still a little hard for me to pin down lol. I don’t think a lot of his writing was truly brilliant, and he seemed like a bit of an asshole, but he was an unconventional thinker & the sheer volume of his creative output means that lightning must have struck at least a few times. That sounds harsh, but i’ve read, well, most of his work – which i can’t really say about a lot of authors. I found this really gorgeous collection of his permutation poems while i was editing a manuscript of an informal biography written about gysin. (I don’t know if that manuscript will ever see the light of day). Amid the swathes nontraditional, sound, & visual poetry that came after it, i think that the permutations (at their best) are nice selections of vernacular english.
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). “The Walls Do Not Fall: 10.” Trilogy, New Directions, 1998 (orig. 1973), p. 17.
Probably the piece that takes most seriously its biblical source material, & the only piece of the three used that i would consider traditional poetry. i have always loved HD’s trilogy.
If you got the best ending (ie the one that starts back in the hotel), you will have read a short poem adapted from a stray memorable line in Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles.