The Poetics of Game Design: Rhetoric and the Independent Game

This paper, "The Poetics of Game Design: Rhetoric and the Independent Game" by Lindsay D. Grace, argues that independent games are best understood through the lens of poetry rather than film or visual art. Its central thesis is that independent games function as "sonnets" within the broader landscape of game design: compact, dense, and unified in theme, with rhetorical devices that can be analyzed as poetic structures. The author proposes that this framing offers a useful vocabulary for designers, critics, and archivists, and that it allows classification of games by formal structure, such as meter, stanza, and verb, rather than by genre or subject matter.

The analysis builds on the notion of the game verb as the atomic unit of design, with examples such as Canabalt, where a single verb dominates, and The Unfinished Swan, which reinterprets a real-world verb. The paper treats rhythm as central, comparing levels to stanzas and the pacing of player actions to meter, and it draws on flow theory to describe how designers shape tempo. It further examines abstract devices such as metaphor and personification, illustrated through titles including Flipside, Akrasia, and Journey, and it proposes that games can be categorized in a manner analogous to poetic forms like the ode or haiku.

The work is largely conceptual and illustrative rather than empirical. It draws on a broad set of referenced independent titles from roughly 2005 through 2011, situated within the Proceedings of DiGRA 2011, and it does not rely on survey data, sample sizes, or quantitative measures. Its method is comparative and interpretive, relying on close reading of selected games and analogies to literary history. The paper acknowledges that its framing is an alternate lens rather than a definitive answer to questions about canon formation, advergame design, or archiving practice.