Daniel Snelson’s Elden Poem is a sequence of poetic messages originally composed in the storyworld of Elden Ring, an action RPG released in 2022 by FromSoftware. Elden Ring’s in-game messaging system enables a severely constrained form of interplayer communication: using the “Tarnished’s Wizened Finger” relic, players can access a finite set of message templates, such as “**** ahead,” “Seek ****,” or “Be wary of ****,” and then insert predetermined words or phrases into the template’s lacuna, thereby forming a sentence that is subsequently etched into the game’s environment for (among other things) the assistance, diversion, or obstruction of other players. Players can also choose between options such as “wave” or “point downwards” to add “gestures” to their messages; a ghostly afterimage of the player’s avatar performs the selected physical action when the message is opened, creating a complex semiotic interplay between the message’s kinetic and textual components.
Players typically use this messaging system to spread either information, disinformation, or an ambiguous mixture of the two. Snelson, in thrillingly original contrast, activates the system’s latent potential as an Oulipian method of text generation under the considerable duress of a restricted vocabulary and predetermined syntactic patterns. These restrictions result in formal and linguistic austerity; the poems are mostly arranged in non-rhyming couplets, tercets, and quatrains, and the paucity of available language options means that words must be rationed out and thoroughly reused. As with other constrained texts, such as Raymond Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes (1961), much of the interest of Elden Poem lies in the richness that can be wrung out of its constituent poverty. For example, Snelson uses the adverbial phrase “in short” not only in its conventional sense to summarize preceding material, but also as a volta signaling a turn or change in a poem’s concerns (“Be wary of order / In short / Praise the chaos!”), as a conjunction that links two associated concepts (“Elden ring, O Elden ring / In short / Behold, destruction!”), as a kind of paratactic brick in a wall of statements piled on top of one another (“Behold, rump! / In short / Praise the sinner!”), and in several other ways that the reader must learn through careful trial and error, much like the process of completing a level in a difficult videogame. As one poem states, in what might be read as a condensed ars poetica, or at the very least as a warning to the impetuous reader, “Be wary of dashing through / In short / Praise the laggardly sort!”
“Laggardly” is an ironically reflexive word to use in the shared context of electronic poetry and videogames. In 2007, the artist-programmer Jim Andrews predicted that “as we move into a situation where poetry is more electric and net-oriented, and where videogames are maturing into their art possibilities, there will be more exploration of the meeting ground of poetry … with games” (58). In the ensuing years since Andrews’s prediction, however, the main point of theoretical contact between electronic literature and videogames has been narratological. Various critics have studied the narrative and worldbuilding mechanics of videogames, and a small but growing body of scholarship has begun to concentrate on the converse topic of how contemporary print literature can incorporate the ludic tropes of videogames (for a balanced overview of videogames and narrative, see Ciccoricco 2014; for the intermedial commerce between videogames and print literature, see Hayot 2021, Butterworth-Parr 2023, and Caracciolo 2023). In contrast, the confluence of poetry and videogames has received comparatively limited attention. Notable exceptions include Astrid Ensslin’s chapter on poetry games, that is, “a type of computer game that has an explicit or implicit poetic agenda without sacrificing or diminishing the phenomenological game-ness that lies at its core” (2023); Jordan Magnuson’s conception of his own games as lyric poems, due to similar formal characteristics such as brevity, hyperbole, and ambiguous imagery (2023); and, most significantly, Jon Stone’s monograph Dual Wield: The Interplay of Poetry and Videogames (2022). Despite these works, the interaction between videogames and electronic poetry is a game that awaits more players. When they arrive, Elden Poem will be poised to show them the rich possibilities that activate when largely segregated artistic modes are brought together.

Works Cited
Andrews, Jim, “Videogames as Literary Devices.” In Videogames and Art, edited by Andy
Clarke and Grethe Mitchell, 54-58. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2007.
Butterworth-Parr, Francis. “Machphrasis: Towards a Poetics of Video Games in Contemporary
Literary Culture.” Games and Culture (2023):
http://doi.org/10.1177/15554120231164087.
Caracciolo, Marco. “Remediating Video Games in Contemporary Fiction: Literary Form and
Intermedial Transfer.” Games and Culture 18, no. 5 (2023): 664-683.
https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120221119980
Ciccoricco, David (2014). “Games as Stories.” In The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media,
edited by Lori Emerson, Benjamin Robertson, and Marie-Laure Ryan, 228-231.
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Ensslin, Astrid. Literary Gaming. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2023.
Hayot, Eric. “Video Games & the Novel.” Daedalus 150, no. 1 (2021): 178
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Magnuson, Jordan. Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice. Amherst: Amherst
College Press, 2023.
Queneau, Raymond. Cent mille milliards de poèmes. Paris: Gallimard, 1961.
Snelson, Daniel Scott. Elden Poem. Hysterically Real, 2002.
Stone, Jon. Dual Wield: The Interplay of Poetry and Video Games. Germany: de Gruyter, 2022.

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