Verses by Kit Riemer
A perfect game for a grey, rainy afternoon when you are sick and feel like all is not right in the world. The pace in which you explore the world is leisurely, unhurried, told in the minute building blocks of the world that you painstakingly move through. Examining the world around you only heightens the gloom, the plodding tone of life, the feeling that you need to constantly look over your shoulder.
What’s most successful about this game is how well it conveys its essence: “there are still problems here, but the problems want to be solved; you can feel their desire to unravel.” It’s impossible to get more than fleeting impressions because everything is lost in translation in an attempt to describe the thing, between languages, but also in the translation from physical object to our own experience of the thing, as mediated through machine. Nothing is fixed, everything is mutable, our experience of the thing completely incomprehensible.
The game actually really reminded me of Autumn Chen’s The Archivist & The Revolution and Eliza Dusapin’s Winter in Sokcho, a little bit of The Employees by Olga Ravn – all loosely stories about trying to get by, of the grunt work of hyper specialised fields, of trying to understand something bigger than yourself and ultimately utterly failing, of mediating difficult relationships between people and superiors, between being dragged along by a force greater than yourself.
There were so many very excellent lines here - a few of my personal favourites below:
- The work happens in a wooden box. The product of the labor is removed, and the work continues. Where it goes is none of our concern; maybe it would hurt us to know. But it’s impossible not to wonder."
- There is no one keeping you here, but then again, to escape a place is to abandon it.
- What have I done? I have not collated the memories she brought to me. I have not kept eating and eating and eating what she has given me. I have not been her dutiful oblate.
I honestly had such a good time reading the different versions of the poems, watching the act of translation happening in real time, and the descent into the mystery is beautifully opaque and wonderfully rendered.