Jordan Magnuson, Senior Lecturer at Southhampton University, UK spoke with students in the AI, Social Media, and the Meaning of Life class at Heider College of Business on April 23 about his work and the concept of thinking about creating games as a form of poetry. Jordan is the author of  Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice (Amherst College Press, 2023) and a longtime video game creator. In 2005 he founded The Independent Gaming Source (TIGSource.com), a community site focused on fostering an “arthouse” ethos among indie game developers. Since 2010, Jordan’s serious games, art games, “notgames,” and “game poems” have been featured by Wired, PC Gamer, Le Monde, and others, shown at festivals and exhibitions around the world, nominated for various awards including the New Media Writing Prize and the IndieCade Grand Jury Award, and cited by a wide range of creators and scholars (e.g. his travel games project, “Gametrekking,” is mentioned in the Cambridge History of Travel Writing). 

Jordan is particularly interested in using the most basic elements of interaction, computation, and representation to craft meaning and impact in videogames, and in using games to tackle difficult topics, subjective experiences, and complex emotions. He has lectured on critical and experimental game design at many of the top game programs around the United States (including USC, The DigiPen Institute of Technology, The University of Utah, UC Santa Cruz, and MIT), as well as at venues such as GDC, IndieCade, and Google. He has also collaborated with faculty and students at a variety of institutions to adapt and utilize his games in the context of interdisciplinary research (e.g. a game-based psychology study with Kipling Williams of Purdue University). Examples of Jordan’s work and games can be found at his site https://www.jordanmagnuson.com/bio One of his most provocative games is ‘loneliness’ which can be found here: https://youtu.be/Ne7L7byleDw .