 Amidst the clashing of steel and an island plagued by war, Ghost of Shishima provides us some reprieve in the form of meditation and poetry composition. The haiku, a popular poetic format hailing from Japan, serves as the template, and we have to choose from a variety of inspirations in our immediate environment to lend poignance to our contemplative reverie. It's a moment of serenity to juxtapose the madness, allowing our protagonist Jin Sakai to reflect on what has passed and what is to come. Haikus have a defined compositional structure, usually in a 575 pattern, and illustrate the beauty of form and constraint in poetry composition. It is also soothing and induces consternation, and like most poems, its meaning is elusive and bound to its form, inviting analytical thought, but also enabling escapism. Poetry is hardly the only medium Ghost of Shishima borrows from. The game, plain clear, managed to samurai films in a Kirokura Sawa in particular. Everything from the lighting to the camera movement to the dynamic weather system have a cinematic cadence to it, framing this tale of rebellion and honor with a different kind of poetic flair. The story itself borrows from heroic fiction and Japanese lore, following Jin Sakai as he tries to thwart the Mongol forces from the island of Shishima. The central dilemma, of course, is whether he is justified in renouncing the honor of the samurai code, a path that will surely lead to his demise, and to instead become a ghost, hunting his enemies from the shadows. Ghost of Shishima expertly weaves many other art forms together, cinema and poetry and story at an aesthetic weight we recognize as sophisticated, but what of video games? Interactivity alters the way we interface with other mediums, but what are the aesthetics of the video game? What is the poetry of play? Will it exist in the aesthetics of combat as we twirl between enemies like a feudal ballerina? It manifests in the joy of exploration as the divine wind guides us. It exists in challenge and improvement and escalation and encounter design, of character optimization, resource acquisition and strategic acumen. It is a pluralistic form of engagement, captured by much talked about frameworks like the aesthetics of play. But like the humble haiku illustrates, poetry is not just about the formalism of language, it is not just about rhyme schemes, consonance, alliteration and progression, but also reflection. It is about being both engaged and disengaged, immersed, but with an aesthetic distance. On the subject of love, Shakespeare wrote, It is the star to every wandering bark, whose words unknown, although his height be taken. Its syntax is beautiful, but so too is its meaning. Love is the north star to every ship, a wandering bark, and we know not what it is made of. Its words unknown, but we embrace it all the same. Its height is taken. Then we have this poem by Aram Saroyan. It is not aesthetic in syntax or semantics, but in itself awareness. What on earth is this, you might ask? How do we even pronounce it? And then you realize, the poem highlights through incongruity, the absurdity of the silent G.H. to begin with. It uses a deliberate mistake and dissonance to force us to pay attention to the medium itself, language. So poetry is both about a formalism, as well as a deconstruction of its own formalism. This is the duality of poetry. So video games also have an established formalism. We have genres and mechanics and tropes plenty. Ghost of Shashima borrows readily from many of them. It is an open-world game with combat stealth and linear narrative progression. In its open-world design, it tries to be a hybrid between Zelda, Breath of the Wild's unguided expanses, and the more structured zoning of a Ubisoft title. In its combat, it blends the deliberate rhythm of a Souls game, with the dance-like antics of Assassin's Creed. There is a formalism in games that is more subtle, though, one not just rooted in mechanics, but also experience. Take Flower. A game designed as an interactive poem exploring the tension between nature and humanity. It communicates its meaning through mechanics, the joy of weightless traversal to signify nature's freedom, but it is also in its use of spatial metaphors, symbolism, and music that it creates an interactive poem. The meaning here is enabled by the formalism, but ultimately, it is in the player's emotional experience that grants the game its poetry. Flower and its successor Journey are among many indie and avant-garde games that have championed different forms of emotion-based experiential design that, much like the poem we just saw, challenge as much of the formalism of games. In their essay titled in a decidedly non-poetic way, A Preliminary Categorization of Techniques for Composing Poetic Gameplay, the authors argue that poetic gameplay is gameplay that is deliberately made strange or defamiliarized to create a poetic effect, drawing attention to the form of the work as a way to encourage reflection. Defamiliarization is a term coined by Viktor Slavsky, which he explains as the process of undermining expectations so as to slow down perception and to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. In essence, it is about challenging preconceptions, resisting a formalism, about invoking the unfamiliar to get people to reflect on the medium itself. Another expression used by Russian formalists is to make this stone stony, or in other words, to draw attention to things more acutely to reveal their machinery to all. The authors create an extensive categorization scheme of these techniques in games, and you will notice that each of these challenges a convention of game design. For example, one device is counter-intuitive controls. The kind scene in Brother is a Tale of Two Sons, when you control both brothers with two analog sticks. It seems silly, till you realize this symbolizes conflict. It has a poetry that transcends convenience. Two of these devices are used in the game Shadow of the Colossus, slowing down the interaction loop and reframing success as failure. It rejects conventions with regards to pacing and power fantasies, and in unquestioningly listening to the designer's desires. With their interaction, time, agency, boundaries, or in gameplay, there are a bevy of games that challenge the status quo when it comes to design formalism. Much of this poetic design comes from gaming's indie and avant-garde sectors. In his book Handmade Pixels, Jesper Ewell documents the history of indie games and how they have altered our conception of aesthetics, and in his book Avant-Garde Video Games, Brian Trank does the same for avant-garde games, and further creates a categorization scheme for how subversive games can exist on both formal and political dimensions. In both instances, the creative freedom afforded by lower budgets, by artistic cross-pollination, and by people inspired to push the medium further, has transformed the medium from within. These have all seeped into more mainstream games and have enriched the medium with a poetry that pure formalism could never truly capture. And so we come back to Ghost of Shushima, which is a massive AAA game but also embraces poetic gameplay both literally and figuratively. The paradox here is that the game feels both derivative and avant-garde. It feels like a distillation of many of the elements of design that characterize this generation. From open-world design to third-person action games and cinematic gameplay, but also carries many of the conventions brought forth by the poetic underground. It invites contemplation and reverie. It blends mediums. It has a story that is not too dissimilar to Shadow of the Colossus and how it asks us to question our purpose, our moral code, our reason for play. Another interesting thing to note is how the game was made by Sucker Punch, a western studio, but has been best received by people from Japan. This is actually not uncommon in other mediums. The Spaghetti Western is a western film, directed mostly by Italians, that brings an outsider's eye to the events of a culture. As meticulous as Sucker Punch were in recreating Shishima, they also explicitly stated that the game is historical fiction. It brings an aesthetic, a poetry, an interpretation to the events of the past. In this story we can see the poetry of defamiliarization more clearly. Ghost of Shishima not only reflects the duality between formalism and subversion, but reconciles east and west not through its mechanics, but its poetics. As Jin sits contemplating his actions and the implications for his home, so too does Ghost of Shishima reveal elements of our past and perhaps the future of our medium.