Video Games
Quests, pixels and extra lives: bring the worlds you have played through into your poems.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about video games: vivid imagery, craft techniques, mistakes to avoid, with exercises and prompts in this free guide by Writory for poets.
What this theme is
Video game poems inherit the oldest story shapes we have: the descent, the trial, the return. A dungeon crawl is a quest narrative with a health bar. But the theme's richest seam is usually not inside the game at all; it is the sofa. The sibling with the second controller, the rented cartridge that had to go back on Sunday, the arcade machine that ate a summer of coins. Game poems are very often memory poems wearing pixel light.
There is also the strange grammar games offer that life does not: save points, respawns, extra lives, the pause screen. A world where death is a checkpoint and every failure can be retried is an irresistible mirror for grief and second chances. The poem asks what it means that we practise dying nightly, and wake unharmed.
Why poets return to it
Poets choose this theme because play is serious memory. For several generations now, childhood, friendship and even mourning have happened partly inside game worlds, and poetry that pretends otherwise leaves real life out of the record.
The mechanics are also a metaphor mine. Levels, loading screens, side quests, the boss you cannot beat: each maps onto ambition, waiting, avoidance, the unbeatable thing in a life. Handled with a light touch, one such metaphor can organise an entire poem.
Where it comes from
The quest is ancient equipment. Odysseus island-hops through monsters and puzzles; Beowulf fights what are, structurally, level bosses; Gawain accepts a side quest with a terrible completion reward. Games did not invent this architecture, they inherited it, which is why poets can travel between the two so easily.
Poets have always written about games in any case: medieval verse treated chess as allegory long before Eliot set a chess game inside The Waste Land. In recent decades, anthologies such as Coin Opera gathered poems about video games specifically, and the arcade elegy, a poem mourning a childhood machine and the child who played it, has quietly become a recognisable modern genre.
The elements that carry it
- Pixel light on faces in a dark room, the household's small campfire.
- The hum of an old console and the smell of dust burning off it.
- The pause screen holding a whole world still while real life interrupts.
- Controller wear, the shine on buttons where thumbs lived.
- Save points, extra lives and the words GAME OVER, a vocabulary of mortality in lowercase stakes.
Techniques that work
- Borrow game grammar as metaphor with a light touch: one term, respawn or checkpoint or side quest, per poem, and let it carry the weight.
- Write in second person like a game addressing its player: 'you enter the room, you have one life left.'
- Set the poem on the sofa rather than in the game: the person beside you matters more than the dragon.
- Let the game world leak into the real one, streetlights becoming torches, the walk to school a map to clear.
- End on the screen going dark and the reflection that appears in it; the theme hands you this mirror for free.
Mistakes to avoid
- Jargon walls. A reader who has never held a controller must still be able to feel the poem; translate through image, not glossary.
- Treating games as automatically childish or automatically profound. Both are poses; the truth is in the particular game and the particular player.
- Nostalgia as inventory: naming ten consoles is a list, not a feeling. Choose one machine and one afternoon.
- Letting the game replace the stakes. If nothing human is at risk, the poem is a review.
An exercise
Choose a game you loved and write only the room you played it in: the carpet, the hour, the weather at the window, who else was there and where they sat. The game itself may enter only through its sounds and its light.
A challenge
Write a poem structured as three lives: the same real event attempted three times, one stanza per attempt, each ending differently. Let the reader feel the respawn between stanzas.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem about opening the saved game of someone who is gone, their character still standing exactly where they left it.
Before you submit
- Game terminology is rationed and always translated by image or context.
- A real person or real loss anchors the poem.
- The poem contains a physical, sensory world: light, sound, furniture.
- Any extended metaphor is singular and sustained, not a pile of references.
- The ending faces the player, not just the game.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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