What makes a poem, and what makes a man? Artist, writer, and game-maker Sonny Rae Tempest explores both in Gap, a brief “navigable poem” about the boundaries of masculinity. Your player, the letter “A” or a “supposed Alpha male,” must walk through a maze of letters — his presence is necessary to complete each line of the poem, but he’s literally hemmed in by the words that describe him. The poem is revealed piece by piece, but the spotlight around the player will never show all of it, leaving the words bleeding in from darkness outside. It’s a fairly well-established view of gender and masculinity, but the presentation is spare and effective, and you can find it (for Windows only) at Tempest’s site.
Play this: ‘Gap,’ a poem about gender you ‘read’ by walking through it
is a senior tech and policy editor focused on online platforms and free expression. Adi has covered virtual and augmented reality, the history of computing, and more for The Verge since 2011.
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