Sometimes I Wonder About The Other Me is a 2D platformer created by "small game" developer Luis "Ludipe" Díaz Peralta, whose other works include A Place For The Unwilling. It's broken into a handful of single screen maps. On each screen, there's a Mario-brand exclamation mark block that burps a text fragment, forming an overarching monologue that begins with the title phrase. As you move between screens, you come to a signpost pointing left and right. Heading in either direction leads to a splitscreen area, with the player controlling duplicate characters. As you guide your charges rightward, one half of the screen flakes away to darkness. The remaining character returns to the starting screen, there to wonder anew about the Other Me.

Modest though it may seem, I find Lupide's game a more gripping invocation of "choice" than many of the sliding-door questlines I've experienced in, say, blockbuster fantasy RPGs with branching narratives. Ludipe's project doesn't offer two or more distinctly imagined, completable scenarios; instead, it's haunted by alternatives it can't stop overwriting. It's about the rhythmic and mocking re-enactment of What If, opening and closing possibility in one movement. As such, it also warps the concept of 'replay value'. This isn't the bang-for-buck, one-more-go framing of classic videogame review appraisals, or the habit-forming seasonal "cadences" of latter-day live service. "Sometime" is time without structure: it is contemplative, speculative, uneconomical, always available and not quite there.

All of which may owe something to Lupide's project being a "game poem", as described by the designer and academic Jordan Magnuson in his open access book Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice. In Magnuson's terms, a game poem can offer a "ritual space" and a "forum" for ambiguous participation in an event or feeling, rather than being a medium for the transmission of statements, representations and 'content' at large. Sometimes I Wonder About The Other Me was, in fact, created for Magnuson's recent Game Poem jam, co-organised by the UK's National Film and Television School, with a panel of judges that includes former PlayStation Indies boss Shuhei Yoshida.

The jam ran on 7th-8th September with the loose theme "the other one", attracting around 90 submissions in 24 hours. I think the choice of theme has been very useful, in that it speaks to how videogames and poems might continue to be productively and critically estranged, even as they grow closer.

You might know Magnuson as the original founder of TIGSource, back in 2005 - a spawning ground for Minecraft, QWOP, Fez and other eccentric indie projects that have become household names. Over the years since, Magnuson has created a series of shortform games that he now characterises as poetic exercises: these include Loneliness, in which black squares move in half-recognisable patterns against a darkening cloudscape, until scattered by the player's approach.

In his book, Magnuson offers up "game poem" as "a loose category (defined by family resemblance rather than hard boundaries) of games that are generally short and subjective, make use of poetic address, exist in a ritual space, are hyperbolic and bound to metaphor, and juxtapose signified meaning with material meaning". The book is built around unpacking each of these broad criteria, chapter by chapter, identifying common ground between various videogames and older works of written poetry. It invokes a gossipy menagerie of devs, scribblers, and scholars: Anna Anthropy, Maya Angelou, Jason Rohrer, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, and Pippin Barr, to name a few.

Magnuson's focus is on English language 'lyric' poetry from Europe and North America, but he does make room for comparable literature from other regions, such as Japanese haiku, together with more 'experimental', non-lyric poetry such as the computational verse of Stephanie Strickland, one of my own favourite e-bards. I'm not sure Magnuson's book will strike you as a radical account of poetry, if you're familiar with people like Strickland, and the likes of Rohrer's Passage may seem well-worn subject matter, if you're a veteran of the trenches of Are Games Art? But I like how the book gently, methodically unpicks many of the prevailing market conventions around poems and videogames: the primacy of narrative design and mimesis in blockbuster development, for example, or more simply, the idea that poetry should consist of words on a page. In putting the two disciplines together, you could argue, Magnuson politely proposes to tear them apart.

Early on, Magnuson characterises poetry as "not a medium so much as a form, and not a form so much as a mode of intervention that can exist in any medium". In the same paragraph, he cautions that it is not "always popular to use methods and techniques from old media to 'colonize' new media". Having written a little about videogame poetics myself, I think I'm maybe more spiteful on this front than Magnuson. I'd say that gaming could benefit from being "colonised" by poetry, just a bit: specifically, the wealthier levels of the industry that preach the cultural stature of games as the one, true 'interactive artform', while overworking, impoverishing and stifling the people who make them. Lupide's project above demonstrates how the poetic "mode of intervention" can put the torch to some of the industry's favoured idols.

Likewise, I think that lyric poetry – a spectrum of personal and affective, 'overheard' writing that, as Magnusson suggests in the book, tends to be treated as synonymous with poetry in general – could benefit from being aggressively demoted to a subgenre of game. This is basically drive-by shitposting, and I'm too much of a coward to name names, but I find a lot of modern English lyric poetry unbearable. I find it excessively ornamental and consumed by notions of human profundity and the profoundly human, speaking in universals while disregarding the social and economic hierarchies that decide who gets to publish their work. A lot of lyric verse is also fixated on musical phrasing and elegant imagery in a way that reminds me of gaming's morbid, labour-exhaustive adoration for 'flow' and 'polish'. Some of the 'experimental' poetry I like most deals, by contrast, in something akin to videogame 'jank': jarring metaphor and grammar that kicks your legs out, poetry that declines to smooth over its own artifice, leaving the solids on the surface.

All told, when I checked out the submissions to Magnuson's Game Poem jam, I was looking for signs of healthy antagonism between game and poem, and for works of potent irresolution at large. I found plenty. Take The Other Line, created by the five-person Sunfarer team. Here, you control a block switching between two queues of blocks, all waiting to exit screen-right. It soon becomes apparent that each queue only moves when you're not in it. Rubbing in the salt, other blocks squeal "yippee" when they reach the front of the queue.

The game makes me think of the bloodthirsty peevishness of British supermarkets. More appositely, the endless queuing frustrates the left-to-right movement of both 2D scrolling games and the eye reading a line of English verse. It's as though you're trying to finish a couplet, fiddling with one line and realising that you now have to tweak the other. I love it.

I also love Faulty Mirror, developed by New Zealand-based Chris Barrett. It sees you operating a pair of hands with the keyboard. The implicit objective is to match the reflection of those hands in a mirror, but the reflected hands keep fidgeting around. Meanwhile, a rising Shepard's tone – that is, the auditory illusion of a note that is constantly getting higher, formed through the superposition of scales - makes your throat constrict. Is the mirror faulty - or are you? It inspires something like the nagging open-endedness of Lupide's game, but it implicitly extends that feeling to encompass the proposed reciprocity of videogame and poem.

The piece accompanies a written text that makes me think of both R.S. Thomas and the Babadook: "There's something up with this mirror, / It imitates my smiles and frowns. / But sometimes I can't help but fear / That it's the other way around." The slant rhymes of the game poem caption are another set of faulty mirrors - the sentences do not quite 'reflect' each other - but that doesn't make the written poem a mirror held up to the game poem, or vice versa. After all, the written text describes a reflected face, rather than a pair of hands, unless we get, well, poetic about whether hands can smile or frown. Is there perhaps some point being made here about which aspects of bodily (well)being are at stake when interfacing with a videogame, as against reading poetry? What does it mean, to be unable to see your own expression in a game?

Speaking of faces: I'm still thinking about Still Life, a "stress toy/stim gadget/poem" from tabletop publisher Misery Tourism, who advertise themselves as "dredging life’s fertilizer lagoon for a few fresh bodies, the less completely decomposed, the better". I found Still Life to be a thing of brilliant, frightful exuberance. It's based on Conway's Game of Life, and sees you growing and sculpting a face by meddling with cellular automata patterns, or just letting them unfold. You can click highlighted patterns to earn points that allow you to flip a single square, skewing the evolving pattern and thereby, altering the contours, colour, and texture of the head swelling at the top of the screen, against lunar KidPix scenery.

There are actually two Conway grids you can switch between, labelled life and death - each with a variation on what I think is the 'same' head, each frozen while the other grid is active. As grids cycle, the heads break out in warts and wrinkles, bloat and shrivel and grow lopsided, sprout hats and lichenous hair. They never break eye contact. The grid generation gradually accelerates, making it harder to catch the highlighted patterns, and the run ends with a sunrise that causes the living and dead heads to "crossover". I think Still Life deserves better than to be crammed into this article's thesis, but perhaps there is something to say here about verse and videogames composing and decomposing in tandem until finally wed and calcified by sunlight.

You find similar fraught (mis)alignments in Magnuson's own poem game Portraits of My Child, which pre-dates the Poem Game jam, but often feels like the project that has inspired it. It's an on-going portrayal of Magnuson's relationship with his son during the latter's first year of life, consisting of atomised minigames such as "first breath" and "first smile". I like Portraits because while I came in expecting saccharine meditations on the joy of fatherhood, the parent and child expressed by the game prove inchoate, cybernetic, and deeply alarmed by each other. The baby cries in white noise. During peekaboo, the parent's looming face is a shifting constellation of rectangles: it suggests that the filial bond begins as mere pareidolia.

This feeling of mutual alienation appears to be the desired effect. Writing about Portraits of My Child in his book, Magnuson summarises the project as "a kind of triangulated address between the game’s player, myself as the game’s creator, and the various evocations of my son", consisting of "an ambiguous set of perspectives within perspectives designed to continuously evoke questions of how the self relates to the other and who is addressing whom." I'd like to extend this uneasy "triangulation" to the poem game/game poem at large, which appears in these works as a confused and self-sabotaging creature, an old head on a young body or vice versa, regarding itself suspiciously and trying to match its own step. Long may it continue to be its own other, and ask itself: what if?