Elden Poem was written using the in-game messaging system deployed in FromSoftware’s hit game, Elden Ring. This dark fantasy social media network comprises runic stones placed on the ground, composed with a limited set of textual options using the “Tarnished’s Wizened Finger” relic. The messages are etched in stone via pre-determined phrasal fragments that may be accompanied by ghostly traces left by the player character called “gestures.” In this work, I plays a wandering bard – misusing the system to produce the most unlikely of scrawls: small poems scattered across the game’s landscape. The book is a documentation of that performance in a prosody marked by the poetics of fandom. They are recorded here as movie captures, static images, and poetic texts, arranged in four parts spelling a newly coherent object. Anyone can leave a message in the game’s environment. Online players discover these messages left by others throughout the Lands Between. Messages are commonly used to help, hinder, encourage, troll, amuse, and/or distract players. Like emoji keyboards and the OuLiPo, Elden Ring’s messaging system presents constraint-based literary rules for collective invention. In a past life, these poems inhabited the gaming environment itself. Subject to the ongoing erasure of message limits and time-based access, they’ve begun to dissolve, rendered as ephemeral as the hours one spends at play. Here, for a moment, “spellsword” meets “spells word,” and the materialization of play inscribes a poetics of digital messaging. : : Advance Praise: Are you Ready? Didn’t expect Giant First off, Nuance High Spot, Praise Snelson —Eddo Stern |
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