Quest for meaning at arcade

What was going through the minds of those kids pumping quarters into arcade games in the ‘80s and ‘90s? In at least one case, it was the stuff of poetry. “Blue Wizard Is About to Die,” a fat new collection of “prose, poems and emoto-versatronic expressionistic pieces about video games (1980-2003)” by Seth “Fingers” Flynn Barkan, bills itself as “the first collection of poetry about video games ever published.”

Is it art? An existential dispatch from a flashing, beeping world? A press release, and the poems (samples appear on www.twhi.org/bluewizard.htm) offer hints.

From the press release: “Whether portraying Mario as a Stalin-esque tyrant who rules the Mushroom Kingdom with an iron fist

From the poem “Mario in Exile”:

he does not call for the princess

for she is dead, turtle shell in the head;

self-inflicted, found clutching a note with one question:

“where has my plumber gone?”

From “Dragon’s Lair”:

It was always that voice and the vision of Dirk

Falling from one thing into another, sword flailing reflexively,

As fifty tentacles attacked;

Each scene set up so simply:

A gigantic cartoon castle of evil that loomed in the distance,

Moat and drawbridge down waiting to encircle our fated hero,

Witless but willing, all so simple and pure

but the first step set the deadly trap in motion,

some sort of evil god inside of every element of the place,

set and bent and waiting to destroy you: DRAGON’S LAIR!

the voice would boom,

And before you knew it you were pumping quarters

into the thing like a mad monkey addicted to cocaine...

no care in the world....