In a world rife with cookie-cutter video games that rehash old formulas and take no risks, a few independent developers are showing that they aren't afraid to explore, experiment, push the boundaries and break some rules. “Games That Break Rules” is an ongoing feature that recognizes indie games which innovate, defy convention, or just plain mess with your head. In the spotlight this round is Poesysteme.

Games That Break Rules 3: Poesysteme
Monday, August 11, 2008 – by Eric Franck, Staff Writer

With all the buzz surrounding Spore these days, it's easy to believe that it'll be the biggest and most technologically advanced life simulator the video game world has yet seen. Even if it does turn out to be the smash hit that it's poised to become though, it almost certainly won't be the most unique sandbox life sim you'll ever play. That distinction instead belongs to a small student-made game called Poesysteme.

Since the genuine weirdness of Poesysteme's premise defies expression, it's best to just let the blurb from the game's official website speak for itself:

“What is a word? Can you touch a word? Can you taste it? Is it alive? And if it is, what kind of life does it lead? You've probably never wondered about these things. Well, thanks to Poesysteme, now you can!”

Yep, that's right, Poesysteme is a life sim that lets you create, feed, and breed words. Here's how it works: players start with just a blank white screen, but a mouse click pops open a radial menu that lets them create words, drop word food or word food generators, or build impassable inkblot walls. Your initial concern is populating your ink-and-paper world with words by typing them into existence. The important thing here, though, is that you separate sections within your words by periods. This effectively determines your word's “genes” which will eventually decide what sort of gibberish results when two words procreate. Once you've got herds of words in your digital kingdom, they'll need food. Using the right-click menu again, you can either drop in limited quantities of food or plant an odd looking tree that continually spawns sustenance for the population. Happy healthy words get together with other words and soon words made up of random parts of their parents are born. Hungry, unhappy words cannibalize their neighbors and wind up with chunks of their victims inside of them.

With all of this wild word mayhem going on, it isn't long before you start seeing gaggles of words that can't be found in any dictionary running around. You can try to contain the chaos, quarantining rogue words by building walls and deleting excesses of food, or you can take advantage of all of the rampant nonsense by feeding it into Poesysteme's poetry generator. At any time while playing, you can hit the spacebar, and Poesysteme will use all of the words in your world to compose an original (and usually incomprehensible) piece of poetry. While the kind of stuff that comes out isn't worthy of Lewis Caroll, it most certainly is just as strange, and manages to sometimes be good for a laugh when read aloud.

Poesysteme definitely won't be seen by everybody as a stroke of genius (although the word nerds among us will surely appreciate it), but at any rate you have to give props to the French student development team for being creative enough to come up with something as bizarre as a life sim featuring words. If you'd like to try your hand at initiating generations of gibberish with Poesysteme, you can download it here.