Background: A poetry slam is a competitive performance poetry event, usually held in bars or art spaces, where poets are judged olympic style by several randomly chosen audience members (the judges are supposed to base their score half on the poem and half on the performance.) There has been a national championship event held anually for the last ten years or so, and two feature films based on slam poetry have been made.

Idea: A video game where the player composes a poem (using pen and paper or whatever) and then reads it in their best performance voice into a microphone connected to the game console or personal computer. The player then selects an avatar (or creates one using included functions similar to Fractal Design Poser or something) and then "performs" the poem in sync to their recorded voice using the game pad controler, which effects gestures and movements and such. They could even have the opportunity to speed up the audio or slow it down at the "performance" stage, or add dramatic pauses. The composite of the resulting audio and the avatar's physical performance is streamed to other users, some of whom will be competing, and others will have been randomly selected to be judges, and others will just be spectators.
-- JakePatterson, Jan 19 2002

PeterSealy, I don't think I agree with your assertion that "how fast you can think on your feet" is a substantial component of slam poetry. While a poet can, if they want, ad lib something from scratch, the vast majority practice and rehearse before ever considering subjecting one of their works to a slam audience. There is some strategy involved in which poem to read based on the types of poems that others have read before you (and the behavior of the judges.) That dynamic could be included in the video game version as well. Other online sites where poetry can be submitted don't have the performance aspect, which is intergal to slam. If this idea were implimented the way I envision, you would have no more or less time to think than you would if you were doing it at an actual slam. THE POINT would be that you could compete in, or just watch, a poetry slam whenever the heck you wanted to. You could also try a poem in front of a remote audience before having to do it face to face.
-- JakePatterson, Jan 19 2002


We do that all the time here
question is, who's going to start the Slam this time?
-- thumbwax, Jan 19 2002


there is very little that jangles my nerves, but I do get scratchy when people post lengthy ideas and then when the first anno received is not positive, they come back aggressively with another lengthy annotation explaining their first lengthy rant. Plain English Rules OK
-- po, Jan 19 2002


// slam is a competitive performance poetry event

Isn't the US an amusing country?
-- mcscotland, Jan 19 2002


po, I wish you would get half as upset at PeterSealy's rudeness as at someone's rather patient and well-reasoned reaction to it.
-- jutta, Jan 19 2002


as the carachter 'strayman' in the drama 'strumpet'?
-- technobadger, Jan 19 2002


This was sort of baked, some years ago when it actually cost money to get into an online chat room. I used to use Prodigy, and there was a group of regulars who would compose poems based on the topics of conversation. It was a lot of fun, because you had to be able to come up with something really quick, or your poem would be irrelevant, and it had to be good or you'd be quickly ignored.

Then came the internet, the dominance of AOL, price points which appealed to the riff-raff, and the decline of Prodigy, and that was that. Haven't found anything quite like it, since.

At any rate, sounds like an interesting idea. Pastry.
-- Guncrazy, Jan 19 2002


Some years later and I am searching for something like this as a developed software package. any news? Excellent tool for teaching performance poetry in schools. from the u.k. Dreadlockalien of the New October Poets.
-- dreadlockalien, Apr 11 2004


http://www.popcap.com/logon.php?theGame=psychobabble

You could easily make this into some sort of board game. The above address is to a game called Psychobabble. It's basically "battle magnetic poetry". Be careful though, it's addictive.
-- Th3Lung, Apr 13 2004



random, halfbakery