The above quote is taken from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Ah, yes. The favourite poem of every man and his dog. Likely beloved by that bloke who pays over £5 for an IPA and tries to convince himself and others the flavour makes up for it. I’d bet £20 it’s his favourite poem. It’s either that or Howl.

If you can get past the layers of hyperbole and fetishisation, I recommend you do. Peel back the wrapping this poem’s accumulated over the years; here’s your English teacher giving a stale account of how each line relates to WW1 – get rid. Next, it’s a relative lecturing about how “of course, a proper understanding of the Greeks and their myths is required to fully penetrate the poem” – yawn, yuck. Underneath this, the £5 pint bloke has something skin-crawling to say about what part the poem played in his sexual awakening. Somewhere, beneath all this, there’s an actual poem.

If you ever finish this solitary game of pass the parcel you’ll eventually find the following eight words: “you know only a heap of broken images”. Eight really quite good words, in a nice order. They’re true too, and I think they’re important. Important for how we understand people. Important for how we understand our perception of things. And, for the purposes of this blog post, important for how we understand 505 Games’ new release: Virginia.

It’s a tricky task: adding to the sizable conversation that has already sprung up around this game. It’s short enough and strange enough that it’s now been played by thousands of people who want to talk about what they’ve seen and what they felt because of it. So I’m going to pause right here, put my cards on the table, and let you all know what I have to add to the conversation about this game:

Virginia is an Imagist poem.

There. Let’s continue.

When T.S Eliot writes “you know only a heap of broken images” he’s addressing us all, the sum total of humanity, and I think it’s fair to say: he had us pegged. Small, isolated images constitute a huge proportion of our knowledge. We use these images, in different combinations, to make sense and give meaning to what we see. We also use and reuse these images in the stories we tell, the images we paint and – yes – the games we create. A middle aged man with long hair and a beard is nailed to a cross, there are thorns in his hair and his face is bloody. A boy glides through the air above an ocean, he is wearing mechanical wings, his father looks worried. A suited individual drinks coffee at a diner, the wallet on their table reads ‘FBI’. A beautiful band plays at a seedy roadhouse. The figure of two children stand, holding hands, inside a pillar of light – above them, a spaceship looms.

You might know these images from film, books, television, the internet – any number of places. What matters is that these popular, recurring images begin to constitute a visual language we can “read” like words on a page. The makers of Virginia understand this. They understand it well enough that they are able to forego dialogue altogether and simply rely on a carefully chosen set of images to create a narrative. Judging by the overwhelmingly positive reception of Virginia, it seems that we are literate enough in the language of signs, symbols and images for this to be a viable design choice.

However, long before Virginia proved this theory – the Imagists laid the foundations for it. Imagism is a movement in early 20th Century literature. Primarily poetry. It comes under the broad header of “Modernism” and its ideas and techniques were certainly considered modern and novel in their time. Imagism is an aesthetic philosophy which holds that something moving, beautiful and robust can be created simply by isolating and focusing in on a particularly captivating and evocative image. To give you an idea of what Imagism looks like, here’s a famous poem from of its most well-known practitioners:

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

– Ezra Pound

That’s it. That’s the whole poem. Pound’s idea of a good imagist poem meant having enough faith in your chosen image to reduce it to its simplest, most minimalist form. In theory, this makes the image more striking and memorable. There’s a reason road signs use stick men and not detailed, realistic renderings of people. It’s about being concise. It’s about being immediately and urgently recognisable. It’s about creating an icon you can recognise instantaneously, even when you only glimpse it for a moment. I think this is reflected equally in the style and presentation of Virginia. Everything in the game is presented with purposeful minimalism. This means that old images are immediately recognisable and new ones – such as the red bird or the buffalo – become quickly internalised. The game may be composed of “only a pile of broken images”, but it works hard to make these images recognisable and readable. The minimalist art style employed is a good way to achieve this. The player is set on a path through a sea of images, old and new, which are read in quick succession and held together by our own shaky network of associations.

Ezra Pound created Imagist poetry using a technique he termed “the ideogrammic method”. An ideogram is an image or symbol which stands for some larger idea or concept. Chinese characters are ideograms. Egyptian hieroglyphs are ideograms. Emojis are ideograms. Ideograms are small images that our eyes read and our minds unpack into something much larger. Ideograms are the reason that a carefully chosen aubergine emoji from the right person, at the right time, can make your pulse quicken. Pound’s ideogrammic method invited poetry to engage in the same activity – to create images which speak volumes. Carefully chosen pictures which bring subterranean memories, thoughts and associations to the surface. Likewise, Virginia engages with an ideogrammic form of storytelling. It takes a heap of broken images – a shade of red lifted from The X-Files, a bar stool borrowed from David Lynch – and packs its story inside these pop-culture pictograms.

Jacques Rancière once said that a good teacher must allow their students “to venture out into the forest of things and signs, to say what they have seen and what they think of what they have seen”. Virginia presents players with a fascinating forest of things and signs. Many days after my first playthrough, I am still looking for ways to say what I have seen and what I think of what I have seen. So far, I have found one thing to say and it bears repeating here: Virginia is an Imagist poem. Virginia is a very good Imagist poem.