Organic poetry

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Organic poetry is a social game designed to produce collaborative poetry, using a program to generate forking chains of words. It is an exercise in creating a rhizome-like network of words, which can be read meaningfully in multiple, non-linear ways. Conceptually, it has roots in Hermanne Hesse's Glass Bead Game, and The Garden Of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges. It was designed by Indian writer Rohit Gupta as part of a festival of algorithms.

On a linguistic level, it takes the word as the basic unit of language, upon which phrases and sentences can be built. Unlike Scrabble which uses letter of the English alphabet upon a cartesian grid, the Organic poetry model can be extended to Indic and other languages with very interesting results due to its use of chaining events in free space. Another area would be to explore the networking of pure phonetic syllables into a rhythmic structure. This would get the game much closer to the Glass Bead Game as Hesse must have imagined it:

It was the crowd, the great congregation filling the hall and all of Waldzell, the thousands of souls who followed the Master down the hieratic and labyrinthine ways through the endless, multidimensional imagery of the Game, who furnished the fundamental chord for the ceremony...

- The Glass Bead Game, Hermanne Hesse