Like many ideas, Observing Digital Space Debris started on a train. Not a real one, where I could hear the wheels screech and feel the tracks rumble underneath my feet, but a digital one I imagined myself on. Specifically, it was the train circling the icy asteroid and hot bed of labor injustices called Wellspring in Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector. As I’ve written at Unwinnable before, I was fascinated by Wellspring’s train for being an “assault against logic,” as well as a great example of how the 2025 dice-driven RPG about finding community and freedom asks players to use their imagination.

Wellspring isn’t the first video game space that demanded I write about it, but it’s what I consider the inflection point for diversifying my approach. Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, and to some extent its predecessor Citizen Sleeper, constructs its digital spaces in such a way that my brain would slip faster towards drafting poetic verses about the existence of Sleepers and humans under intergalactic capitalism than critical essays focused on the game’s mechanics, its story, its themes or any of the other aspects I’d usually write about. Citizen Sleeper 2 was demanding poetry from me. And ever since I’ve opened up to exploring that path, it hasn’t been the last game to do so.

I’ve been writing poetry for about five years now. It actually used to be a much bigger part of my online presence. Throughout 2021, I’d occasionally host community poetry nights where Twitch chat and I wrote a single poem together based on a few thrown-out ideas. These nights led to conversations that ranged from thoughtful to pathethic to wheezing levels of hilarious. They produced collaborative works like Dirty Mirror Selfie and how is the elephant? does it eat apples?. Outside of streaming, I also wrote poems very frequently in my spare time. I still do. There’s a USB drive in my apartment housing a couple hundred finished poems, while even more finished and half-finished ones reside in my phone’s Notes app. Only a handful have seen the light of day. One, titled I Should’ve Been an Astronaut, currently lives at the literary journal 7th-Circle Pyrite. The others went back into hiding following the end of my short-lived poetry account on TikTok.

I’m not sharing this history to reminisce. It’s more to instill some confidence in both me and you. The former definitely needs it to not only share poetry again, but also charge what’s essentially a dollar per poem. The latter might need it to determine if the poem below and ensuing series is worth taking a chance on.

Here’s the deal: I started a Patreon — a lite version, specifically. The full details on what to expect are covered in this short introduction post. Observing Digital Space Debris will be a weekly poetry series, inspired by game worlds, for Patreon members at the $4/month tier. I’ll make a poem accessible to free and prospective members every so often for those who want more examples of what to expect, but the supermajority of poems will be exclusive to paying members. The first few poems are inspired by Jump Over The Age’s Citizen Sleeper 2, but it will be far from the only game featured in the series.

I’m incredibly excited to see where this series can go. I’ve written poems about and in response to works in other artistic mediums before, primarily music, but rarely games until this past year. If you end up liking what you read, consider the $4/month subscription. If you’re on the fence, consider joining for free to see if the next available poem pushes you on one side more than the other. Lastly, if you’ve read this far, I appreciate your time and consideration. This support is not just giving you access to poems about games that compel more than button presses from me and many others. It’s also helping grow a site that would like to stick around for the long run.

Here’s the free first installment of Observing Digital Space Debris: Observing Digital Space Debris #1 – The Hollow.