In pensive browser game Agentia, you can explore and assemble poetry as a beetle, a dinosaur or an island

Deleuze and Guattar 'em up

Every time you load up Agentia you are reincarnated as a different creature. "Creature" is perhaps too narrow a word - the game's "playable characters" range from geese, microscopic life and triceratops to menhirs and small rocky islands. Each forms the heart of a diamond of delicately drawn, isometric grid terrain with a baby mobile canopy of clouds and sun. It looks like an illustration from an old botanical or geographical textbook, although the inviting emptiness around the visible area also dimly reminds me of certain elder RPGs I used to play on Macintosh.

There are no dungeons or fell beasts to wrangle with, however. You exist here simply to explore, or be explored, roaming the landscape using the arrow keys (the angled perspective is a little unwieldy) or staying put to witness the passage of other entities such as birds and sailboats. There are snatches of music against a steady wash of animal and mineral noise. As you and the world move through each other, encounters produce or modify lines of poetry along the bottom of the view, with underlined text you can click to develop or sometimes, reduce the possibilities of a phrase - it feels a little as though you're asking somebody to repeat themselves, to be a little more specific.

The game's tilesets are based on the city game isometric asset pack created by withering systems, while the main theme is George Georgia's Solemn Solstice. The verbal elements were algorithmically extracted from a range of mostly "vintage" texts in the public domain, then organised by hand. These sources include manuals of astronomy, accounts of mountaineering expeditions, and works of philosophy such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus. The latter tome begs to be navigated in a similarly pliant and loosely connected way.

"Each entity featured in Agentia experiences, senses, or simply witnesses the world in ways very different to that of the human mind and body," explains the project's web page. "Rather than suggest their being can be expressed directly through language, Agentia (Medieval Latin for agency, ability, to act, perform, broadly construed) uses found language excerpted from related works of literature, creating a collage of registers (often strange and enigmatic), that can hint at such more-than-human stories - including, inevitably, their entangled relations with our own.

"Plants and stones, of course, do not move through the world in the same way," it continues. "Readers are invited to be still with them, reading vignettes from time and space as they flow by, and so consider a distinctly non-human mode of being."

I enjoyed Agentia, which you can play in a browser for free. It has opened a small space in my head, and I'm not sure what, if anything, I should put there yet. The creator, Richard A. Carter, is a UK-based academic who "investigates the material and ecological dimensions of technical artefacts, activities, and environments". I know him a bit via Xitter, and always like hearing about his experiments. His other works include Signals, a book of algebraic poems written in a mathematical language designed for extra-terrestrials, and Dark Mode, a "minimal meditation on the rogue-like / adventure game genre, stripped to its bare essentials: a labyrinth, varied "encounters", and numerical stats".