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Other Worldly Haiku

Here’s an opportunity to try something completely different: Michael Douma, president at www.idea.org, is hosting a haiku contest to generate poems for use in OtherWorldly, an online puzzle game due out later this year and to be made available on major platforms. Here are the details:

OtherWordly Intergalactic Haiku Competition

Prime your space torpedoes and fuel your rockets for a Haiku competition that is out of this world. Winning haiku will be read by hundreds of thousands of players during pauses in a word game app.

INVITING poets of every species to submit space-themed haiku. You can write about anything galactic, from the serenity of deep space, to the fury of meteors, to the icy chill of a comet.

PUBLICATION will be in OtherWordly, an educational puzzle game that seeks to expand the active vocabulary of players ages 12+. The game pairs the mental challenge of a crossword puzzle (figuring out words from clues and some letters), with the dynamism of an immersive match-3 game, all with a fun outer-space motif. You can see gameplay here.

Accepted haiku will appear similar to this screen. Up to fifty haiku will be published.

JUDGING will be conducted by a panel of published haiku poets (David Oates and Nicholas Sola). A 5-7-5 format is not required.

SUBMISSIONS will be accepted through April 30, 2019. There are no limits on the number of submissions.

AWARDS of $150, $100, and $50 will be presented to the top three submissions (maximum of one cash award per poet).

ATTRIBUTION will be displayed within the credits of the app (along with other artists, musicians, programmers, and game designers).

For more information about the contest and to submit haiku, please visit our site.

This game is the culmination of a multiyear effort. Our team’s apps have previously been featured by Apple in the App Store, and we anticipate that this game will also be featured by Apple. The game will be free-to-download, and we therefore anticipate a large player base.

This Post Has 3 Comments

  1. I am the game producer.

    We’ve have over 829 submissions so far (the deadline is tonight), and I’m delighted at the interest we’ve tapped into. I’d love to see more and more multidisciplinary opportunities for poets to reach broad audiences — Whether displayed in games, or posted on billboards in cities, or printed on grocery bags, and so on.

    The game publisher is a nonprofit organization, with a goal of improving public literacy. Contributing poets share our goal of exposing players to haiku at pause times in the game. The game will publish the 3 winning (paid) haiku, plus several other excellent submissions, so that game players are enticed to read a variety of haiku.

    The licensing is simply and clearly listed on the bottom of the submission page, and I’ll repeat it here also: “All rights revert to the authors after publication. IDEA receives perpetual rights to publish your submission in our game, or for any related purpose (e.g. within marketing materials for the game).”

  2. I’m not fond of the idea of providing other people with free content… And the lack of any information (here, or on their website) of copyright and licensing gives me pause as well.

    THF should not be promoting free content, and should not be linking to “contests” without rights and licensing terms.

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