As a junior high student of the millennial generation, I regularly took trips to the computer lab to work on school presentations, conduct research for essays, or use educational software to supplement the ordinary, paper-based coursework. Because I was part of the first wave of public school students to be given access to classroom-sized computer labs, my cohort was unintentionally granted a shocking amount of freedom. Supervising a classroom of pre-teens hidden behind rows of monitors must have been borderline impossible, especially because teachers in 2001 weren’t exactly expected to be tech savvy, and they certainly didn’t have a mature IT industry behind them to moderate student activity on school computers.
At first, I don’t think our educators anticipated or accounted for the hundredfold efficiencies afforded by computers to people intimately familiar with them, particularly those of us proficient in searching for information online. For example, in the seventh grade, I was part of a small group of students granted access to the computer lab during math class. The lab was right across the hall from the classroom, and our doors were always open, so ostensibly we were part of that class, just receiving instruction and completing practice problems on the computer rather than on paper. But I was raised on video games and am halfway decent at math, so I was able to complete the Grade 7 and 8 Mathematics programs, including their final exams, in a matter of weeks, and so I spent the remaining months of the school year playing Flash games on eBaum’s World.
Later, once our teachers realized they couldn’t sit at the front of the computer lab and expect to observe our behavior like they could in a traditional classroom, they would roam up and down the rows of terminals, checking our progress on the assignment over our shoulders. Some computer labs were even arranged in a big circle, with all the computers facing in from the outer wall like some sort of Apple-sponsored panopticon. And yet, kids are more clever than they are conscientious, especially when they have a generational edge on their authority figures, and we students quickly adopted pass-times that looked like research or whatever else seemed to be expected of us while we goofed around on the computer.
One such pastime was the Wiki Game or Wikirace, as it was referred to in my friend group. According to Wikipedia, the Wiki Game “is a race between any number of participants, using [hyperlinks] to travel from one Wikipedia page to another. The first person to reach the destination page, or the person that reaches the destination using the fewest links, wins the race.” I’m not claiming to have been anywhere near the epicenter of the invention of the Wiki Game, but we did play the hell out of it in my formative years, and those experiences laid the foundation for my above/ground chapbook, Alternate histories.
I wrote Alternate histories by starting on the Wikipedia page of an ancient technology, then finding various routes to the page of an emerging technology. For example, “Petroglyph >> Emoji” charts six different paths from the “Petroglyph” page to the “Emoji” one. By mapping routes of different length from term A to term B, the series plays with the human propensity for linking ideas together, the associative leaps we make that spur creativity and innovation, and which bring us from “Microlith” to “Total war” in a mere two clicks.
Success in the Wiki Game is predicated on the ability to form meaningful associations between terms that move you closer to the target article. As a teenager, winning was both an intellectual flex on my friends and a collective act of rebellion, given that we usually played under the noses of our teachers; we had to be smart enough to win and not get caught while doing it. Competition and subterfuge aside, wikiracing undoubtedly made me a better poet, not because I now pursue especially valuable links between subjects, but because it enamoured me to the larger language game we all play—meaning by association—where the winning sequence of ideas is not always the most direct.
Kyle Flemmer is a writer, publisher, and digital media artist from Calgary in Treaty 7 territory. He founded The Blasted Tree Publishing Co. in 2014 and his first book, Barcode Poetry, was published in 2021. Kyle's first trade book of poetry, Supergiants, is forthcoming from Wolsak & Wynn in 2025. His most recent chapbooks include WikiPoems from 845 Press, Gourmand from Paper View Books and Alternate histories from above/ground press.