The poet and video game designer Khail Campos Santia, who hails from Bukidnon but now calls Dumaguete home, plays with worlds.

He does that not in the careless way of a child stacking blocks only to topple them, but in the precise, deliberate alchemy of a creator who knows that every rule, every pixel, every string of code is also a sentence, a stanza, a line break. He moves between disciplines—game design, computer programming, chemistry and physics, art, writing—with the enviable quicksilver ease of someone who refuses to be bound by a single form. What results, I think, are works that exist in that rare space where digital play meets literary contemplation.

His games, at first glance, might seduce you with their whimsy. Pandesal Boy, a collaboration with graphic novelist Josel Nicolas, which became an official selection for Indie Prize Singapore, is a delightful platformer where nostalgia smells faintly of yeast and morning streets. Paper Worlds, developed with Eru Petrasanta and Dumaguete visual artist Xteve Abanto, which was chosen for the Tokyo Game Show, layers visual charm over the heft of environmental storytelling. And In the Time of Pandemia—crafted with Dumaguete animator Ramon del Prado, Linea Fernandez, Dumaguete composer Algernon van Peel, and others—is a fragile HTML5 artifact from a global moment, a kind of playable diary that remembers the stillness, fear, and strange camaraderie of those first months of lockdown.

The uninitiated might think of these as “just games.” But look closer.

Khail’s mechanical choices echo the economy of poetry: every jump, obstacle, or collectible is as intentional as an enjambment. He calls it, half-wry and half-earnest, “the austere beauty of game mechanics,” and it’s not hard to see why. Like a sonneteer bound by meter, the game designer lives within the constraints of code and rulesets, and Khail thrives in these limits, turning them into creative muscle.

Perhaps this is why his work has found recognition across the board: quadruple Newgrounds trophies from the global player community, a national GameOn award, and invitations to curated exhibitions in Tokyo, Manila, Kuala Lumpur, Tel Aviv, and Singapore. Even his venture into tabletop learning design—a board game that won the inaugural Benilde Prize for Design Excellence—feels like an extension of his poetic sensibility: the tactile click of a piece on a board, the careful pacing of a player’s choices, the hidden narrative unfolding in the quiet logic of turns.

The literary connection is no accident. Khail was a special poetry fellow at the 54th Silliman University National Writers Workshop, where the brutal generosity of panel critique shapes you in ways you can’t yet articulate. His poems and essays have appeared in Sands & Coral, MetroPost, and Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine. There is, in his writings, the same playfulness and precision you find in his games. And in his games, you can detect the same literary impulse: the desire to make meaning from structure, to embed stories in systems, to seduce the player into a narrative without once uttering a word.

In this way, Khail’s practice recalls that old Jorge Luis Borges idea—that literature is a labyrinth, and the reader, a player navigating its turns. Except here, in Khail’s games, the labyrinth actually responds. It is both text and machine. A line of poetry might be a trapdoor. A puzzle might be a metaphor. The reward for clearing a level might be not victory but recognition—of the self, of the world, of the delicate architecture that binds both.

For Khail, code and verse are not opposites. They are dialects in the same language of making. A game, after all, is just a story you enter with your hands. And a poem is a game you play in the mind, where the rules are rhythm and image, where victory might simply be the catch in your breath at the final line.

It is tempting to ask which came first—Khail the poet or Khail the game designer—but that’s the wrong question. They are the same maker, inhabiting two interfaces, feeding each other’s obsessions. In one world, he writes in loops and conditions, in assets and sprites; in the other, he writes in couplets and line breaks. Both worlds converge in the player, the reader—us—invited to inhabit the beautiful machinery of his mind.