Dual wield: Adventures at the interplay of poetry and computer games

Stone, Jonathan

Abstract

In recent years, poets and digital game developers alike have begun to experiment with the possibilities of poem-game interplay and hybrid poetry games. The results of such experiments are intimately connected to poetry’s expansion into digital-interactive space, a process described by Loss Pequeño Glazier as extending “the physicality of reading”. This experiential augmentation runs both ways: the technologies associated with game development permit the reader’s cybernetic incorporation into the world of the poem, while poetry may be used to lend shape and meaning to the bodily sensations experienced by the player of computer games.

Additionally, computer game culture, long underprivileged in arts discourse, represents a new frontier of emergent assimilable dialect for the poet. The components of the computer game – its rules, content, interface, hardware – may all be absorbed into the textuality of the poem, recruited as units of poetic meaning, not just verbally but ideogrammically, imagistically or calligrammically. This is, in short, an abundant new playground for poets, while on the other side of the equation, the organisational strategies of poetry make for an equally rich resource for game developers.

This project takes the form of a hybrid of more conventional theoretical analysis and practice-based research, analysing the existing state of poem-game hybridity and testing ways that it might be advanced through the creation of various example artefacts. In developing these examples in tandem with theoretical analysis, I establish a number of continuums to help visualise the phenomenological tensions that exist between poetry and computer games, and which must be negotiated in order for interplay or hybridity to be effective. I then develop a rough taxonomy of poetry-game hybridity, including ludo-poetic intertextual mutation and ludokinetic poems, and set out a number of works of my own as examples of how these categories might be expanded.

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Sep 5, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 27, 2020
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/2792578
• Related Public URLs: http://researchdata.uwe.ac.uk/555/
• Award Date: Feb 17, 2020