Poetry-Assembling in Video Games as Performative Occurrence

On the topic:

"At the first glance, poetry and video games might seem difficult to reconcile: where the former struggles with the perception of being notoriously difficult to understand and, thus, inaccessible (Castiglione, 2019), the latter, at times, struggles to free itself from the accusations of its overt simplicity as a medium meant only for simple entertainment (Oliver et al., 2016).

Drawing from the work on poetry/game intersections (Ensslin, 2014; Stone, 2022; Magnuson, 2023; Mitchell and Van Vught, 2024), I will look specifically at the moments in which a poem is inserted into a video game in a way that encourages and requires player participation, recognizing that most often such poetry-making is presented in a form of poems-as-puzzles: the player can only choose words or verses to complete a poem. During the talk, I will present various examples of such poem encounters and discuss their functionality, focusing on their poietic ability to shape the game reality and, as Percy Shelley would have it: "make familiar objects be as if they were not familiar" (1821)."

Agata Waszkiewicz

Dr. Agata Waszkiewicz is a scholar at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland. They are a video game researcher interested in metafictional and experimental video games. Furthermore, they research queer representation in video games and the ways in which games allow for the exploration of one’s identity.