[Commlist] CFP: Poetry in Games / Games in Poetry

*Call for Papers | Multiplatform 2026: /Poetry in Games / Games in Poetry/*

*11–12 June 2026 | Manchester Metropolitan University*

/Hosted by the Manchester Game Centre, in collaboration with the Poetry 
Research Group and the Manchester Poetry Library./

*Multiplatform* is the annual Manchester Game Centre symposium dedicated 
to analogue and digital game studies and practice. In 2026, we turn to 
the lively, uneasy, and productive overlaps between poetry and games: 
poems as playable systems; games as lyric objects; constraints, 
procedures, and code as compositional practices; and the long history of 
poetic play that sits behind (and alongside) contemporary videogame 
forms. Across literary history, poetry has repeatedly organised itself 
around rule-sets, patterned repetition, score-like structures, and 
performative address. Across game history, play has repeatedly leaned on 
language, voice, rhythm, and symbolic density. This symposium takes 
those overlaps seriously as method, as form, and as cultural practice.

Work at the poetry–game interface often stages a deliberate collision of 
modes: reading and playing, attention and action, semantics and 
mechanics, interpretation and execution. Poetry typically asks for 
rereading, hesitation, and attunement to ambiguity; games often demand 
decision-making, optimisation, and a negotiated relation to rules. Yet 
these tendencies are neither stable nor opposed: poems can be 
procedural, iterative, and rule-bound; games can be lyric, opaque, and 
resistant to mastery. The point is not to declare a neat hybrid, but to 
examine what happens when poetic techniques (constraint, voice, rhythm, 
fragmentation, compression, citation, translation) become operational 
within game systems, and when game logics (choice, feedback, scoring, 
repetition, failure, branching, inventory, level design) shape poetic 
form and subject matter. We invite proposals that treat poetry and games 
not as separate domains occasionally borrowing from one another, but as 
entangled traditions with shared concerns: constraint and freedom, 
authorship and agency, performance and embodiment, procedure and 
expression, worldmaking and address, cultural transmission and 
adaptation. The symposium welcomes critical, creative, and 
practice-based engagements that clarify what becomes possible, whether 
formally, aesthetically, or politically, when poems are performed and 
games are read.

We welcome proposals that address (but are not limited to) the following 
themes:

  * *Poetry depicted in games* (analogue or digital): how is poetry
    represented, and what functions does it serve (worldbuilding,
    puzzle, ritual, collectable, voice, tutorial, ambience, social
    practice)?
  * *Games as a subject for poetry*: how do games shape poetic voice,
    imagery, scene, and form (including platform cultures, speedrunning,
    modding, fandom, streaming, tabletop scenes)?
  * *Code as poetic language*: histories of poetry and coding (broadly
    conceived), including constraints, procedures, generative methods,
    and other “rule-based” poetics (digital and non-digital).
  * *International poetic forms in contemporary games*: adaptations,
    allusions, and translations of poetic traditions and
    narrative-poetic canons (e.g., haiku, epic, saga, Indigenous
    storytelling, devotional forms), and questions of cultural
    authority, appropriation, collaboration, and ethics.
  * *Games as poetic objects*: when (and how) games operate as lyric or
    poetic artefacts independent of overt linguistic poetry; “game
    poems” and poetic game-making as practice.
  * *Non-digital games in poetry; traditions of poetic play*: surrealist
    and avant-garde ludic poetics; constraint-based and recombinatory
    works (e.g., perpetual poems, permutational sonnets), collaborative
    and paratextual games, and “poetry-as-project”.
  * *What makes a game poetic (and vice versa)?* How do mechanics,
    interfaces, pacing, attention, sound, and material form “gamify”
    poetry or “poeticise” play?
  * *Adaptation and remediation*: poetry adapted into game forms and
    platforms (including miniature RPG remakes, interactive fiction,
    Twine, Bitsy, Game Boy/homebrew, tabletop adaptations), and what is
    gained/lost in that translation.

Submissions can be proposed for the following formats:

 1. *Individual papers* (20 minutes + Q&A)
 2. *Research-creation / practice-based presentations* (talk +
    demonstration/performance; or critical reflection on making)
 3. *Creative submissions* (readings, performances, playable works,
    game-poems, hybrid pieces; digital or analogue games; etc.)
 4. *Roundtables / panels* (60–90 minutes; 3–5 participants recommended)

We welcome proposals from scholars, poets, game designers, artists, 
archivists, librarians, and independent creators, as well as 
collaborative teams.

Multiplatform 2026 will include an *in-person poetry game jam/workshop*, 
with collaboration from */Game Poems Magazine /*(Jordan Magnuson).

Confirmed keynote speakers are Dr Jon Stone (Anglia Ruskin University) 
and Dr Abigail Parry (Cardiff University).

*Submission guidelines*

  * *Title + abstract* (c. 250–300 words) describing the intervention,
    materials/works discussed or presented, and format.
  * *Short bio* (c. 100 words) and affiliation (if any)
  * For *creative/playable work*, include a brief technical note
    (platform, access needs, install requirements) and, where possible,
    a link to documentation or a build-in-progress

*Deadline:* /10 April 2026, 11.59 PM (GMT)/

*Notification of decisions:* /24 April 2026/

*Submission email:* (_R.Martens /at/ mmu.ac.uk) <mailto:(R.Martens /at/ mmu.ac.uk)>_ / 
Please put ‘MULTIPLATFORM’ in your subject line.


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