MULTIPLATFORM 2026: Poetry in Games / Games in Poetry
About this Event
In 2026, the Multiplatform symposium turns to the overlaps between poetry and games: poems as playable systems; games as lyric objects; constraints, procedures, and code as compositional practice; and the long history of poetic play that sits behind contemporary videogame forms.
Work at the poetry–game interface stages a deliberate collision of modes: reading and playing, attention and action, semantics and mechanics, interpretation and execution. Poetry 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. Multiplatform 2026 takes these entanglements seriously as method, as form, and as cultural practice.
Over two days, the symposium brings together scholars, poets, game designers, and artists from across the world for papers, practice-based presentations, readings, and playable works spanning digital and analogue forms. Topics range from lyric structures in video games and ADHD-fuelled game poems, to tabletop roleplaying and autobiographical poetics, to constraint-based design, cultural adaptation, and the poetics of wandering in open-world games.
Multiplatform will have seven panels across two days, featuring presentations and playable works by participants from the UK, Australia, India, Iran, Canada, the USA, and beyond — including browser-based game poems, a textile installation, Twine adaptations, and live readings.
Whether you approach this from a background in literary studies, game design, creative writing, or practice-based research, Multiplatform 2026 offers two days of rigorous, wide-ranging, and genuinely playful engagement with two forms that have more in common than either has typically been given credit for.
If you would like to join any of the session online, please consult the programme and email [email protected] and include Multiplatfom 2026 in the subject line:
Draft Programme
DAY 1: Thursday 11 June 2026
09:00–09:30
Arrival & Registration (coffee/tea)
09:30–11:00
Panel 1: Lyric Structures and Poetic Form
11:00–11:15
Break
11:15–12:45
Panel 2: Tabletop, Lyric Games, and Documented Play
12:45–13.45
Lunch break
13:45–14:45
Keynote 1: Dr Jon Stone (Anglia Ruskin University)
14:45–15:00
Break
15:00–16:30
Panel 3: Translation, Constraint, and the Adapted Form
16:30–17:00
Break
17:00–19:00
Poetry Game Jam with Jordan Magnuson (Game Poems Magazine)
Panel 1: Lyric Structures and Poetic Form (09:30–11:00)
- Liam Gibbons (online, Melbourne) — Brevity
- Anton Romanenko (online, Prague) — A Play of Poetry, a Poetry of Play: Lyric Structures in Video Games
- Harrison Whitaker (in-person) — Can a Question Be a Poem?
Panel 2: Tabletop, Lyric Games, and Documented Play (11:15–12:45)
- Samuel Mui Soon (in-person) — Lyricising Lived Experience: Autobiographical Poetics in Lyric TTRPGs
- Emily Friedman (in-person) — The Night Market: An Experiment in Creative Documented Play
- Andrew McInnes (in-person) — Angrian Adventures and Gondolian Games in the Brontës' Poems (1846)
Panel 3: Translation, Constraint, and the Adapted Form (15:00–16:30)
- Jordan Magnuson (in-person) — After Rilke: A Game Poem Diptych
- Lucy A. Armstrong (in-person) — "The Dawn Breach" from Fragments from the Vault
- Alyse Knorr (online, Denver, CO) — "That's Ten Blocks": Constraint as Design Engine in Poetry and Games
DAY 2: Friday 12 June 2026
09:00–09:15
Arrival & Coffee
09:15–10:45
Panel 4: Atmospheres of Play: Wandering, Procedure, and Affect
10:45–11:00
Break
11:00–12:30
Panel 5: Cultural Adaptation and Material/Embodied Practice
12:30–13:30
Lunch break
13:30–14:30
Keynote 2: Dr Abigail Parry (Cardiff University)
14:30–14:45
Break
14:45–16:15
Panel 6: Memory, Trauma, and Lived Experience in Game-Poems
16:15–16:30
Break
16:30–18:00
Panel 7: Readings - Poetry From and For Games
18:00
Conference closes
Panel 4: Atmospheres of Play: Wandering, Procedure, and Affect (09:15–10:45)
- Yujia Jin (in-person) — Programmed Flânerie: The Poetics of Wandering in Assassin's Creed
- Richard Carter (in-person) — Agentia: Game Poems as More-than-Human Media
- Atreyee Sen (online, India) — Manifesting the Moment: Poetics of Minimalism and Loneliness in Short-Form Play
Panel 5: Cultural Adaptation and Material/Embodied Practice (11:00–12:30)
- Shahriar Khonsari (online, Iran) — Adapting the Shahnameh as a Poetic Game System
- Isa Alsaba (in-person) — The Path of Thorns: How Poetic Play Shows Positivity as the Key to Progression
- Mailey Horner & Jonathan Carroll (in-person) — Party in the front, disaster in the back: a fucking didactic textile archive
- Isabelle Masters (in-person) — Distancing Act of Play
Panel 6: Memory, Trauma, and Lived Experience in Game-Poems (14:45–16:15)
- Rose Ramsden (in-person) — The Adverse Childhood Experience Test
- Sandy Wardrop (in-person) — Don't Get Upset: An "ADHD-Fuelled" Game Poem
- Shastra Deo (in-person) — Variations on the Word Ghost
- Elizabeth Adams (online, Minneapolis) — Samsara: Overcoming the Fear of Death Through Games
Panel 7: Readings - Poetry From and For Games (16:30–18:00)
- Greg Bem (online, Spokane, WA) — The Withered Approach: An Inquiry into Virtual Performance
- Rashika Singh (online, SoCal) — A Resonance in Me (from 1000xResist)
- Stephen Mooney (in-person) — eye aloft Gleaming Arctic: gaming Lovecraft
Hosted by the Manchester Game Centre, in collaboration with the Poetry Research Group and the Manchester Poetry Library.
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 0.00
