From Play to Poetics: Reconfiguring Pleasure through Defamiliarisation in Game Poems

Game poems, the short, affect-driven hybrids of poetry and digital play examined in this paper, are presented as a distinct poetics of play that locates pleasure in expression, subjectivity, and affective resonance rather than in the conventional goals of fun, mastery, and completion. The authors situate this concept within existing taxonomies of game art and theories of play and enjoyment, arguing that these works generate reflective, intersectional, and even "no-fun" modes of engagement through defamiliarisation, expressive intimacy, and formal constraint. Their central claim is that game poems expand what counts as pleasurable play and what counts as legitimate game design.

The argument draws on lyric poetry and constraint-based movements such as Oulipo and Dogme 95, contending that mechanical, temporal, or social limits generate intensity and originality rather than diminishing them. Works including Queers in Love at the End of the World, Portraits of My Child, and A Lake Sketch are offered as illustrations, and Sophie Mallinson's The Crying Game (2020) serves as a key example of how such works defamiliarise both games and poetry at once. The paper positions game poems as a hybrid form that sidesteps the vagueness of the "art game" label and can attract literary audiences who would not ordinarily engage with video games.

The evidential basis is qualitative and practice-based. The authors draw on close readings and observations from workshops and exhibitions conducted between 2017 and 2026, including feedback from poetry festivals and from participants who had never made a video game. These accounts are explicitly framed as reflective rather than as formal user studies, and the paper does not attempt quantitative measurement of player experience. Its geographic and industry scope is therefore best understood as centred on the poetry festival and experimental game community rather than the commercial mainstream.

The authors conclude that game poems broaden game design and game studies by legitimising brief, intimate, low-complexity works and by opening new research directions into archives, comparative analysis, and poetic design methods. The paper's contribution lies less in definitive findings than in establishing a vocabulary and framework for treating pleasure in short, expressive play as a subject worthy of sustained critical attention.