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

Abstract

Game poems - short, affect-driven hybrid works at the intersection of poetry and digital play - have the potential to produce distinct pleasures. Rather than centering achievement, challenge, and fun, they evoke pleasure through defamiliarisation, expressive intimacy, and formal constraint. By blending poetic techniques with interactive systems, game poems renew perception, foreground subjectivity, and create reflective, participatory experiences that unsettle assumptions about what games are for and how playing them should feel. Their constrained, minimalist designs operate analogously to poetic form, transforming limits into aesthetic and messaging. Simultaneously, their hybridity disrupts dominant gaming logics and opens spaces for non-normative, intersectional pleasures shaped by identity, lived experiences, and relationships to slowness, ambiguity, and vulnerability. Presenting both theoretical background and examples, the paper examines game poems and illustrates how they reconfigure pleasure as relational and resistant to market-driven expectations of fun, expanding creative practice and challenging prevailing paradigms of play and its pleasures.