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.
The event is free for all attendees and can be joined in person or online via Teams. Registration is essential: please register at Eventbrite. The conference schedule is available below; abstracts and author bios are available here.
Conference Schedule
DAY 1: Thursday 11 June 2026 Time
09:00–09:30: Arrival & Registration (coffee/tea) - Grosvenor East Building, Atrium (ground floor)
09:30–11:00: Panel 1: Lyric Structures and Poetic Form (Teams) - GF.11 (Grosvenor East, ground floor auditorium)
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?
11:00–11:15: Break
11:15–12:45: Panel 2: Tabletop, Lyric Games, and Documented Play (Teams) - GF.11
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)
12:45–13.45: Lunch break - provided in Grosvenor East Bulding, Atrium
13:45–14:45: Keynote 1: Dr Jon Stone (Anglia Ruskin University) [Teams] - GF.11
14:45–15:00: Break
15:00–16:30: Panel 3: Translation, Constraint, and the Adapted Form (Teams) - GF.11
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
16:30–17:00: Break
17:00–19:00: Poetry Game Jam with Jordan Magnuson (Game Poems Magazine) - GE308 (Grosvenor East, Third Floor)
DAY 2: Friday 12 June 2026 Time
09:00–09:15: Arrival & Coffee - Grosvenor East Building, Atrium
09:15–10:45: Panel 4: Atmospheres of Play: Wandering, Procedure, and Affect (Teams) - GF.11
Yujia Jin (in-person) — Programmed Flânerie: The Poetics of Wandering in Assassin's Creed
Richard Carter (online, York) — Agentia: Game Poems as More-than-Human Media
Atreyee Sen (online, India) — Manifesting the Moment: Poetics of Minimalism and Loneliness in Short-Form Play
10:45–11:00: Break
11:00–12:30: Panel 5: Cultural Adaptation and Material/Embodied Practice (Teams) - GF.11
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
12:30–13:30: Lunch break - Grosvenor East Building, Atrium
13:30–14:30: Keynote 2: Dr Abigail Parry (Cardiff University) [Teams] - GF.11
14:30–14:45: Break
14:45–16:15: Panel 6: Memory, Trauma, and Lived Experience in Game-Poems (Teams) - GF.11
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
16:15–16:30: Break
16:30–18:00: Panel 7: Readings - Poetry From and For Games (Teams) - GF.11
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
18:00: Conference closes
Multiplatform 2026 is organised in conjunction with the Manchester Poetry LIbrary.
