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
Individual papers (20 minutes + Q&A)
Research-creation / practice-based presentations (talk + demonstration/performance; or critical reflection on making)
Creative submissions (readings, performances, playable works, game-poems, hybrid pieces; digital or analogue games; etc.)
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 and/or online poetry game jam/workshop, with potential collaboration from Game Poems Magazine. Outputs and documentation from the symposium and jam will inform an exhibition at the Manchester Poetry Library in Autumn 2026.
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: 1 April 2026, 11.59 PM (GMT)
Notification of decisions: 24 April 2026
Submission email: R.Martens@mmu.ac.uk / Please put ‘MULTIPLATFORM’ in your subject line.