poems that GO : poems

Остранение. That's what some say it is: making strange. Literature is defamiliarizing the ordinary, making us see even the most quotidian things in a new way. And games? We might describe them in several ways, but they are certainly ritual spaces in which rules that are not the ordinary social and cultural ones apply. So perhaps the concept of the literary game — a seemingly curious concept — is not truly oxymoronic. It may be that certain literary games, including works of interactive fiction, derive their power from the play between their literary aspects and their nature as games. Whether or not such arguments are persuasive, in some ways literature and game do seem to toe the same line. Continued >>