Making the Familiar Unfamiliar: Techniques for Creating Poetic Gameplay

Just as writers use specific literary devices to deliberately draw attention to a poem's form, in this paper I propose that game designers can make use of the structure of gameplay to draw attention to a game's formal qualities for "poetic" effect. Starting from Shklovsky's notion of defamiliarization and Utterback's concept of the poetic interface, I draw parallels between poetic language and the techniques used in games to create what I refer to as poetic gameplay. Through a close reading of Thirty Flights of Loving, I identify three possible techniques for creating poetic gameplay: undermining the player's expectations for control, disrupting the chronological flow of time, and blurring the boundaries of the form. To demonstrate the potential use of these techniques for analysis, I discuss how these techniques appear in a range of games, suggesting that these techniques can serve as the basis for a more general set of techniques for creating poetic gameplay.