Description
Player One: video games Player Two: poetry [Hit Start] Once again, Dr Fulminare has set a generation of poets loose on a half-century of video gaming, compelling them to seek out mystery and meaning in a panoply of virtual realities. This time the scale is grander, the rewards richer, the effects dazzling in their variety. Mixing existing game poems by well-known performers like Ross Sutherland and Nathan Penlington with newly commissioned work from a plethora of young writers, Coin Opera 2 uncovers the surprising similarities between the two mediums: the hidden rules and restrictions, the role of rhythm and structural repetition, the need to access that vital space between ‘too hard’ and ‘too easy’ which snares the human imagination, and, fundamentally, the importance of play. These are poems that don’t just respond to the games that inspired them, but mould and reshape them, mimic and tinker with form and convention, fuse and confuse our world with theirs. Expect poems made entirely out of Playstation controller inputs, Lemmings as a metaphysical tale of transcendence, Caligula cynically gunning for a role in Final Fantasy IV, two-player collaborative, party-gathering and head-to-head poems, and mega-size boss poems. Everything, in fact, that the good Doctor needs to make his dreams of vengeance and world domination a reality.Continue?
Credits
Kayo Chingonyi, Samuel Prince, Ross Sutherland, Matt Haigh, Joe Dunthorne, Nathan Penlington, Phil Brown, Aliya Whiteley, David Floyd, Simon Barraclough, Richard Watt, S.J. Fowler, Abigail Parry, Melissa Lee-Houghton, E. Kristin Anderson, Charlotte Geater, Ben Wilkinson, Niall Campbell, Chrissy Williams, Sam Buchan-Watts, Claire Trevien, Chelsea Cargill, Gabrielle Nolan, Harriet Moore, Kate Potts, John Clegg, Charlotte Runcie, Isobel Dixon, Cliff Hammett, Holly Hopkins, Luke Kennard, Emily Hasler, Ben Stainton, Posie Rider, Dan Simpson, Francine Rubin, James Brookes, Harry Man, John Canfield, Jon Stone and Kirsten Irving.
