![]() ![]() As Brendan Keogh notes above, many people see computer games as a new and inaccessible form or one hardly worth pursuing because of superficial and seemingly infantile content. However, two things should give us pause from the outset. But they can also set computer games into broader intertextual agendas, questioning and appropriating not only game narratives, but modes of use, histories and materialities (see Weightman and Davidson below). Poems can cite computer games allusively and briefly (see Motion and Glastonbury below). For computer games, with their complicated types of interactive textualities and their increasingly discernible impact on Australian poetic practice, seem to lend themselves to rich poetic moments. Shakespeare, the Bible, classic films, the works of the Symboliste poets) it may be time for such analysis to begin (even if the gaming industry’s nascence is eternally pronounced). Given the contemporary cultural significance of computer games and the rigour with which other types of poetic allusions or intertexts have been treated (e.g. Certainly no one within Australian poetry studies has closely examined computer games as technological texts in quite the same manner as, say, Philip Mead’s perspicacious exploration of cinematic technology and the poetry of Kenneth Slessor (2008: 30-86). To date, it appears that few Australian scholars of poetry have explored contemporary poetic allusions to computer games in systematic or detailed ways. (Toby Davidson ‘Quartet for the Age of Interruption’ 2012: 51-56) In the event of game over, re-read the instructions’ Many see them as nothing more than militaristic wet dreams or playthings of young and old boys: racing cars and shooting aliens and not a whole lot else. (Brendan Keogh ‘On Video Game Criticism’ 2014: n.pag.) Video games seem inaccessible to those who don’t play them, like the literary canon of a foreign language. Keywords: Poetry – computer games – transhumanism – Australian Literature – technology – game studies
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