Poetry at Play developed a practice-based transdisciplinary research approach to examine creativity and the creative process in digital games and poetry. Starting from the idea of constraint and George Szirtes’s assertion that “the constraint of form are the chief liberators of the imagination”, this research cluster organised two workshop to examine creativity and constraint in the two art forms.
The project brought together students on the BA Games Design and BA Games Design and Creative Writing courses, with professional games designers, as well as professional poets. Overall, the project included 21 Creative Writing and Games Design BA students, three professional poets, and three professional games designers. The students who participated praised the project for its democratic approach, noting that it helped them related to their lecturers differently and understand what research in their respective disciplines might mean. Furthermore, some of the students even took the initial prototypes developed during the workshops further, developing them for their assessments.
To conclude two workshops were very successful and produced a number of artefacts which were presented at the College of Business, Arts, and Social Sciences Education Forum in 2019.