Creativity and the creative process in digital games and poetry

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.

Meet the Principal Investigator(s) for the project

Dr Andra Ivanescu - Andra is a Lecturer in Game Studies and a ludomusicologist. Andra’s research interests are broad, going beyond her primary focus of music in videogames, and including appropriation and nostalgia, genre, gender studies, and film studies. Her research has been published in journals like The Soundtrack (2015) and she has presented papers at a variety of conferences including Myth, Fantasy and Fairy Tales in Literature and the Arts (Cambridge, 2013) and the Ludomusicology Conference (Chichester, 2014; Utrecht, 2015; Southampton, 2016). She is also co-editor of the academic journal Book 2.0. Andra has also led (and co-led) two Global Lives-funded research clusters focusing on creative processes in poetry and games, as well as the dissemination of academic research through digital games. Andra's first monograph - Popular Music in the Nostalgia Video Game: The Way It Never Sounded - is now available from Palgrave Macmillan. Andra teaches a number of game studies modules at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, including Game Studies 1: Introduction to Game Studies, Game Genre, and Socio-Cultural Studies.

Dr Hannah Lowe - Dr Hannah Lowe is a Reader in Creative Writing. She is a poet and memoirist, whose work lies between creative writing, memory studies and postcolonial studies. Her completed her AHRC funded PhD in Creative Writing at Newcastle, using historical research to narrate the 1947 journey of the SS Ormonde, the immigrant ship predating Windrush. Broadly her writing explores British multicultural society and its links to the Caribbean and China. Recent practice-based research has focused on Chinese arrival and settlement in the UK.  Dr Lowe is the author of several collections of poetry and a family memoir and the former poet-in-residence at Keats House, London. In 2021, she won both the Costa Poetry Award and the Costa Book Award for her collection The Kids. She is the 2024 recipient of the Eccles Centre-Hay Festival Writers Award for her work in progress, The Woman in The Chinese Collar. She is also a founding member for the Chinese-Caribbean Studies Network.

Related Research Group(s)

Global Lives - Research conducted in the Centre addresses the challenges facing society, helping to change the lives of people around the world by bringing economic, social and cultural benefits.

Project last modified 13/07/2021