Jul 21, 2025 at 12:28 PM
Join Date: Aug 3, 2014
Location: worm hole
Posts: 365
Age: 24
Pronouns: she/her
Hi everyone,
I haven't really been active on these forums for some years now but I'm starting a Masters in Game Design soon and wanted to share my Undergraduate dissertation project from last year here, since the CSTSF and modding Cave Story is one of the places I got my start making games.
There are three "game poems" in the anthology, and also three short written poems, with one being contributed by my friend Beatrice Timken. The games all explore themes of alienation, disconnection, and the denial of satisfying conclusions or ways to measure progress, and are based on research by Alex Mitchell into defamiliarizing techniques in games, linking back to Russian Formalist and Neoformalist theory. You don't need to know that to play any of them, though, and they're all pretty short in terms of playtime (the longest takes about 10 minutes until you run out of new things to do). They're pretty interpretive and vary in quality, but I'm happy with them and have got some good conversation out of them.
I haven't really been active on these forums for some years now but I'm starting a Masters in Game Design soon and wanted to share my Undergraduate dissertation project from last year here, since the CSTSF and modding Cave Story is one of the places I got my start making games.
There are three "game poems" in the anthology, and also three short written poems, with one being contributed by my friend Beatrice Timken. The games all explore themes of alienation, disconnection, and the denial of satisfying conclusions or ways to measure progress, and are based on research by Alex Mitchell into defamiliarizing techniques in games, linking back to Russian Formalist and Neoformalist theory. You don't need to know that to play any of them, though, and they're all pretty short in terms of playtime (the longest takes about 10 minutes until you run out of new things to do). They're pretty interpretive and vary in quality, but I'm happy with them and have got some good conversation out of them.