Lachlan Brown is a lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing at Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga. His first book of poetry, Limited Cities, was published by Giramondo in 2012 and was commended for the Dame Mary Gilmore Award. He was shortlisted and commended in the 2014 Newcastle Poetry Prize. Lachlan’s research areas include poetry and the sacred, transnational short fiction and literature and suburbia.

 

‘The Beautiful Pixels’

Computer Games and Two Contemporary Australian Poems

This essay offers detailed readings of Toby Davidson’s ‘Double Dragon’ (2012) and Connor Weightman’s ‘Garden Pixels’ (2013) as examples of contemporary Australian poems concerned with computer games. Unpacking the computer game allusions in each work, the essay demonstrates how games might supply a rich background for specific poems, both in particular game content, but also in the complexities of the material form of the video game. The readings of each poem take into consideration theoretical perspectives (such as N. Katherine Hayles’s account of transhumanism), as well as insights from game studies (including work on controllers by Bjorn Nansen and Graeme Kirkpatrick) and more traditional literary comparisons (such as works by Franz Kakfa and Philip Salom).