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Entering The Lady’S Dressing Room: Using Feminist Game Design To Look At And Beyond The Male Gaze In Swift’S The Lady’S Dressing Room., Melanie D. Holm

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

In 2017, I developed “Entering the Lady’s Dressing Room,” an Interactive Fiction game based on Jonathan Swift’s satiric poem “The Lady’s Dressing Room” (1734) to help my students become better readers of Restoration satire, and poetry generally. I did this for two reasons: to test whether the digital mediation of game-playing could help my undergraduate students more fruitfully engage with the poem, and 2) to theorize the similarities between poetic interpretation, the multiple narrative-making experience of game-playing. This article takes seriously the idea that poetry is play. It describes the circumstances that led to the development of the game and …