Melanie Holm has published "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'" in ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830.
Holm's article discusses the process of developing "Entering the Lady's Dressing Room," an interactive, digital, text-adventure based on Jonathan Swift's poem "The Lady's Dressing Room." The interactive game she designed aims to demystify reading poetry for undergraduate readers by turning poetic narrative into a "choose your own adventure." Students assume the role of the poem's protagonists and decide whether they would follow his example in the poem or make different choices in the virtual space of the poem.
This experimental design theorizes a connection between literary interpretation and gameplay. Holm describes how feminist game design creates a game in which there is no winning, only different comic outcomes, dismantling through play the assumption that there is only one correct way to read a poem. The game encourages different ways of looking in and at the poem, complementing the poem's own parody of the male gaze. Finally, the article considers the potential of adapting poetry into interactive fiction to promote more effective and detailed reading strategies in undergraduates.
Holm is a faculty member of the Department of English.