NarraScope 2026: Writing a Manifesto Inside Game Engines

Writing a Manifesto Inside Game Engines: Interactive Systems as Resistant Narrative Interfaces Presented by Gene Santiago-Holt Sunday, June 14th 2026, The University at Albany, NY Description: Let’s examine manifesto writing as an interactive narrative practice rather than a fixed literary form. Instead of treating manifestos as declarative texts, I will explore how game engines and interactive fiction tools can function as sites where theory is fragmented, misread, looped, and materially enacted. I’ll draw from traditions of détournement and practice-based research. What happens when ideological writing is forced to operate under the constraints of branching logic, audiovisual layering, interface friction, and engine-specific affordances? Speaker: Gene Anthony Santiago-Holt, also known as MOYOGASH, is a diasporic Boricua multimedia artist, game designer, and performer based in Philadelphia. Their practice weaves decolonial glitch aesthetics, ancestral memory, and cyborg theory as modes of resistance. Working across interactive games, improvised performance, sound, and experimental video, they embrace fragmentation, distortion, and the poetic as refusals of linearity and compliance. Santiago-Holt is the creator of MAGIKINGDOM Daymare: Chapter Uno and No Sun For Nu Boricua. They hold a BFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and an MFA from the University of Delaware, and are pursuing a PhD in Media.