I’m sure I’m not the only Black Mirror fan in this crowd. While reading about “gamification” and thinking about the various ways play has been instrumentalized to managerial ends in the past 10+ years, I thought back to one of the first episodes, “Fifteen Million Merits.”

I’ll spare you the plot summary, but it’s interesting to me that the episode aired in 2011, at precisely the time that Bogost’s notorious rant on gamification as “bullshit” took place…

I should’ve posted this earlier, but here’s a 20 min peek at McGonigal’s work at TED, where she’s a frequent contributer:

Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world

Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how.

Also, here’s a link to ChoreWars, discussed in chapter 7, and World Without Oil, one of McGonigal’s own games, just for fun.

Having confronted our first frustrating broken object with Norman’s Window, I wanted to point anyone who’s interested to some of the critical literature within DH on the topic of digital preservation. As has been widely observed in DH circles in the past 10 years or so, DH erupted onto the scene in the 2000s amid a broad techno-utopianism that was fascinated with the new. More recently, the field has started to look back and consolidate its own history and discovered that … everything is broken.

I exaggerate, but the deprecation of Adobe’s Flash and the obsolescence of early experiments predicated on particular soft- and hardware configs means that countless projects, including projects that were very prominent and widely-discussed in their time, are largely unread and are being forgotten.

This is a dynamic area in DH, and if anyone’s interested would make a great final project topic. Here are a couple of books that will get you started.

Pathfinders: Pathfinders

Introduction to Pathfinders An introduction to Pathfinders with detailed information about the project Judy Malloy’s Uncle Roger Judy Malloy’s Opening Page John McDaid’s Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse John McDaid’s opening page for Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl This is the opening page of the Jackson Reading Path

Traversals

An exercise in reclaiming electronic literary works on inaccessible platforms, examining four works as both artifacts and operations.Many pioneering works of…

I wanted to pass along Nicole’s self-introduction and contact info. I’ve invited her to visit us in class as well, but especially since you’re plunging into the group projects this week, she might be a good resource/sounding board. Here’s what she gave me:

I am a PhD candidate in English at the Graduate Center, where I broadly work on topics related to the environment, media studies, and the history of technology. I have also taught various coding and tech skills at the GC and elsewhere—for example: JavaScript (w. HTML/CSS), D3, git/GitHub (w. Markdown/Command Line), Python, accessible design ideas, & etc.—and have worked broadly on applied digital media and digital humanities projects.

I am reaching out to share that I am available to meet with students to discuss coursework and project-based questions as well as program related queries (i.e. advising on course selection and the like). I will be holding office hours for students this semester by appointment.

Alternatively, for quick questions, students can always just message me on the department’s Slack or email me.

A hearty welcome to all students in DH 780 this term. I look forward to meeting you on Monday (note that we’re in 4119). In the meantime, please look around. There’s nothing to prepare for our first meeting, but if you’d like to introduce yourself via the charming microblogging interface, Padlet, be my guest:

https://huntercollege68.padlet.org/jallred/dh-780-introduction-games-people-play-eju0g92tcgz67v2h

I trust that you’re on the Commons and a member of our group + site if you’re reading this, but email me if you’re having issues.

Re-reading Wardrip-Fruin on playable media this week, I thought of Wallace Stevens’s great long poem, “The Blue Guitar” (1937). The poem is a long riff on the way “things as they are” are transformed through the refracting energies of poetry (the titular “blue guitar”). I think both Bogost and Wardrip-Fruin, in different ways, want to think about how digital texts can marshal some of this deformative energy and create new ways of thinking about the same old, same old.

Here are some excerpts from the poem for those who are interested from a charming olde website of yore from one of my mentors, Al Filreis.

We’ll put our heads together and choose a text to “play,” beginning next week. There are no hard and fast rules on what makes for a good text, but in my view here are some general criteria:

• size matters: there’s a lot of work (well, play) in order to read the text and understand it, plus do enough research on your character in order to play them competently. So novella-length is good. Also, a modest number of main characters is much better than a Tolstoyan dramatis personae.
• rich history helps: the play really cooks when you can activate the penumbra around a text rather than just enact what happens within its pages. So texts that have interesting reception histories or performance histories or controversies around them are a good fit.
• lively voices: since you’re basically ventriloquizing characters, authors, readers, etc., one hopes for fun, lively characters to inhabit.

A few suggestions:

• At the risk of tedium, my earlier suggestion of Sinclair Lewis’s novel imagining a dystopian fascist USA, It Can’t Happen Here, would be great. I dimly remember that it was turned into a play that was widely performed in the 1930s and would be interesting to delve into.
• How about Jonathan Franzens’ The Corrections, given that it sparked the notorious Oprah Affair and occasioned all kinds of discussions about literature, media, and commerce?
• A novel with a coterie of famous readers around it might be cool, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein?

I’m sure you’ll have your own ideas, and we can have 2 or 3 games going on different texts if we like.

Finally, a few examples:

• These 720ers played Nella Larsen’s 1920s Harlem Renaissance novel of passing, Quicksand.
• And these Hunter undergrads played a cycle of Charles Chesnutt’s revisionary plantation fiction stories, The Conjure Tales.
• Finally, these 720ers played Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

Interesting piece on the 1980s Choose Your Own Adventure series of children’s books that touches on some of the overlap between print and screen-based media we discussed last night, insofar as the CYOI series anticipates some of the 1990s giddy fascination with “hypertext media” and the contemporary proximity between cinema, video games, and the novel.

BTW if it isn’t obvious, this is your space too: feel free to post anything course-relevant on the blog as we move through the course.

Katharina asked the very useful question last week, after I suggested that one or both groups might choose a substitute for the planned Billy Budd: what makes for a good text to play via Ivanhoe? Here are some thoughts on that score:

• you can “play” virtually any fictional narrative (or even historical event, legal debate, etc.): as long as there are an array of different personae to inhabit, the play will work.
• shorter is better: in my experience, the game works best in groups of 4-7, to allow for a range of different personae and to give a sense of the text as a whole. As I joked in class, Russian “doorstop” novels have too many characters and too much plot complexity to work well. Novella-length is great, given the time constraints.
• public-domain is always nice but less necessary here: we are transforming these texts and thus can “publish” our work in the open under “fair use.” So the only downside is the expense, potentially, of getting your hands on an in-copyright text.
• interesting publication history: if you dig deeply enough, almost any text has a rich publication history on some level, but it’s nice to think about texts that occasioned some kind of vivid debate, or had unusual itineraries through the publication process, or otherwise teach us something about the production/consumption/distribution of texts.
• As I mentioned in class, the Bedford Cultural Edition series has a few 19thC texts that have rich publication histories, are of manageable length, and are chock-full of the kinds of cultural materials that would enhance your play.

For an example, check out the site in which my honors course at Hunter played Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Tales last term. As you can see, both teams played the same text but with different emphases and different “paratextual” characters. The fun of the game emerges through the interactions, in which players, much as in improvised music or theater or dance, have to listen to one another in order for their expressions to mesh with the whole. Of course your play will look very different, but I think these students did great things with the project.