group project

Project Description

In this group project, you will divide into teams of 4-5ish (depending on our numbers) and “remediate” a literary work (probably Alice in Wonderland) to render it as an example of what Nick Montfort calls “playable media.” By “playable,” I mean that the assumed positions “author” and “reader” in the received way of thinking about “literature”—literature is authors writing textual sequences that readers read in order—gives way to something different. That difference is up to you, but at a minimum, you’ll be expanding this one-way flow to accommodate a) a reader who may still read, but who participates more actively and creatively as well, making choices in a branching structure, adding to the text (thus becoming a co-writer or interpreter), or even moving an avatar in a simulated space, in a video game mode.

You’ll present your object in class on 10/27, so you’ll have to work quickly and dispense with perfectionism: this is definitely a “quick and dirty” build in which process trumps product: I want you to get a sense of what it means to transform an object through play, and to use that nitty-gritty experience to think more deeply about the rather abstract theories of play we’re reading, on one hand, and the many playful objects we’ll examine throughout the term on the other.

suggested steps:

1. Find a text and read it (duh). I like the idea of using Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and have scheduled time for us to read it together to kick-start things, but you might consider others if you like, for example, A Tangled Tale, Carroll’s less-known, serially-published book of mathematical puzzles, since Carroll’s work bakes in the mechanics and spirit of play in such a delightfully “meta” way. Or you might get really crazy and remediate one of the Surrealist "games" in the collection edited by Gooding that's in the Useful + Extra file in COURSE READINGS in the Group Library.
2. Choose a platform. As mentioned in class, Twine is a fabulous HTML-based tool that generates branched, non-linear storytelling structures. It’s pretty easy to use: my kid created a simple version of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine in 6th grade during the pandemic. But it can be taken to great heights of design and creativity, as we’ll see throughout the term. You might poke around and think about other approaches, using the Ivanhoe theme for WordPress (example below), a simple video game engine, or something else. The only thing you can’t do is agonize, since you’ve only got a few weeks!
3. Devise a workflow. The division of labor will vary, depending on the text, the approach, and the platform, but you may need:
   1. researchers to dig into the history of the text and its cultural context
   2. designers to think about how best to shape the user interface/experience
   3. someone to dig up or create relevant media (artworks, sounds, video, etc.)
   4. a presenter who can distill the process/product for a 15 min. in-class presentation on 10/27

You’ll also want to agree on a communications strategy, be it email, Google Docs, Slack, or whatever. It’s very important to be accountable to your teammates and keep the workload as fair and even as possible.

The last requirement is that you compose a brief post for the blog (500 words or so) reflecting on a) the process/product as a whole and b) your specific role within it, with an emphasis on what the experience taught you that merely reading about annotation and textual editing would have missed. The post is due on 10/27

Evaluation/Criteria

You will be evaluated on the following criteria, which I will not boil down to a simple rubric, since they all interact with one another in subtle ways:

• adventurousness: does the text take risks, or just play it safe? Does the edition resemble other standard "critical editions" in print, or does it do something new, using digital affordances to engage readers in novel ways or devise a new angle on the text that will be fresh to readers?
• quality: is the product accessible and user-friendly? Does it articulate a clear relationship between the "primary text" and your "secondary" comments on it? Was some attention paid to aesthetics and design?
• reflectiveness: does the presentation (and the discussion in the seminar and on the blog) reflect careful thinking about the project? Did the secondary readings by Huizinga, Callois, Bogost, McGonigal, etc. show up in the project in some way, however obliquely? ⠀ All group members will receive a collective grade for the group’s work. This can be unfair, I realize, and a given member can be uncooperative or unresponsive, but that’s also true in postgraduate life, so it’s good practice. Each of you will receive individual grades for your reflective post, as well. And all of the group projects will be folded into one grade (15% of total grade), so the project is relatively “low stakes.” If your group is having problems (or has one problem member) you are encouraged to contact me privately for help. As you plan your attack on this project, feel free to be a bit zany. It may be that “quality” and “adventurousness” are somewhat at odds (since it’s easier to have good quality if you know what you’re aiming for and easier to experiment if you’re not worried too much about quality), so consciously decide what you’re going for, go for it well, and have fun.

Examples of Student Work:

In this and other courses in the program (and at Hunter) I have had students engage in this kind of transformational play in the past. Here are a few examples that might be suggestive:

• My DH 720 students have transformed a number of texts into role-playing games using the Ivanhoe concept. We’ll examine this mode of play more closely later on, but you can explore the example below to get an idea. In this mode of play, each player assumes a persona of someone in or around the text: a character, for sure, but also the author, an editor, a reviewer, a friend or relative of the author, and so on. Here are some sterling Honors English majors at Hunter “playing” the African-American fiction writer Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Tales.
• Miaoling Xue’s Twine-based version of Sui-Sin Far’s memoir/novel of immigrating to the US.
• Nathalie Kretschmer’s [charming 8-bit video game](https://dh720fa22.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2022/12/17/the-leaf-collector-adapting-whitman-for-accessibility-and-fun/ based on Whitman’s long poem Leaves of Grass, built with Bitsy.
• Lisa’s (who prefers to have her last name private) Twine-based version of Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, emphasizing the historical context that’s so crucial to the text.
• Past 780 students have done interesting (and super-weird) things:
  • a deranged version of parts of Sterne's already deranged novel, Tristram Shandy, summed up here by Patricia Belen with some links to explore.
  • an even more experimental piece created in Python that jumped off of a Borges story, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote": the game is hard to explain but attempts to mirror Borges's title character's claim to have re-created Cervantes's Don Quixote. Those with some Python chops can run it on their own machines via this link.
  • Alice, a gobsmackingly good-looking "electronic literature" version of the text from the Fall 2024 section.

Note that didn't fit anywhere else:

There is an edition of the text, The Annotated Alice (Norton, 2015), that is richly illustrated and copiously annotated with historical context. You might find it suggestive, as you plan, to find out all the jokes on popular culture that are embedded in this text. Once you realize that the "nonsense" material is often burlesquing very familiar, pious verse and art from the Victorian era, the text's extreme subversiveness stands out all the more.

groups: