Each student will give one ten-minute presentation on a work that is both literary and ludic in some sense. A lot of ink has been spilled on both of these terms, but what I’m looking for is material that is narrative or poetic but hails the reader as a co-participant, a “player” of the text, in ways that are more decisive and thorough than most literary texts.

A good place to look is the trove of “electronic literature” produced over the past 30 years or so. What’s “electronic literature”? Our definition of electronic literature is expansive, but it generally means a creative work invested in language, meaning, or storytelling that takes advantage of the unique properties of digital environments. A videogame that does not place storytelling first would not be appropriate for this project.

The Interactive Fiction Database is a great source for parser-based or choice-based interactive stories, particularly the lists here . The Made with Twine category on Itch.io has some great finds by indie authors. To save you wading through dozens of possibilities, you can check out sub-Q , a selective journal whose editors vet (and pay authors for) digital fiction.

Or, you could select a work from the unofficial canon of electronic literature: volume one , volume two , or volume three of the Electronic Literature Collection, an anthology curated by the Electronic Literature Organization .

Finally, you might think about videogames with a strong narrative disposition or, in the opposite direction, printed texts that are “playable” or gamelike.

The presentation should contain some visuals in the form of a slide deck: screengrabs or screen recordings, a walk-through capturing the reader/player/user’s itineraries through the text, and a reflection, using some of the “game theory” vocabulary we’re acquiring in the course, on what the game/text/mode of play does to us: enchanting us in the sense of McGonigal’s work, mounting arguments in the “procedural rhetoric” outlined by Bogost, enacting a critique of some unexamined aspect of culture as Flanagan explores, and so on. Make sure to rehearse enough to give us a “tight ten”: if you do your job, we’ll all spend 10 hours on our own, wrestling with the object you’ve so provocatively presented!

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Note: this project is adapted from Mark Sample's Let's Play assignment.