A week ago, I dug into Folding Ideas’ latest video Why It’s Rude to Suck at Warcraft. While not his strongest video-graphic essay (instead see his masterfully technocratic critique of cryptocurrencies/NFTs in Line Goes Up), this piece provides a loot box of (video)game cultural criticism that I began mining this past week.

Olson’s video starts with Wolfgang Iser’s dichotomy of instrumental and free play in The Fictive and the Imaginary (recalled the Implied Reader that we read earlier in the semester). Instrumental play for Iser requires a goal-oriented type of play, while free play lacks goals. The example given in Iser’s text concerns children playing tag (instrumental) versus children running around in a field together. Scholar Kristine Ask reformulates instrumental play in the age of videos to as goal oriented approach that values efficiency, expertise, and optimizing strategies as a part of play. A non-casual player does not just reaching the end of the game, but determines the best way to get there.

Using World of Warcraft (WoW) as an example, Olson makes it clear that these categories of play, and the production of meaning in videogames with a online multiplayer element never exist in “pure” forms. Videogames in the 21st century increasing involve a push/pull between game developers with designs, technology and infrastructure, and the players informing the the devs direction through playing in the game in unintended ways (see Steinkueler). Similarly, free play in games like WoW often morph into instrumental play, with an example given from of Warcraft festivals that first involved congregating without an explicit purpose evolved an instrumental facet, where gatherings in WoW can involve raising money specific charity with an explicit dollar goal (see Taylor). There’s a recognition in Olson’s video that early scholars of Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs) held games apart from the world, a notion that Taylor’s and subsequent work rejects. One aspect of this commentary sheds light on how ubiquitous utopian urges were in the early scholarly work on videogames. The identification of this trend serves as a good reminder to digital humanists that sometimes we conflate broad sentimental history and productions of knowledge with discipline specific movements.

The concept addressed in Why It’s Rude to Suck at Warcraft that interested me the most was the morphogenesis of paratexts from books to videogames. Paratexts in Genette’s original iteration focus on the materials like authorial commentary, editors, printers and publishes that surround the text and inform a text’s reception. Far from being outside of the “main” text, paratexts are “more than a boundary or a sealed border, [but] rather a threshold” (Genette, 1-2). In her work Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogame, Consalvo cleverly extends the paratextual scope to include reader/gamer generated agency in the form of reviews, player forums, fan art etc. Consalvo’s proclamation that “paratexts grow more integral to the digital game industry and player community with every year” was bold in the publication year of her book (2009) it seems obviously true at present.

Although consistent gaming has left my life, I am a slavish fan of From Software’s Soulsborne titles, which had a banner year with the release of Elden Ring. I haven’t finished the game in any meaningful way yet (too many more interesting activities at the moment). I have paid particular attention to the paratexts surrounding it in some detail because of the aggressive (at least, for this gaming studio) patching with an emphasis on game balance both in single player mode (player vs. environment or PVE) and multiplayer mode (co-opt, and player vs. player or PVP). Consalvo’s expansion of paratexts in videogaming contexts serve as an excellent frame for exploring my own knowledge of the Soulsborne community.

Social consensus for the community of gamers playing these titles informs the game play via several concise memes and generally agreed upon though frequently disputed values of these games. “gg” implores new players to “git good,” a mantra offers only slightly in just as advice for people requesting tips for defeating a particular enemy (From games are notoriously difficult). Weapons overly powerful and often used in PVP are referred to as “cancer,” meaning quickly spreading, suddenly pervasive, and frequently destructive to game play. By far the most widespread less instrumental form of play is Fashion Souls, where the effectiveness of armor is minimized in favor of looking fashionable or ridiculous in different helms, robes, boots, etc.

Game lore, often communicated by item description in, gets elaborated in subreddits, forums, and videos. Item locations and questlines and statistical calculations for min-maxing one’s character are house on wikis.

Realizing I’ve got a bit far afield here from the beginning of this post, the paratexts surrounding contemporary videogames looks suspiciously like the popularization of scholarship. In the same way that the novel was finally accepted as appropriate for scholarly attention after decades of treatment as merely a popular form, is this the way that new information media become less disruptive and more accessible to intellectualizing?

For the purpose of this project, our group selected the second and seventh chapters of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway for annotation. Our group is made up of Hampton Dodd, Majel Peters, Sean Patrick Palmer, and Kai Prenger. At the onset, we loaded the publicly available version of the novel from Project Gutenberg into Manifold. However, Majel spearheaded a fairly advanced prototype of Miro board with one chapter, demonstrating the varied annotative approaches we could use on this platform, and we adopted it as our tool of choice, While some of our annotation followed a more orthodox pattern (highlighting text and commenting on the highlighted text with digital sticky notes providing annotation), Miro gave us flexibility to pursue other styles to gloss the text. To track events external through each character’s point of view, such as the backfiring car or mysterious skywriting in chapter 2, we used flowlines connecting disparate references to these events across pages and perspectives. In another form of marginalia, we created a color-coded legend for each character’s stream of consciousness which could be appended to a page/paragraph when the stream begins, helping the reader understand how this common Modern literary technique is applied in Mrs. Dalloway. One main difference (and indeed trade offs) between using Miro as an annotation platform in comparison to hypothes.is or Manifold is that most annotation is visible without clicking or drilling down into each individual annotation. Maps, images and the annotations themselves live on the surface of the document. The unnested nature of the marginal notes closely mimics notes on a physical page. Beyond that, this digital tool also allowed us to include instructional notes on how to use Miro, and potentially could give new annotators details on the meaning behind color choices and structure of previous annotations like flowlines used for events interleaved throughout a chapter.

Initially, our division of labor rested on having each team member specialize in the type of annotation provided. For instance, Sean Patrick Palmer highlighted philological shifts by identifying words which exist today in English, but had a different meaning or valence in the Britain of Woolf’s time. Some teammates chose to focus on intratextual and intertextual commentary, while others wanted to provide historical context. Outward bound links varied from publicly consulted sources like Wikipedia to scholarly articles found in academic journals. We created maps and appended photos of locations extensively referenced in chapter 2. Portraits of royalty and dogs were included.

Reflecting what next steps would be interesting for a project like this:

1. Allow for filtering based on the annotation styles (historical, intratextual, cultural/theoretical, etc)
2. Creating more interactivity to reveal the relationships between narrators, or narrative through lines like the car backfiring

On a personal level, I found the additive nature of annotation, particularly sped up with digital tools, slightly overwhelming. I often asked myself “how much annotation is too much?” Perhaps I prefer subtractive creative work (photography, work through editing, even interpretive essay writing) versus additive work (painting, sculpting, annotation?).

I was fortunate enough to work with a group of classmates that coalesced on three short pieces with shared leitmotifs as options for our audiobook: “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin and “The Box Social” by James Reaney. Our group also came to a prompt agreement that interleaving these texts could generate a convincing audiobook. Bri Cassatt guided us towards this compositional conceit after reading each work, and donning her editor’s cap by initially cutting, pasting and rearranging all three texts into a Google doc that served as a script of sorts. Teammates help revise and refine our collage over a weekend, then we volunteered for the remaining roles in our audiobook project. Readers included Majel Peters (Yellow Wallpaper), Patricia Belen (Story of an Hour) and Raquel Neris (The Box Social). Each reader recorded the entirety of their assigned story using cell phones (covered in socks for use as pop filters). MP3 files were then forwarded to the group for editing. I created a rough cut of the assembled audiobook by chopping up the files into their constituent parts along the segments created by our script. Natalie Kretschmer then removed artifacts from the recordings like interstitial claps between sections, adjusted levels between recording, and adding the one “sound effect” (the scream) found in our work. JP Essey corralled our experiences into a presentation in class, where we reflected the experience, the output, and lessons learned.

My position as the first round “audio engineer” engendered some odd imprints on my experienece when compared to an audiobook or visual reading of these texts, even in the collaged form our team had stitched together. Scrubbing back and forth through the recordings to identify the breakpoints had two effects. Having heard three of my classmates’ voices for hours, I felt a strange sense of intimacy with them, even though we’ve likely spoken a couple dozen words to each other since the start of the class. A pedagogical lesson learned by listening to these audio recordings repetitiously while viewing our script was the impact of the text as language informing the meaning. I believe the best analog from our reading was English’s cursory note about “incommensurable textual layers that aural literature brings into play are acknowledged as proper matters of concern” when reading texts (420). This emphasis on the aural nature of language in the text stuck out as much for a couple of missing lines as for those present in our recordings. One pronounced example that was missing from our recording was “Better in body, perhaps” spoken by the narrator when her husband notes that she seemed in better spirits. Hearing sentences spoken before each breakpoint in our script highlighted the design of our interweaved texts and the effect of each text’s tone in a way that reading or hearing them all in isolation wouldn’t have.

When the subject of audiobooks arrived for this weeks topic, I thought instantly of surveying random recordings of the “General Prologue” of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Although selected prior to reading Rubery’s The Untold Story of the Talking Book, the benefits of talking books listed as “dialects, foreign languages, and song lyrics” retrofit into the motivation of selecting Chaucer’s text (Rubery 9). My selection likely reflects the sentimentality attached to my reading of this particular text. Taking a course on the Canterbury Tales at Hunter College in Spring 2019 paradoxically lead me to both pursuing a masters degree and, counterintuitively on first blush, digital humanities.

(Except from The General Prologue of Chaucer’s “the Canterbury Tales”

read by J.B Bessinger Jr.)

The most persuasive version I found in my brief survey was digital rip from a cassette tape recording of J.B Bessinger Jr., excerpted above from the Internet Archive. Bessinger, an NYU professor, known for his thorough pedagogical schemas for teaching Beowulf, outshines competing recordings by criteria that’s meaningful to me as a listener of an audio performance in Middle English. One distinguishing factor that makes this audio version better than the others found online is the omission of line break pauses. Rhyming in oral traditions offer the memorial ergonomics to the performer, but weren’t intended to modulate the sentence pacing in a given stanza. For example, line five through half of line seven should be spoke all in one breath even though there are two line breaks.

Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

The tendre croppes,

Should be read as “Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth inspired hath in every holt and heeth the tendre croppes.”

Pausing for the line break is rampant in all the readings in of the prologue I could find online.

Bessinger’s intonation accounts for the flow of sentences, and he voices each character’s description in some semblance to the station and gender of the character described. The reading is extremely fluent, and the pronunciation matches how I was taught Middle English. It’s worth wondering to what degree I feel a heretofore surreptitious sense of authenticity when I hear the gentle pops of static build up created during playback and recorded to this digital version of the General Prologue.

Other audio recordings of the General Prologue sounded less convincing to my ear. Though the breath of the Ancient Literature Dude‘s Youtube Channel is impressive, his reading of the General Prologue has several unsatisfactory elements. First, his voice is impressively deep and gravelly, but doesn’t vary vocal characterization throughout the General Prologue. In fact, you’ll find that his tone appears to be flat regardless of ancient language or text read (e.g. a rune poem read in Old Norse ). The music in this rendition, a welcome addition given the audiobook medium, apes the general mood of medievalism, incorporating as much variation as the vocal intonation. This instruction video] prepared by the University School of Nashville offers a major assistance, albeit in visual aides. Still, flashing the image of a bird when speaking of the “smale fowles maken melodye” can help contemporary readers understand some of the meaning behind the Middle English they will recite at the end of the semester, even if it’s not strictly a property of an audiobook.

I am not well-versed in audiobooks, but part of what occurs to me while seeking out recordings of Chaucer is the surprising conservatism in this small subset of this format. I’d be interested to hear if anyone in the case can point me to audiobooks that use more sound effects or audio cues to help enhance a reading of an audiobook when compared to sight reading. Then again, maybe I’m confusing an audiobook for a radio play.

Here’s [a link to the General Prologue] on Gutenberg if anyone wants to read along with the audiobooks presented here. The first two stanzas are included below to give a reader of this blog a flavor of Middle English in written form.

Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth                        
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye,
That slepen al the night with open yë,                        
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages):
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
(And palmers for to seken straunge strondes)
To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes;
And specially, from every shires ende                         
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The holy blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke.

Bifel that, in that seson on a day, 
In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay 
Redy to wenden on my pilgrimage 
To Caunterbury with ful devout corage, 
At night was come in-to that hostelrye 
Wel nyne and twenty in a companye, 
Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle 
In felawshipe, and pilgrims were they alle, 
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde; 
The chambres and the stables weren wyde, 
And wel we weren esed atte beste. 
And shortly, whan the sonne was to reste,
So hadde I spoken with hem everichon, 
That I was of hir felawshipe anon, 
And made forward erly for to ryse,
To take our wey, ther as I yow devyse.