Game link: https://mxue.itch.io/inthelandofthefree
Please find details of my design in the file I attached. Hope you enjoy it.

My project was to create an interactive decision-making game based on the short story collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912) written by Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton, 1865–1914). I used Twine (Story format: Harlowe 3.3.3) to write the game. The project is an attempt to explore how to PLAY with literary works and historical records.

Bogost, Ian. “Winning Isn’t Everything.” Published December 19, 2014, https://medium.com/matter/winning-isnt-everything-255b3a26d1cf.

_______. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2010.

_______. “Videogames are a Mess.” Published September 03, 2009, http://bogost.com/writing/videogames_are_a_mess/.

Chan, Sucheng. “The Exclusion of Chinese Women, 1870–1943.” Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America 1882-1943, edited by Sucheng Chan, 94–146. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991.

Denning, Andrew. “Deep Play? Video Games and the Historical Imaginary.” The American Historical Review 126, Issue 1 (March 2021): 180–198.

Yang, Robert. “Not a manifesto; on game development as cultural work.” Published October 04, 2015, https://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2015/10/not-manifesto.html.

https://mxue.itch.io/inthelandofthefree

My project was to create an interactive decision-making game based on the short story collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912) written by Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton, 1865–1914). I used Twine to write the game. The project is an attempt to explore how to PLAY with literary works and historical records. I have mixed three stories from this collection into one major storyline in the game and adapted some other plots/characters to enrich the scenes. I will make another post to talk about my rationale and questions I examine through designing this game because I don’t want to spoil the enjoyment here.

I hope you enjoy the game and experience lives of immigrants in the late 19^th century. And after you finish the game (no matter which ending you reach), you can take a look at the second post to see if you could feel my goals through the designs. I would like to listen to your feedback!

(Sorry for the late post, I couldn’t figure out how to host the game and then the commons server went down.)

My project was to create an interactive selection of poems from Leaves of Grass. I have a bit of a soft spot for Whitman. Over the years, I’ve come to disagree with how Whitman is taught in schools. While Song of the Self is a fine piece, often that is all that’s taught. Whitman can be long-winded, but he can also be concise and poignant. He condenses natural imagery and extrapolates outward into philosophical musings. Part of the reason I enjoy Whitman so much is because of this habit; it’s how I was first trained to write metaphor and think philosophically. But in the longer musings, some of this keen eye is lost. In selecting shorter poems I felt able to showcase this as part of the rhetoric of the game.

As I stated in my presentation, I believe that any selection of works that isn’t arranged by the author themselves is inherently argumentative. The order in which I arranged the poems allows for some freedom based on the preference of the player, but there is still a loosely ordered progression through the game. Though it might not immediately come across, I chose the order of the game based on what I believe to be foundational aspects of Whitman’s style and philosophy. The game was also designed with a narrative pace and flow in mind, moving through a series of themes that are representative of Whitman’s body of work in an order which summarizes my interpretation of the themes and their relationship to one another.

The limitations of Bitsy as a development tool demanded brevity and simplicity. However it also allowed for stark design and a certain amount of imaginative freedom. The goal of design was to create an atmosphere appropriate to each poem respectively, to allow the background to set a mood without distracting from the words. In the future, I might update the game to include some sound design, but to an extent, I think the atmosphere is sufficient as-is.

I hope you enjoy the game! Feel free to leave a comment on the itch.io page if you have any thoughts.

My final project, Mapping Mihály, adapts the novel, Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb to the Miro digital platform. Using internal hyperlinks, interactive tools, and collagesque supporting AI images and gifs, the story of Mihály traveling through Italy comes to life. 

Given the traditional use of Miro as a collaborative work platform—not a narrative based interactive story platform—there were interesting challenges to resolve and work around. However, specifically because of the collaborative intention behind the software, opportunities to pull the user in were easily accommodated. There is a lot of potential for building different types of interactive narrative experiences within Miro.

Intended for avid fiction readers and undergrad students looking for a new way to explore this classic of Hungarian fiction, the project does not seek to completely retell every aspect of the novel. It does not, for instance, shift to the perspective of Mihály’s wife, as the original work does, but focuses, instead on the events, locations and people directly impacting Mihály’s journey. Throughout the experience, users are asked to offer their own take on what is happening and are prompted to decide the next best course of action. Prompts throughout the experience to “get lost in thought” help recreate the inner world of the highly impressionable main character as he wrestles with his past and tries to figure out how to create a future. 

Mapping Mihály

Yo, here’s my final project! I didn’t tell you guys evvvverything during my presentation to save some surprise… which is that I made it into a Tumblr blog! I felt it most appropriate to host the results on the site it was born out of, and since it’s an active community I could show everybody what DA actually looks like. I’ve interspersed some actual Dark Academia posts between the research so you guys can see it forrealsies!

PS- the URL was created by a generator with ‘Dark Academia’ as the prompt, which is kinda neat. And the blog title is based on the results of the research!

Links:

Homepage: http://ave-paris.tumblr.com

If you want to read the research without browsing through the cool Dark Academia stuff I show y’all to accompany it, go here.

If you should wish to have a closer look at the header (which only appears on Tumblr’s in-house theme) and the icon for the blog, browse to tumblr.com/ave-paris.

A note: when you go through the site, Tumblr automatically sorts it reverse chronologically, so you’ll have to go to the last page to start reading (unfortunately it’s kinda hard to change this since it goes literally opposite to Tumblr’s algorithm and frankly I’m not messing with that right now) OR just click on the handy little links I put beneath each post.

Everything I’ve reblogged or posted has appropriate tags so you know what exactly it is that you’re looking at. It’s mostly basic stuff, #quote or #moodboard, but I also tagged the authors that I mentioned in my writing when I reblogged a quote of theirs. Everything else in this blog is like a little Easter egg hunt for y’all to notice the stuff I wrote about in the content itself 🙂

Finally, I’ve placed keep readings on the long posts to save y’all from scrolling hand syndrome, so you’ll have to click under the cut to finish some of the posts (with exception of a couple long ones, long story).

I’d like to conclude with a quote by Sylvia Plath: “Hail and farewell. Hello, goodbye. O keeper Of the profane grail, the dreaming skull.”

See y’all on the flipside.

Final Project 720 December 2022

Final project link

Fun times last night! Thanks for a wonderful semester and hope to see you all soon!

– Patricia
pbelen@gmail.com

For those interested: Final Project - DH720 - Fall 2022

[A preview of one of the play screens, featuring the player avatar (a bird), Walt himself, and a waving leaf of grass.]

I’ve pivoted quite a bit from my original proposal. I’m still working with an interactive format, but rather than focusing on themes of control, I’ve decided to make use of spatial and atmospheric features with the Bitsy game engine.

I’ve decided to create an interactive selection of poems from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The player will navigate through an interactive world collecting imagery from a handful of selected poems to unlock others, eventually progressing to an end. Leaves of Grass itself is a unique artifact in that it is a complete work of the author, not in anthology, but in curation. Because of this, I feel it bears division and critical analysis especially well. 

Because of the format, I had to choose shorter poems. However, I am also of the opinion that, when many people are taught Whitman, they are primarily exposed to Song of Myself. Though it is a pivotal work of his, there are so many other poems of his that are more accessible to readers, length being a key feature of this accessibility. 

The Bitsy engine has some pretty significant limitations, especially in visuals. The game screen is limited to 128 x 128 pixels, and there are some pretty significant challenges to editing the screen. Each tile must be edited separately, rather than being able to paint the whole screen at once. There are some workarounds to this, with which I’ve been experimenting. Audio design is limited as well, to a chiptune editor in the interface, barring the same sort of workaround. However, In the limitations, I’m hoping the imagery of the poetry itself will be able to shine through.

There is a loose linear progression through the game, and therefore through the poems themselves, but there is also a degree of freedom. I want the player to be able to progress through the text based on their personal preference first, and the structure of the game second. 

The end result, I hope, will be an interactive essay on the themes and philosophies found in Leaves of Grass. I don’t want to spoil anything, but as of now the game is split into two areas, which represent key points of—in my opinion and analysis of the text—Whitman’s philosophy on life. 

I hope everyone has a chance to play it!