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!

I’ve noticed that sometimes games may not come with rhetorical baggage, but they tend to attract certain audience.

My experiences here concern mostly RPG’s, but I will lead with one computer game example.

Well, I’m not sure it was an example THEN: Castle Wolfenstein is an early 80’s shoot ’em up where you’re infiltrating a castle filled with Nazis. Your job is to kill all of them.

I remember my gun crazy friends* going crazy for this game because, again, circa 1983, the big games were things like Pac-Man. So this game was fun because it was very different and you could play it at home,

A lot of this audience is conservative. I’m not sure the creators of the game planned on attracting a politically conservative audience, but it did.

Personally, I only got into the fame when someone hacked it and turned it into Castle Smurfenstein because, by that point, the nephew I was helping to raise was a toddler, and he LOVED the Smurfs, so we watched them all the time. Killing Smurfs was cathartic.

Still, though, most of my experience here comes from RPG’s.

Take an RPG from the 80’s called Twilight 2000. The premise here is that you and the people on your crew are stranded in Europe after a limited nuclear exchange.

No, seriously.

This attracted a VERY conservative audience.

I played because the people who set up the game would frequently buy pizza. I was nineteen, and free food was a powerful motivator.

In the 90’s. RPG’s had a different issue. They would set up a universe that the players wouldn’t buy into.

Take Vampire the Masquerade. In this game, you role-played vampire trying to stay alive (unalive?) in the modern world.

This game was supposed to an angst and horror filled game where, your character tried desperately to hold onto your humanity while your surrounded by those who would destroy you.

Interestingly, many of my conservative friends, who had no issue with Twilight 2000 refused to play Vampire because pretending to be a vampire was immoral somehow.
(This is so very 1990’s)
Having said that, no one in my friend group played the game the way the authors intended. I knew someone who wrote scenarios for the game, and he told me that he thought we were playing the game wrong, that we were missing the deep, personal horror of it all.

I said, “I play these games to escape. Why would I play a fame where I’m more miserable thanI am in real life.”

He never understood that.

Anyway, it’s interesting to see how these things interact, and I never thought about it in this way before.

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*I grew up in Western Pennsylvania. I knew (and know) lots of gun owners. Heck, deer season is such an important thing where I’m from that the first day of deer season is a say off from school. I mean, gun culture is a thing. For example, I learned how to shoot guns at summer camp whenI was ten. Right after the archery lesson.

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.

Keeping a learner active and challenged means constantly expanding one’s skill-set with what learns, and keeping in mind that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I would like to to approach my final project by designing a course syllabus that integrates many concepts that I have learned over the semester.  I would like to put into practice some of the ideas we have worked on to expand the interaction of a story and its ‘program’ to  make reading communal, to make it multi-modal, to make the user experience more involved.  I would like to use our course projects as a source of ideas to include on a syllabus for  a freshman English class.

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?

I would like to explore producing audio books in a classroom setting.

In an ideal world, I would set it up so that each student would get ta separate chapter that they would have to record.

I do an assignment similar to this in Voice and Diction, but I use long poems, that I divide into sections and assign. Then, each student has to find photos that match what’s going on in the poem, record their part of the poem and turn it into a short video.

Then, I take the individual videos and edit them together and we watch the video in class.

I’d like to do something like that, though not for Voice and Diction… in my mind, this project would be the big end of term project for, like, Oral Interpretation of Written Texts. I’d like yo present the idea and the research to the people at my college who teach that class, but, honestly, when I’ve brought up projects like this before, they haven’t been interested.

This is partially because they fall into the “I’ve been teaching this way since the Pleistocene, I don’t need to anything different” camp of Academics (everyone who works in the Academy knows people like this) and partially because they have all the creativity of a turnip.

I could maybe pitch it to the person who teaches Oral Communication for Non-Native Speakers.

Anyway, before I do this with anyone, I’d need to have my ducks in a row, in terms of theory and examples. For an example, I was thinking of using the Manifold project I did for In Our Time and move on from there.

Obviously, I’m still refining this idea, so comments and critiques are welcome.
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After yesterday’s gaming discussion I came across this article in PC Gamer and thought I’d share. In it, former Greek Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis, who worked for Valve as a consultant on their in-game economy discusses the process of developing a functioning and sustainable financial system within the company’s games back in the 2010s.

I found it interesting how nested games can work (how far can you drill down and spin off?), how much of the “real” world can be injected into the virtual (as Murray asked: when do you start to feel the outside creeping in and lose immersion?), and how simulations can jump outside of their boundaries to other platforms (the “real” world). Wonder if the “real enough to use” (Murray) quality of the Valve economy made it more susceptible to platform jumping—people recognized it as something beyond the virtual space.

Former Valve economist calls Facebook’s metaverse ‘a Steam-like digital economy’ with Zuckerberg as its ‘techno-lord’

Majel set up the Miro site. I wasn’t thrilled at this at first… we didn’t have a great deal of time, and I didn’t want to learn a new application in that time frame.

Credit where it’s due, Majel was right. Miro worked for Mrs. Dalloway, especially the way Majel set it up. I think that Majel is a more visual person than I am, and the way she set everything up made the chapters we did flow.

The learning curve for Miro was not that steep, frankly. Looking back at it, I’m not sure why I Was resistant, other than my “sheer cussed stubbornness”. (To borrow a phrase my grandmother used)

Even though I normally teach things like Voice and Diction or Public Speaking, I have had to teach texts to students, so I think in terms of context, historical background, and vocabulary. So, those are the things I focused on. In this regard, the work was not difficult, just a little time consuming. I felt that this historical context was important, because this novel takes place after WWI, but a novel set in the early 1920’s is going to have a very different feel from one set in the the 1930’s, or even one set in 1919.

I sometimes felt like I over-annotated in places, but anytime I looked at a word or phrase and thought to myself, “I’m not sure what this means”, I felt I had to include some kind of note. I mean, if I didn’t understand it, odds are students wouldn’t.

I admit, I thought about this as a way to annotate the work for a class. Because of the classes I Teach, I considered including performance tips. Let me explain. As a student, I have had assignments when I was given a long text — a short story or chapter of a novel– and told to edit the text down and recite what I Edited.

The two times I did this, I was given time limits, like your recitation could only last 5-7 minutes. You’ll see this kind of assignment in some advanced foreign language classes (I did it in French and Spanish) and in courses like Voice and Diction, Oral Interpretation of Written Texts, and maybe some acting courses.

Som at first, I considered adding performance notes keeping assignments like this in mind. I decided against it because I thought notes like that would be going a little too far for what we’re doing here.

As we continued, I was going to be our spokesperson when we presented, but then I got sick and ended up in the hospital, so the team had to deal with that, which I apologize for.