Teaching Games and Game Studies in the Literature Classroom 9781350269712, 9781350269750, 9781350269743, 9781350269729

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Figures
Introduction: Ludology, Narratology, and Teaching Literary Games Tison Pugh and Lynn Ramey
Part I: Theories of the Ludic and Literary Classroom
1 Developing and Teaching Games-Focused English Courses: A Technological and Curricular Walkthrough Eric Detweiler
2 Gaming Literature: Games as an Accessible Entry into the Study of Literature Regina Marie Mills
3 Levelling up: Transferring the Analytical Gaze from Print Literature to Digital Literature and Digital Games in the Literature Classroom Nolan Bazinet
4 Reverse-Engineering Stories in the Literature Classroom: Linking Video Games and Traditional Narratives to Foster Critical Reading Skills John Misak
5 Pwning Tolkien’s Trilogy: Game Studies in a Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) Don Rodrigues and Jay Clayton
6 How/Why We Read/Play: Conceptualizing Reader Goals in the Game of Literature Mitchell Gunn
Part II: Video Games and Interactive Media in the Literature Classroom
7 Ready Player Action: Teaching Close Reading and Critical Play in a Ludic Century Craig Carey
8 Teaching Japanese Video Games: Practical Strategies for Analysis and Assessment Ben Whaley
9 Intervening in Game Cultures: Video Game Streams and/as Literature Cody Mejeur
10 Ethical Simulation Games in the Liberal Arts Classroom: Civilization V, SimEarth, and Sweatshop Harry Brown and Nicole Lobdell
11 Procedural Bibliography: A Ludoliterary Pedagogy for Thinking Outside the Book Chloe Anna Milligan
Part III: Gaming Identity and Ideology in the Literature Classroom
12 Teaching the Iñupiaq Video Game Never Alone and/as Literature Natalie Neill
13 First Person in Translation: Gaming Perspectives on Indigenous Languages and Literatures Jillian Sayre
14 Playing in the Dark: Teaching Representation, Appropriation, and Identification with Assassin’s Creed III James K. Harris
15 Constructing Subjectivities and Teaching Otherness through the Silent Hill Series Katsuya Izumi
Part IV: Gamifying the Literature Classroom
16 Film and Literature Instruction through Live-Action Role-Play Evan Torner
17 How to Develop Gamified Pedagogical Strategies: A Case Study of Classical Japanese Poetry in the Undergraduate Classroom Catherine Ryu
18 Designing and Implementing a Roleplaying-Game-Based Course in Advanced Classical Literature: Challenges, Benefits, and Iterations Roger Travis
19 Games We Play on Paper: Understanding the Process of Discovery through Detective Fiction and Behavioral Neuroscience Michelle Robinson and Marsha Penner
20 Making Feminist Games in the Gender Studies and Literature Classroom Gabi Kirilloff
Afterword: Confessions of a Game Scholar in an English Department Anastasia Salter
Notes on Contributors
Selected Bibliography
Selected Ludography
Index

Citation preview

TEACHING GAMES AND GAME STUDIES IN THE LITERATURE CLASSROOM

Also Available from Bloomsbury USING LITERATURE IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDUCATION, edited by Janice Bland USING GRAPHIC NOVELS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS CLASSROOM, William Boerman-Cornell and Jung Kim DIGITAL GAMES AND LANGUAGE LEARNING, edited by Mark Peterson, Kasumi Yamazaki and Michael Thomas PROCESS DRAMA FOR SECOND LANGUAGE TEACHING AND LEARNING, Patrice Baldwin and Alicja Galazka CRITICAL DISCOURSE STUDIES AND TECHNOLOGY, Ian Roderick

TEACHING GAMES AND GAME STUDIES IN THE LITERATURE CLASSROOM

edited by Tison Pugh and Lynn Ramey

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Tison Pugh and Lynn Ramey and contributors, 2022 Tison Pugh and Lynn Ramey and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover design: Charlotte James Cover image © itscatrameymedia All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-6971-2 PB: 978-1-3502-6975-0 ePDF: 978-1-3502-6972-9 eBook: 978-1-3502-6973-6 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

List of Figures

viii

Introduction: Ludology, Narratology, and Teaching Literary Games Tison Pugh and Lynn Ramey1 Part I: Theories of the Ludic and Literary Classroom

13

1

Developing and Teaching Games-Focused English Courses: A Technological and Curricular Walkthrough Eric Detweiler15

2

Gaming Literature: Games as an Accessible Entry into the Study of Literature Regina Marie Mills27

3

Levelling up: Transferring the Analytical Gaze from Print Literature to Digital Literature and Digital Games in the Literature Classroom Nolan Bazinet39

4

Reverse-Engineering Stories in the Literature Classroom: Linking Video Games and Traditional Narratives to Foster Critical Reading Skills John Misak49

5

Pwning Tolkien’s Trilogy: Game Studies in a Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) Don Rodrigues and Jay Clayton63

6

How/Why We Read/Play: Conceptualizing Reader Goals in the Game of Literature Mitchell Gunn71

Part II: Video Games and Interactive Media in the Literature Classroom 7

79

Ready Player Action: Teaching Close Reading and Critical Play in a Ludic Century Craig Carey81

Contents

8

Teaching Japanese Video Games: Practical Strategies for Analysis and Assessment Ben Whaley91

9

Intervening in Game Cultures: Video Game Streams and/as Literature Cody Mejeur101

10 Ethical Simulation Games in the Liberal Arts Classroom: Civilization V, SimEarth, and Sweatshop Harry Brown and Nicole Lobdell111 11 Procedural Bibliography: A Ludoliterary Pedagogy for Thinking Outside the Book Chloe Anna Milligan121 Part III: Gaming Identity and Ideology in the Literature Classroom

131

12 Teaching the Iñupiaq Video Game Never Alone and/as Literature Natalie Neill133 13 First Person in Translation: Gaming Perspectives on Indigenous Languages and Literatures Jillian Sayre143 14 Playing in the Dark: Teaching Representation, Appropriation, and Identification with Assassin’s Creed III James K. Harris155 15 Constructing Subjectivities and Teaching Otherness through the Silent Hill Series Katsuya Izumi165 Part IV: Gamifying the Literature Classroom

175

16 Film and Literature Instruction through Live-Action Role-Play Evan Torner177 17 How to Develop Gamified Pedagogical Strategies: A Case Study of Classical Japanese Poetry in the Undergraduate Classroom Catherine Ryu185

vi

Contents

18 Designing and Implementing a Roleplaying-Game-Based Course in Advanced Classical Literature: Challenges, Benefits, and Iterations Roger Travis197 19 Games We Play on Paper: Understanding the Process of Discovery through Detective Fiction and Behavioral Neuroscience Michelle Robinson and Marsha Penner207 20 Making Feminist Games in the Gender Studies and Literature Classroom Gabi Kirilloff215 Afterword: Confessions of a Game Scholar in an English Department Anastasia Salter225 Notes on Contributors 233 Selected Bibliography 236 Selected Ludography 239 Index241

vii

­F IGURES

  0.1 Ian Bogost’s Playful Poster Depicts a Clash between Janet Murray, Representing Narratology, versus Espen Aarseth, Representing Ludology 4   4.1 A Sample Twine Storyboard Illustrating Narrative Possibilities in Hamlet57 12.1 The Player Characters Nuna and Fox from Never Alone © E-Line Media and Upper One Games, 2014 134 12.2 Nuna and Fox Leaping across Ice Floes from Never Alone © E-Line Media and Upper One Games, 2014 136 12.3 A Spirit Helps Nuna and Fox from Never Alone © E-Line Media and Upper One Games, 2014 140 13.1 Still from Ubisoft North America. “Assassin’s Creed III: E3 Cinematic Trailer.” YouTube, June 12, 2012. 148 13.2 Still from Assassin’s Creed III Playthrough on PlayStation 3. Author’s own, 2017 149 17.1 Blank Tanka Metric Grid Given to Students 189 17.2 Tanka Metric Grid Samples 190 17.3 Basic Parts of Speech in Japanese Visualized with Double-Coding 190 17.4 Prefilled Grid with Verse 5 191 17.5 Correctly Identified Parts of Speech in Verse 5 192

INTRODUCTION: LUDOLOGY, NARRATOLOGY, AND TEACHING LITERARY GAMES

Tison Pugh and Lynn Ramey

Literature is a game. This statement could be read metaphorically, as suggesting the recreational nature of the form and the playful engagements it elicits between authors and readers. Or, this statement could be read structurally, as suggesting that poetry, fiction, and other literary forms bear the requisite elements of a game, particularly in their rules, strategies, and players. Or this statement could be read pessimistically, in the assumption that literature’s ludic qualities would necessitate that it therefore involves the tedious win/loss binary so central to many games’ form and function. Or this statement could be read defensively, as part of the simmering debate between narratologists and ludologists, who view the shifting landscape of the humanities from different and at least potentially oppositional frameworks. Or this statement, despite the inherent tautology, could be read literally: literature is a game in all of its constituent parts and possibilities. Beyond a doubt, games and literature have long intertwined, with ludic themes circulating throughout the literary realm and literary history, including the riddles of the Sphinx in Oedipus Rex, the tale-telling game of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the narratological games of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler—even the beheading game of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Sports novels and nonfiction, such as Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, Don DeLillo’s End Zone, and Lauren Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit, merge the literary and the athletic. Virtually all detective fiction can be construed as a game, even from its beginnings in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” in which authors challenge readers to unravel the puzzles created for their pleasure and frustration. Various poetic forms—sonnets, villanelles, rondels—demand precise adherence to metrical rules, with poets constraining their lexical options to adhere to these arbitrary yet essential requirements. Analyzing the protocols of fantasy literature, which requires an imaginary landscape that must nonetheless be anchored by some sense of order, Gabrielle Lissauer states that the genre “must have rules. Not only that, but these rules must be consistent. There must be continuity. If there isn’t any, then the seams in the world are evident and the illusion of story is broken” (172). Given this long history of the literary and the ludic intersecting, it is not surprising that many recent novels, such as Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One and Neal Stephenson’s Reamde, are inspired by video games, and just as novels can be adapted into films or films can be reconceptualized as novels, so too do many popular video-game franchises offer novelizations of their storylines.

Teaching Games and Game Studies

Further along these lines, ludic and literary scholars have long pursued the intersection of literature and games. In his foundational study Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, Johan Huizinga devotes a chapter to play and poetry, describing the latter as a “social game” (124). The 1968 volume of Yale French Studies, with essays by Jacques Ehrmann, Michel Beaujour, A.J. Greimas, Michael Holquist, and Mikhail Bakhtin, remains of critical importance to scholars of literature and games. Studies of literary games could be largely subdivided into those focusing primarily on games (e.g., Jenny Adams’s Power Play: The Literature and Politics of Chess in the Late Middle Ages), those focusing primarily on authors (e.g., Kathleen Blake’s Play, Game, and Sport: The Literary Works of Lewis Carroll), and those focusing on ludic and literary strategies (e.g., Peter Hutchinson’s Games Authors Play), but such an approach would simply impose an overarching structure on a phenomenon predicated on rich interconnections. In her foundational study of games and literature, “The Game of Literature and Some Literary Games,” Elizabeth Bruss posits a universal ludic form present in virtually all aesthetic artifacts: “Every symbolic product, literary works included, presupposes a situation of exchange: there is no significance, no communication, without the minimal engagement of a sender and a receiver” (153). For Bruss, these exchanges create the ever-present potential of a ludic experience existing concurrently with a narrative one. Writing in the late 1970s, Bruss could hardly have envisioned that the ensuing decades would witness an explosion of games and the birth of game studies as a field of humanistic endeavor. While the release of Atari’s Pong in 1972 might not have caught the attention of literary critics, games as a cultural phenomenon became increasingly impossible to ignore over the subsequent decades. Middle-class children of the 1970s and 1980s grew up with rudimentary gaming consoles in their households, and subsequent decades witnessed the establishment of game studies as a serious scholarly field, with the International Board Game Studies Association (IBGSA) coalescing in 1990 and the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) emerging in 2003. By 2018, the Entertainment Software Association reported that video game sales reached $43.4 billion, thus attesting to its premier position within the world’s cultural economy. Simply put, games are here to stay, and they cannot help but influence our understanding of preceding cultural forms, including literature. Yet the intersection of cultural forms at times generates controversies, and the relationship between interactive storytelling and video games has long been complicated by a desire on the part of some to separate gameplay from narrative. Today most economically and critically successful video games at least nod toward a storyline, although this was not always the case. The earliest graphical arcade games like Pong incorporated one- or two-player competition and scoring but without an overt story line. The plotline of Space Invaders (1978) is fully encapsulated in its title, as is that of Asteroids (1979) and Missile Command (1980), and the play of these minimally narrative games was equally simple: shoot and destroy. Other early games engaged more directly with literary culture: Atari’s breakout game Adventure (1979) alluded to Beowulf in the name of one of its dragons—Grundle—and incorporated a storyline reminiscent of the Arthurian quest for the Holy Grail. Text-based games like Oregon Trail (1974), Zork 2

Introduction

(1977), and Rogue (1980) employed absent or light graphics while allowing players to progress through a narrative with multiple outcomes. Video game production, both text and graphics based, moved along in time with technological developments, eventually privileging computationally heavy graphics over storylines as users and game developers stretched to make the most of the rapid improvements in video cards. Whereas many game studies scholars date the founding moment of their field to Chris Crawford’s The Art of Computer Game Design (1984), for literary and narrative scholars Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (1997) stands as the pivotal study, as it recognized the power of games and claimed their equal status with literature and movies. Furthermore, she saw the early text-based narrative games as new forms of writing and storytelling with enormous potential. The same year, Espen Aarseth published Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, a book that took seriously the field of video game studies and electronic literature. Both Murray and Aarseth advocated for the aesthetic and narrative potential of video games and cybertexts, with Murray recognizing the role of storytelling in games and Aarseth focusing on the essential differences between games and cybertexts. At a conference in 1998, then graduate student Jesper Juul weighed in, suggesting that the tension between gameplay and narrative in narrative-leaning video games produced something that was neither a good game nor a good story. Interactivity requires the user to be in the “now,” whereas narrative places the user in the “past.” A game could not be a narrative because they were “two phenomena that you basically cannot have at the same time” (Juul). Ian Bogost created a visual sendup of the dispute pitting ludologists versus narratologists (see Figure 0.1). This debate about the primacy of game play (ludology) over storytelling (narratology) continued throughout the late 1990s and into the twenty-first century. In 2005, Murray claimed to have the “last word” on the ludology versus narratology debate, suggesting that ludologists suffer from a Bloomian “anxiety of influence,” seeking recognition and separation for the field of game studies from the oppressive dominance of literary criticism (“Last Word”). The conflict appeared to wane, although documented and kept alive in such volumes as Matthew Kapell’s The Play Versus Story Divide in Game Studies: Critical Essays (2016), and it was unexpectedly revived when Ian Bogost’s 2017 The Atlantic essay “Video Games Are Better Without Stories” was met quickly with responses from video game journalists Patrick Klepek of Vice and Tom Battey from Gamasutra, not to mention Twitter tirades, including a notable one from Danielle Riendeau. Unlike the Murray-Aarseth dustup, when the conversation moved from academic debate to a public forum, very little support emerged for the exclusively ludologist camp. As scholars engaged in this engrossing version of the chicken/egg debate, game designers continued designing games of increasing technical and narrative sophistication, with an apparent turning point emerging with the release of the critically acclaimed series Bioshock (2007). Bioshock was not the first to tell a story with a first-person shooter format, but its ground-breaking graphics combined with an engaging story moved video games into an era of new acceptance. In a seemingly ideal configuration, it was generally recognized that games could tell engrossing stories and engrossing stories 3

Teaching Games and Game Studies

Figure 0.1  Ian Bogost’s Playful Poster Depicts a Clash between Janet Murray, Representing Narratology, versus Espen Aarseth, Representing Ludology. Courtesy Ian Bogost could be played. Critically acclaimed narrative games proliferated: The Last of Us (2013), The Walking Dead (2012), and Gone Home (2013) figure among the better-known titles. Despite the ongoing tirades of some narratologists and ludologists about the primacy of one perspective over another, many scholars now recognize the importance of uniting critical perspectives from both disciplines. As Souvik Mukherjee states, “It is a common fallacy within the game-story debate to identify one of the entities as being subsumed by the other or being equated with the other” (93–4). On the contrary, ludonarratology as a critical field has emerged more distinctly from these discussions, as scholars recognize that the intersections of game and literature result in kaleidoscopic shifts to dominant cultural forms. As Tison Pugh explains, “Ludonarratology, in uniting narrative theory with gaming theory, recognizes the ways in which these forms are currently shifting in light of their increasing intersection, while also retrospectively enhancing our understanding of narrative and ludic forms of the past” (12), suggesting as well that 4

Introduction

“To define ludonarratology, then, is not to establish a fixed set of parameters for all texts and for all games, but primarily to realize their mutual and fruitful overlap in the particular instances when they enlighten the gaming text, or textual game, at hand” (37). Ludonarratology stands as a key intervention in both literary and game studies, and, even if the issue is not fully resolved for game studies critics, the general public has enthusiastically embraced narrative games. Certainly, the students in our classrooms are often eager to discuss the narrative aspects of games: in our experience, if we ask a generalized question about narrative form, character, plot, or theme requiring students to generate examples from a wide range of cultural artifacts, their answers are as likely to come from video games as they are to come from literature, theater, poetry, television, and film. Given these conditions, this volume explores the benefits of introducing games and game studies into the literature classroom, as well as the gamification of the classroom inherent in this process. At its simplest, gamification can be defined as the incorporation of ludic elements into activities that one might otherwise prefer to avoid, with this practice increasingly encoded into myriad aspects of modern life. Long before its current heyday, Mark Twain satirically depicted gamification as the bailiwick of hucksters and fools in his The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In an iconic scene, Tom is tasked with whitewashing Aunt Polly’s fence, an onerous chore that he transmogrifies into “play” for his gullible peers. The first dupe protests weakly until Tom quells his argument with a bit of solipsistic philosophizing on the nature of work and play: Tom contemplated the boy a bit, and said: “What do you call work?” “Why ain’t that work?” Tom resumed his whitewashing, and answered carelessly: “Well, maybe it is, and maybe it aint. All I know, is, it suits Tom Sawyer.” (30; italics and punctuation in original) The line demarcating work from play, Tom suggests, is drawn by the individual, not by any inherent or preconceived qualities belonging to work or play. Tom convinces his chums to hand over a kite, twelve marbles, a tin soldier, a couple of tadpoles, and sundry other prized possessions in exchange for the “pleasure” of labor, with Twain concluding of his protagonist’s adventures in whitewashing: “If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do” (32). Obligation and choice, respectively, distinguish work from play, yet as Twain’s humorous scene exposes, gamification blurs their borders, dissolving any preconceptions of work’s drudgery and play’s frivolity. Gamification’s advocates would surely point out that muddying the differences between work and play achieves laudable objectives, and within Twain’s fictions, Aunt Polly would likely agree that someone had to paint her fence, with the results arguing for themselves. Proponents of gamification enthusiastically endorse the virtue of cloaking work under the guise of play, and recent volumes in the field promise that games will enhance 5

Teaching Games and Game Studies

one’s success in various aspects of life, including such disparate endeavors as business, child-raising, and education (e.g., Kapp). Envisioning gamification’s limitless potential both to imbue life with pleasure and to resolve society’s most intractable problems, Jane McGonigal stirringly declares: “The great challenge for us today, and for the remainder of the century, is to integrate games more closely into our everyday lives, and to embrace them as a platform for collaborating on our most important planetary efforts” (354). For gamification’s devotees, anything is possible by incentivizing people as players through ludic structures: if we build enough games, kids will love learning, the perils of global warming will be resolved, world peace might just be attained. Others take issue with this utopic kernel assumed to inspire gamification, questioning the rush to exploit the inherent pleasure of games for a variety of non-ludic ends. Furthermore, it is worth considering the benefits of the work/play dichotomy as efforts increase to blur its boundaries. David Golumbia observes that many recent games appear divorced from any sense of play and instead align more closely with the realm of work from which they are purportedly distinct: “On careful examination, many of the programs we call video games today much more nearly resemble something like work, embodying what literary theorists and philosophers recognize as a means of enacting a Nietzschean lust for power and, in Derridean terms, a desire to constrain play—much the opposite of what their construal as games might be understood to indicate” (179; italics in original). In their frenzied dedication to achieve a game’s objectives, which are often arbitrary constructions designed to invoke closure with little sense of resolution, some players appear oblivious to the laboriousness of their efforts. As games are increasingly deployed to make work more appealing, a potential consequence will not be that work becomes more pleasureful but that games become less so. Ian Bogost excoriates the pretenses of this emergent ludic form in a blistering critique, bluntly titled “Gamification Is Bullshit”: “Gamification is marketing bullshit, invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is video games and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway.” More so, teachers long exhausted by the influence of popular culture on their students—some of whom expect more to be entertained than to be educated—now must contend with serving as the magister ludorum of the classroom as well. Surely such instructors can empathize resignedly with the Duke in Max Beerbohm’s classic satire Zuleika Dobson when, exasperated beyond measure, he admonishes an Oxford undergraduate: “The Socratic manner is not a game at which two can play. Please answer my question, to the best of your ability” (230). And for narratological purposes, it is worth remembering that Twain tells his story aligned with Tom Sawyer’s perspective, not that of his duped friends. As much as Tom’s gamification may have promised them pleasure, it was never delivered, and thus they have little story to tell of their day’s events. Whitewashing a fence becomes a story mostly from the perspective of the manipulator, less so from that of the manipulated. Offered as a panacea, gamification is little more than a strategy to enhance engagement, surely effective in some instances, ineffective in others. Players embrace games for their manifold pleasures, whereas people in various other circumstances—frequently children, students, and workers—are lured 6

Introduction

into gamified experiences precisely because the gameless versions of these activities traditionally require work and dedicated attention with little immediate payoff—or perhaps because they are just simply boring. And, of course, a system predicated upon work and dedicated attention with little immediate payoff that many denigrate as “simply boring”—but with unparalleled long-term returns—aptly describes education. Lest we appear to be undermining the ambitions of this book, we must interject that we are not arguing against gamification in the literature classroom but advocating for its purposeful and meaningful deployment. Pursuing the laudable objective of enhancing educational outcomes, gamification’s proponents extol the potential of games to facilitate learning, passionately arguing for their inclusion in the pedagogical realm, and games are increasingly being introduced into the school curriculum, with the objective of helping students to assimilate and retain their lessons. Carmine Consalvo extols the concept of “workplay,” which “connotes the nature of not only the educational processes it describes but also the creative organizational culture that it promotes,” positing further that “work is being infused with new expectations and a new spirit. It is being elevated to a new status, one that is more akin to joy and worship than inconvenience and drudgery” (1). For instructors of literature, our classrooms are not places of inconvenience and drudgery but of aesthetic pleasure and delight. When used well, gamification can assist instructors in sharing such pleasure with a wide range of students. As with any pedagogical strategy, gamifying the literature classroom should be assessed objectively, with a steady eye to its benefits and liabilities. Of course, the purpose of this volume is to outline key strategies for its benefits, for gamification, when done well, can enhance students’ participation in the classroom and increase their enthusiasm for analytical and evaluative exercises. We do not offer gamification as a panacea for dull, listless classes, but we do offer it as an appropriate strategy, one among many others, for engaging our students with the literary realm. In the four units of this volume— “Theories of the Ludic and Literary Classroom,” “Video Games and Interactive Media in the Literature Classroom,” “Gaming Identity and Ideology in the Literature Classroom,” and “Gamifying the Literature Classroom”—our contributors discuss strategies that they have found effective in generating productive classroom activities that capture students’ interest in and enthusiasm for the nexus of literature and game. The first section, “Theories of the Ludic and Literary Classroom,” focuses on the conceptual frameworks employed by instructors who address the interplay between games and literature. In the opening chapter, “Developing and Teaching Games-Focused English Courses: A Technological and Curricular Walkthrough,” Eric Detweiler chronicles his experience implementing a general-education class, shepherding it through curricular committees and overcoming technological hurdles encountered in many classrooms. By relaying his experience, he helps other instructors plan for common issues that arise when proposing courses at institutions without an existing game studies program. Regina Marie Mills, too, deals with the introduction to literary studies classroom, this time from the student perspective as she details how her course engages a diverse student profile by teaching basic literary analysis through games, in the essay “Gaming Literature: Games as an Accessible Entry into the Study of Literature.” Student engagement, she shows, is 7

Teaching Games and Game Studies

not guaranteed by developing a class that incorporates video games. The third chapter, “Levelling Up: Transferring the Analytical Gaze from Print Literature to Digital Literature and Digital Games in the Literature Classroom” features Nolan Bazinet’s experiment with integrating games as a means of understanding and differentiating between terms for literary and media analysis. Gaming theory and terminology can provide a new lens for interpreting other genres. John Misak, in “Reverse-Engineering Stories in the Literature Classroom: Linking Video Games and Traditional Narratives to Foster Critical Reading Skills,” picks up on this need to teach analytical skills, describing his experience with STEM students taking a required first-year composition course. Engaging students who are not traditionally in our humanities courses is one of the benefits of using games in the literature classroom. Moving to a much larger and entirely online audience affords and requires a different approach, as Don Rodrigues and Jay Clayton illustrate in “Pwning Tolkien’s Trilogy: Game Studies in a Massively Open Online Course (MOOC).” Their experiences offer practical insights on how to handle very large class sizes and asynchronous learning. Rounding out this unit, Mitchell Gunn argues in “How/Why We Read/Play: Conceptualizing Reader Goals in the Game of Literature” that literature shares much in common with games, illustrating how instructors can benefit from an approach that applies game studies techniques to literature rather than the more common practice of using literary analysis to understand games. The second unit, “Video Games and Interactive Media in the Literature Classroom,” is comprised of accounts of specific methods, texts, and games employed in a variety of contexts. Craig Carey explains, in “Ready Player Action: Teaching Close Reading and Critical Play in a Ludic Century,” how games like Her Story can help students grasp close reading techniques. The parallels between reading and play allow the fields of game studies and literature studies to mutually inform each other. In “Teaching Japanese Video Games: Practical Strategies for Analysis and Assessment,” Ben Whaley details the ways in which second language instruction can be enhanced by tapping into cultural cues in target-language video games. The availability of games from cultures around the world offers a new tool for classes that teach global understanding. Cody Mejeur offers methods to incorporate discussion and raise awareness in “Intervening in Game Cultures: Video Game Streams and/as Literature.” Video game streams are all too often a space where negative narratives around race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality proliferate, so instructors need to be aware of these issues when planning their classes. Raising awareness through games is also the focus of Harry Brown and Nicole Lobdell’s chapter, “Ethical Simulation Games in the Liberal Arts Classroom: Civilization V, SimEarth, and Sweatshop,” which uses carefully curated games to talk about such important topics as environmental stress, consumption, wealth inequality, and the notion of progress. The goals and win conditions for these society-building games can be considered alongside utopian literatures to allow students to uncover what the authors term “procedural ethics,” moving them toward a process for thinking out the incremental impact that decisions can make in a society. In “Procedural Bibliography: A Ludoliterary Pedagogy for Thinking Outside the Book,” Chloe Anna Milligan concludes this unit by suggesting that instructors should pair experimental literature with video games, 8

Introduction

and thereby demonstrate to students the strong affinities these different media share. As students begin to see “bookish games” as an alternative type of reading, they move from understanding the “literariness” of games to creating their own digital, game-based literature. In the third unit, “Gaming Identity and Ideology in the Literature Classroom,” contributors consider the ways in which issues of personal identity are mediated through video games, as well as these games’ utility in pedagogical settings. Games allow students to play as themselves while simultaneously inhabiting alternative identities, thus allowing them to experience various possibilities and enactments of diversity. Natalie Neill, in “Teaching the Iñupiaq Video Game Never Alone and/as Literature,” demonstrates the benefits of theories of narrative adaptation through video games, using Never Alone, the adaptation of a Native Alaskan legend, as her example. Video games, oral traditions, and literature converge in Neill’s classroom, allowing students to consider their complex interrelationship as related to their own sense of play and self. Jillian Sayre, in “First Person in Translation: Gaming Perspectives on Indigenous Languages and Literature,” sets the video game Assassin’s Creed III in conversation with early-nineteenth-century poet Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s poetry, theorizing the ways in which they seek to defamiliarize their respective players and readers from the traditional perspectives of the Western world. Using theories of translation, Sayre argues for the ability of games and literature to communicate new possibilities of being through the practice of confronting the previously unknown. James K. Harris, taking another look at this game in “Playing in the Dark: Teaching Representation, Appropriation, and Identification with Assassin’s Creed III,” analyzes its presentation of race and identity, asking provocative questions about how its portrayals intersect with issues long germane to ethnic studies. Some games facilitate cultural exchanges, yet the attendant ethical issues of these games must be examined as well. In the final essay of this unit, “Constructing Subjectivities and Teaching Otherness through the Silent Hill Series,” Katsuya Izumi compares these video games to such literary classics as Moby-Dick and Heart of Darkness, examining the ways in which they foreground similar questions of identity and the Other, despite their differences in media. Many video games are based on an assumption of antagonism— that players must mindlessly kill their enemies stands as the central premise of so many titles—yet Izumi details the ways in which, in key moments of the Silent Hill games, the player must confront their very selves in these encounters. In this volume’s final unit, “Gamifying the Literature Classroom,” contributors discuss a variety of strategies for incorporating games, but not necessarily video games, into the literature classroom. Evan Torner, in “Film and Literature Instruction through Live-Action Role-Play,” advocates for students not merely reading film and literature but playing the scenarios that its characters confront—that is, to larp (live-action role-play) them. Looking at a variety of narratives and their larping adaptations, Torner details how larping encourages students to inhabit characters and negotiate the situations they face—an invaluable lesson in both empathy and critical thinking. Catherine Ryu details the ways in which poetry can be likened to a game, and thus how to engage students in the play of poetry, in her “How to Develop Gamified Pedagogical Strategies: A Case Study 9

Teaching Games and Game Studies

of Classical Japanese Poetry in the Undergraduate Classroom.” As she writes, “Poetry is intrinsically a meaning-making game,” and her classroom activities exploit the ludic nature of poetry to assist students in building their understanding and interpretations of it. For over a decade, Roger Travis has structured his classes in classical historiography as a game, and he shares the successes achieved and obstacles overcome in “Designing and Implementing a Roleplaying-Game-Based Course in Advanced Classical Literature: Challenges, Benefits, and Iterations.” Roleplaying games immerse students in alternate realities, yet present a welter of challenges for instructors who must construct all aspects of these alternate realities. Escape rooms have exploded in popularity in recent years, and Michelle Robinson and Marsha Penner propose the utility of this ludic structure and of detective fiction for enhancing student instruction in their interdisciplinary intervention, “Games We Play on Paper: Understanding the Process of Discovery through Detective Fiction and Behavioral Neuroscience.” Collaborating from the fields of neuroscience and literary studies, Robinson and Penner explicate the similar deductive skills required of students of multiple disciplines. Gabi Kirilloff concludes this section with “Making Feminist Games in the Gender Studies and Literature Classroom,” detailing how students can create their own interactive media—either narrative games or ludic narratives—to address critical issues of gender, identity, and culture. With the open-source platform Twine, Kirilloff ’s students make games that thematize issues of deep personal interest that unite with textual interpretation, in a compelling example of the intersection of students’ creative and analytical skills. And finally, noted game studies scholar Anastasia Salter concludes this volume with an afterword, “Confessions of a Game Scholar in an English Department,” in which they explore the interdisciplinarity nature of games and game studies through their experiences in moving from a Digital Media Department to an English Department, and the resulting disciplinary questions such a transition generates. Questions such as what is game studies, what is literature, and how do their union in English departments reflect the shifting dynamics of both fields can never be fully circumscribed, but Salter’s personal experiences nonetheless chart an intriguing, if not fully determined, path forward. Although literature and game studies bear the potential for fruitful inquiry, it should be noted that this volume focuses on games and game studies, not on game theory. Game studies analyzes the cultural phenomenon of games in their various incarnations, particularly board games and video games, as well as the constituent elements of their play and creation, whereas game theory is a mathematically based discipline analyzing the processes by which individuals make strategic decisions, as famously illustrated in the paradox of the prisoner’s dilemma. This school of thought has been successfully applied to literature in such intriguing studies as Michael Suk-Young Chwe’s Jane Austen, Game Theorist and Steven Brams’s Biblical Games: A Strategic Analysis of Stories in the Old Testament. Nonetheless, this approach lies beyond the purview of the present volume. Along with the essayists of this volume, we view the introduction of games and game studies in the literature classroom optimistically, as an approach that will enhance an appreciation for literature and literary history rather than simply supplanting it. Similar hopes and fears were expressed when film entered the college and university curriculum, 10

Introduction

and yet the two media are now seen more as allied than as antagonistic. We predict a similar future for literature and games, in which their commonalities inspire a deeper understanding of their similarities and their differences. The following chapters invite readers to join the game, already afoot for so many of our colleagues.

Works Cited Battey, Tom. “Videogames Can, Do, and Should Tell Stories.” Gamasutra: The Art & Business of Making Games, Apr. 27, 2017, https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/TomBattey/ 20170427/296978/Videogames_Can_Do__Should_Tell_Stories.php. Beerbohm, Max. The Illustrated Zuleika Dobson. Yale UP, 1985. Bogost, Ian. “‘Gamification Is Bullshit.’” The Atlantic, Aug. 9, 2011. Bogost, Ian. “Video Games Are Better without Stories.” The Atlantic, Apr. 25, 2017. Brams, Steven. Biblical Games: A Strategic Analysis of Stories in the Old Testament. MIT P, 1980. Bruss, Elizabeth W. “The Game of Literature and Some Literary Games.” New Literary History, vol. 9, no. 1, 1977, pp. 153–72. Chwe, Michael Suk-Young. Jane Austen, Game Theorist. Princeton UP, 2013. Consalvo, Carmine. Changing Pace: Outdoor Games for Experiential Learning. Human Resource Development, 1997. Crawford, Chris. The Art of Computer Game Design. McGraw-Hill Osborne Media, 1984. Ehrmann, Jacques, editor. “Game, Play, Literature.” Yale French Studies, no. 41, 1968. Entertainment Software Association. “2019 Essential Facts about the Computer and Video Game Industry.” Entertainment Software Association, May 2, 2019, https://www.theesa.com/esaresearch/2019-essential-facts-about-the-computer-and-video-game-industry/. Golumbia, David. “Games without Play.” New Literary History, vol. 40, no. 1, 2009, pp. 179–204. Juul, Jesper. A Clash between Game and Narrative, 1998, https://www.jesperjuul.net/text/clash_ between_game_and_narrative.html. Kapell, Matthew Wilhelm. The Play versus Story Divide in Game Studies: Critical Essays. McFarland, 2015. Kapp, Karl M. The Gamification of Learning and Instruction: Game-Based Methods and Strategies for Training and Education. Pfeiffer, 2012. Klepek, Patrick. “Video Games Don’t Have a Choice But to Tell Stories.” Vice, Apr. 25, 2017, https:// www.vice.com/en_us/article/8qpdmv/video-games-dont-have-a-choice-but-to-tell-stories. Lissauer, Gabrielle. The Tropes of Fantasy Fiction. McFarland, 2015. McGonigal, Jane. Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. Penguin, 2011. Mukherjee, Souvik. Video Games and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Free Press, 1997. Murray, Janet H. “The Last Word on Ludology versus Narratology (2005).” Janet H. Murray: Humanistic Design for an Emerging Medium, Jun. 28, 2013, https://inventingthemedium. com/2013/06/28/the-last-word-on-ludology-v-narratology-2005/. Pugh, Tison. Chaucer’s Losers, Nintendo’s Children, and Other Forays in Queer Ludonarratology. U of Nebraska P, 2019. Riendeau, Danielle. “Ok, I’ve Read the Damned Thing. In Short 1. The Criticisms of GH Are Shitty and Misplaced 2. Downplaying Immersion/Role-Playing of Games.” @Danielleri, Apr. 25, 2017, https://twitter.com/Danielleri/status/856887876482629632. Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, edited by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Oxford UP, 1996.

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12

­PART I THEORIES OF THE LUDIC AND LITERARY CLASSROOM

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­C HAPTER 1 DEVELOPING AND TEACHING GAMES-FOCUSED ENGLISH COURSES: A TECHNOLOGICAL AND CURRICULAR WALKTHROUGH

Eric Detweiler

One of the first video games I remember playing is the 1990 adventure game Conquests of Camelot: The Search for the Grail. Released by Sierra On-Line and designed by Christy Marx, the game puts players in the role of King Arthur, solving puzzles and navigating action sequences as they traverse Camelot and the surrounding world. There are two major reasons the game has stayed with me. The first is that I never finished it. I successfully chatted up Camelot’s inhabitants, defeated the Black Knight, and solved a series of riddles posed by a circle of mysterious stones. But soon thereafter, I found myself standing at the edge of a seemingly uncrossable frozen lake. For weeks, I wrinkled my preteen brain inputting every increasingly frustrated command I could imagine into the game’s text parser: “look at lake,” “cross lake,” “walk on ice,” “break ice,” “PUNCH LAKE,” “FIGHT ICE,” “ASHKHDLASKJHFSAK.” The second reason is its manual, which featured artificially weathered pages and a cover that read, in lettering reminiscent of an illuminated manuscript, “Liber Ex Doctrina” (Sierra). (I didn’t know Latin, but that cover was cool.) In addition to instructional boilerplate, the manual included an introduction by Marx; an overview of Arthurian legends; game maps; and, tucked in the back, a short section titled “Walk-Through” that was preceded by an all-caps warning: “THE FOLLOWING SECTION INCLUDES HINTS THAT EXPERIENCED GAME PLAYERS MAY NOT WANT TO SEE. CONTINUE READING ONLY IF YOU HAVE TROUBLE GETTING STARTED PLAYING YOUR GAME.” Because of its informational and aesthetic richness, I spent an inordinate amount of time poring over that manual. Unfortunately, the walkthrough only covered the game’s first few scenes, so Arthur found himself doomed to eternity on the southern edge of a frozen lake, unaided by a player who lacked access to the more extensive walkthroughs of QuestBusters: The Adventurer’s Journal and who was too shy to call the phone numbers listed in the manual’s “NEED A HINT?” section (Sierra 24–5). I encountered a few more walkthroughs in the ensuing years, including my cherished copy of Final Fantasy Tactics: The Official Strategy Guide (Hollinger and Ratkos), which I used until it fell to literal pieces. But until recently, such guides often carried a patina of shame, marking the player as insufficiently independent. To consult a walkthrough was to admit defeat. Fortunately, signs indicate that this stigma is dissipating (Consalvo

Teaching Games and Game Studies

95–8; “Whose Souls?”), helped along by recent games so brutally difficult that beating them without assistance is all but unthinkable. In the spirit of that sea change, this chapter aims to assist its readers across the frozen lake. Or, to drop the aquatic metaphors, it is meant to serve as a broad walkthrough of the curricular and technological trials one can face when designing a games-focused course in English studies. One of my key assumptions is that developing such courses should involve picking one another’s brains and working collaboratively, not grinding in stubborn isolation. I have addressed video games in a number of pedagogical contexts,1 but I focus here on a general-education course titled Video Games and/as Literature. I begin by providing some local institutional context for the course, then offer a brief overview of technological challenges and possibilities that attend such courses. This information is followed by a detailed look at the course’s structure, including some of the work necessary to adapt it into an online format. As with any walkthrough, readers are welcome to adopt, ignore, and exploit the following strategies as they see fit.

Institutional Context Video Games and/as Literature (henceforth VGAAL) is an iteration of ENGL 2020: Themes in Literature and Culture, a general-education course offered by the Department of English at Middle Tennessee State University. It is currently one of three courses that students can take to fulfill a Humanities and/or Fine Arts requirement. Sections of ENGL 2020 cover a wide range of topics, including science fiction, African American literature, nature writing, romance novels, and disability literature. The course thus gives instructors the opportunity to address their areas of expertise in tandem with areas of potential interest to students. At the same time, all ENGL 2020 sections pursue six learning objectives. In general, the objectives emphasize analytic, critical, and contextually informed approaches to reading and writing about “texts”: 1. Students will improve their ability to read, think, and write critically and analytically about a wide variety of texts. 2. Students will be able to identify basic structural and/or technical elements and strategies and to discuss how those elements contribute to the overall effect of a literary work. 3. Students will gain a greater sense of the range and sorts of texts that are available to them as readers and, hopefully, of the sorts of texts that they most enjoy and wish to continue reading. 4. Students will gain a greater sense of the “conversations” between texts; that is, they will have a sense of the ways in which texts respond to earlier texts, develop ongoing cultural conversations about key issues, develop genres and style, etc. 5. Students will gain a greater sense of the ways in which texts function within culture(s), of the ways in which texts can be used to understand and gain insight 16

Games-Focused English Courses

into cultures/historical movements, and of the ways in which cultural context shapes both the production and reading of texts. 6. Students will develop a sense of themselves as readers; they will gain greater independence in their interpretations and become more aware of their own approaches, assumptions, and interpretive strategies. Conversely, they will become aware of the range of possible reading strategies, encounter and test out new ways of working with texts, and increase their interpretive repertoire. (“ENGL 2020/2030”) As is apparent, these learning objectives address a range of critical thinking skills relevant to many, if not most, courses in literary studies. Proposals for new versions of ENGL 2020 are approved by a departmental committee. I submitted my proposal for VGAAL in 2017 and was approved to teach two sections of the course in Spring 2018. The description for the first iteration of the course, which was drafted for that proposal, states: In recent years, gamers, critics, and scholars have started asking whether video games qualify as art and whether they merit serious study. In other words, video games are following in the footsteps of more established media—novels, movies, television—that were once dismissed as trashy entertainment but gave rise to respected works of art. Along the way, video games have started using complex literary and narrative techniques. In some cases, game designers have adapted written works like Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In others, independent game designers have created games with interactive narratives that explore complicated questions about identity, death, and relationships—questions that have long been explored by other forms of literature and art. In this course, students will draw on scholarly frameworks from English studies, game studies, and related fields to analyze video games as a narrative form. Students will explore how video games’ interactive multimedia narratives shift and affirm our assumptions about what stories can do and how they affect us. Along the way, students will read scholarship about literature and video games; read works of literature alongside video-game adaptations; and play video games that extend and challenge our notions of story-driven art. While the proposal’s approval meant I could flesh out the course’s curricular particulars— what students would create, play, and read—it also raised a set of technological questions on which that curriculum would depend. To put it succinctly: What game-related technological resources could I safely assume students and I would have at our disposal, and what could I do to secure necessary and supplementary resources for students? Before turning to the course’s structure, let me spend a moment addressing these unavoidable complications.

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Teaching Games and Game Studies

­Technovania Around the same time I abandoned Conquests of Camelot, I played Metroid II: Return of Samus on the original Game Boy. Most parts of that game are not germane to this chapter, but one iconic aspect of its gameplay provides a useful analogy for what follows. In some ways, playing Metroid II is similar to playing an early Super Mario Bros. game: by manipulating the character in 2D profile, players navigate the world of the game, eliminating enemies and collecting items that grant new abilities. But unlike early Mario games, players do not just move left to right through a series of discrete, relatively linear levels. Instead, the game is essentially one big level: players might move left to right, down and back up and then left again, with the powers afforded by the items collected granting access to new parts of the game’s map. This approach to level design and exploration has influenced so many games that it has arguably spawned a genre all its own: Metroidvania games, the label a portmanteau of Metroid and the also influential Castlevania franchise. As I prepared to launch VGAAL, I found myself thinking like the designers of a Metroidvania game: What items could I assume students would have at their immediate disposal, and what possibilities and areas of inquiry would those items open to them? Which items did I need to provide students access to and which were optional, helpful for ancillary elements but not integral to the main quest? Which areas of the map did all students need to move through in an established order and which areas could they work around or navigate in a nonlinear fashion? For example, I knew I would be teaching in a computer classroom, so all students would have access to a computer for in-class playthroughs of certain browser-based games. I could assume some students who signed up for a class with “video games” in the title would have some sort of gaming machine, but that is by no means guaranteed at a regional comprehensive university serving many students from working-class backgrounds. I certainly couldn’t assume students owned state-of-the-art consoles or gaming computers. Circa 2018, one student might have had a Chromebook and the latest PlayStation, another a smartphone and a threeyear-old gaming laptop, and yet another a beloved Nintendo 3DS on its way to relative obsolescence. With all that in mind, I came to three realizations: 1. I needed to select games that would be as accessible as possible for students. This required picking games available on a wide array of platforms that did not require cutting-edge hardware to run, and which were not cost-prohibitive. 2. If possible, I needed to provide students access to required games outside of class. This would ensure that students were not entirely left to their own devices. 3. As a final contingency, students experiencing financial hardship who could not afford required games, or whose computers crashed in the middle of the semester, or who commuted long distances to campus and thus had minimal access to on-campus technological resources outside of class time, necessitated supplementary options. Moreover, the course needed to be accessible for disabled

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Games-Focused English Courses

students who might not be able to play certain games but who should not be inadvertently barred from participating and succeeding in the course.2 Those realizations prompted a flurry of emails and phone calls as I prepared to teach the course. I contacted our IT department to see if there were any campus computer labs students could use for playing assigned games; I reached out to a console-equipped game room in our student union as well. For different reasons, neither proved feasible, although I did receive permission for students to reserve one computer associated with our library’s makerspace for out-of-class gameplay. Fortunately, I applied for and received a competitive internal grant through my university’s Faculty Instructional Technology Center that funded the purchase of a PlayStation 4 Slim, two gaming laptops, and accessories (e.g., HDMI cables, controllers, mice, game-capture cards) for dedicated use in my sections of ENGL 2020. This allowed students, for instance, to collaborate on in-class playthroughs of higher-end games that the classroom computers could not run. I also scheduled my Spring 2018 office hours in our classroom so students could use the equipment to play required games outside of class time. I could easily spend the rest of this chapter discussing technological challenges faced and solutions pursued. However, in addition to the institutional particularities of many of those challenges and solutions, even the relatively generalizable issues change rapidly. As hardware, software, copyright law, and university policies fluctuate, last year’s solutions can become next year’s problems, and that is why I end this section as I began it: by drawing a comparison to Metroidvania games. It is immensely difficult to design a video-game course that will unfold in exactly the same way for all students, especially over time. Instructors cannot—or at least, I would suggest, should not—assume students will move like Mario, travelling reliably left to right toward a single end point with only minor deviations along the way.3 Both synchronically and diachronically, I would conceptualize such courses as unfolding across larger, more modular, and less linear paths. Which items are essential for all students to have in their inventories? Which chambers are indispensable and which can be bypassed? Might three different people move through the same challenges in three radically different ways rather than all taking the exact same path? Which parts of the map can be walled off or added in future iterations? As will become clear in the following section, many aspects of VGAAL are meant to be modular and adjustable. But beyond that, I would tentatively present a “technovania” approach as a useful heuristic for thinking about the relations between institutions, technologies, students, and the design of such courses.

Course Walkthrough In this section, I draw most of my descriptions and examples from more recent iterations of VGAAL. Over three years, I have taught six sections of it—three face-toface, two asynchronous online courses offered in the summer, and one synchronous

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Teaching Games and Game Studies

online course—and I make changes every time. For instance, when I began teaching VGAAL, I used Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susana Pajares Tosca’s Understanding Video Games as the required textbook and found it effective in that role. However, in the interest of defraying students’ costs, I have since turned entirely to readings accessible online, through our university’s library, or as fair-use PDFs provided via our learning management system. In its current form, the course is organized into three interrelated units: (1) Historicizing Games, (2) Analyzing Games, and (3) Arguing with Games. Each unit corresponds to one of three major projects. In addition to the major projects, coursework includes three key components: ●●

●●

●●

Gaming Journal: Students keep a journal (analog or digital) documenting their gameplay experiences. They must cover required games and average two pages of journaling per week. Students are encouraged to journal about extracurricular games they play and incorporate diagrams and illustrations as they see fit. I collect the journals at midterm and finals, reading them and assigning a completion grade before returning them to students. Reading Notes: On days with assigned readings, I check students’ notes. They are asked to take notes on printed or digital copies of readings, with markup and marginalia on each page, or in a notebook or digital document, with roughly one line of notes per page of reading. Students submit their notes—as photographs, videos, or documents—to online dropboxes. I always allow students to miss at least a couple sets of notes without penalty. Reading Responses: Students also post responses to course readings in online forums. Students are typically responsible for completing eight to ten 200-word responses throughout the course. Responses are due a few hours before class so I can incorporate students’ questions, interests, and concerns into that day’s class. When I teach VGAAL asynchronously online, students complete half their responses by responding to other students’ posts, thus bolstering student interaction despite the lack of real-time class meetings.

Throughout the course, students play a number of games during and outside of class. Many of the in-class games are tied to particular units. The games students play outside of class are the required ones, which they are expected to either complete or dedicate a certain number of hours to. In each section of the course that I have taught, I have assigned two or three of the following: ●●

●●

●●

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Celeste: A Metroidvania platformer. Players climb a mountain while navigating physical manifestations of the protagonist’s anxiety.4 Kentucky Route Zero: A narrative-heavy adventure game infused with magical realism. Players assume the role of a delivery driver roaming the roads and caves of Central Kentucky. Night in the Woods: Another narrative-heavy adventure game. Players assume the role of an anthropomorphic cat who drops out of college, returns to her

Games-Focused English Courses

Rust Belt hometown, reconnects with friends and family, and investigates local mysteries. ●●

●●

●●

Papers, Please: A puzzle game in which players assume the role of an immigration officer in a fictional Eastern Bloc country, processing paperwork presented by those attempting to enter the country. Secret of Monkey Island: An influential adventure game from 1990. Satirizes the conventions of swashbuckling pirate stories. Undertale: A retro indie role-playing game that subverts the genre’s conventions, with the player slowly realizing the “monsters” populating the game’s world are sympathetic beings with complex emotional lives.

I have swapped games in and out for a variety of reasons. For example, Night in the Woods is one of my favorites to teach, but many students’ laptops (as well as my own) were not powerful enough to run it without overheating. I still include Papers, Please as an in-class playthrough but no longer require students to purchase it because, while a full playthrough adds depth to the game’s narrative and ludological arguments, the brevity of the game’s core loop lends itself to collaborative playthrough and discussion across one or two class meetings. In recent sections, I have required three games: during the Historicizing Games unit, Secret of Monkey Island (with students expected to put in seven hours); during the Analyzing Games unit, Celeste (eight hours); and during the Arguing with Games unit, either Kentucky Route Zero or Undertale (seven hours). I provide a choice in the last case so students can pick the game that suits their interests and because some of Undertale’s challenges present substantial accessibility issues. With the preceding overview in place, I turn now to the three main course units. The first unit, Historicizing Games, introduces students to the history of video games and how that background has shaped the medium and its reception. We read about the nineteenth-century moral panic over pulp fiction (Adler) to contextualize moral panics over video games (Kocurek, “Night Trap”; Williams) as part of an established historical pattern. This allows us to shift from tired questions (e.g., “Do video games cause violence?”) to more nuanced historical questions (e.g., “How do 1990s debates about violence in video games reflect the decade’s cultural anxieties?”). We also read about the ways technology has shaped and been shaped by video games (Kocurek, Save). This extends from the historical ties between video games and military research (Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al. 67) to the history of genres and programs (Laskow; Montfort). Students also do brief in-class playthroughs, sometimes individually and sometimes collaboratively, of “historical” games from Spacewar! to Colossal Cave Adventure to Maniac Mansion.5 As the unit’s required game, Secret of Monkey Island provides us with a shared, ongoing object of discussion and analysis as well as an option for students to write about for the unit’s major project. That project, titled Video Game History, requires students to pick a video game released before 2000, research its history, and write the story of its development, reception, and/or legacy.6 In some cases, students find a game’s reception is the most noteworthy part of its history; in other cases, it is the

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Teaching Games and Game Studies

game’s development or influence on later games. For potential primary sources, I direct students to online repositories of game magazines (“Games”; Retromags). Students write two drafts of this 1,500-word paper and workshop the first draft with classmates. In the second unit, Analyzing Games, students examine more contemporary games. Given the course’s learning objectives and curricular raison d’être, I begin by covering more conventional approaches to literary analysis. An excerpt from Joanna Wolfe and Laura Wilder’s Digging into Literature introduces students to the difference between evaluative claims (as are common in reviews of games and other media) and interpretive claims (13–28). Students practice interpretation by reading and discussing short stories. I typically assign stories in genres like science fiction and fantasy (e.g., Jemisin; Sparks), pointing out the tropes and conventions such genres share with many video games to help students think about narrative analysis across media. We also discuss ludology and narratology, although I am careful to present the two as complementary lenses for thinking about games rather than as a binary opposition (Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al. 222–4). While I appreciate the risk of overemphasizing narrative when analyzing games, given the framework of ENGL 2020, my goal is to introduce and direct students to games that merit narrative analysis while keeping games’ indispensable nonnarrative elements in the analytical mix. That means many notable games, from Tetris to Mario Kart to Among Us, are not a good fit for this unit. As with short stories, a game does not need an expansive narrative to be worth analyzing, but it does need a story about which one can make complex interpretive claims. As students play Celeste outside of class, we undertake one-day in-class playthroughs of games like Braid, Donut County, Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna), and What Remains of Edith Finch. These playthroughs typically involve one or two students playing while others watch, offering live analysis based on course readings. For example, students typically play Never Alone in tandem with a discussion of video game aesthetics. Before class, I draw a large two-column table on a classroom whiteboard and populate the left column with key aesthetic terms: rules, perspective, space, music, etc. (see Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al., Chapter 5). During class, students take turns playing through the game’s early stages on a large screen while their classmates comment on how the various aesthetic elements listed in the table contribute to the game’s ludological, narratological, and rhetorical effects. As they do so, I record and summarize their comments in the table’s right column. After the playthrough concludes, we discuss how students might synthesize the comments recorded in the table into a sustained scholarly argument about the game. The more I have taught this unit, the more I have shifted from traditional gamecentered journal articles to shorter readings that, while still representing substantial scholarly work, more closely model the scope of the analyses expected from students (see deWinter; Salter; Wolf). In addition to applying these readings to in-class and required games, we analyze the readings themselves, discussing how students can make similar moves in their writing. The unit culminates with the Narrative Analysis, the second major project. In 2,000 words, students analyze the narrative of a twenty-first-century game, drawing on the game’s narrative and nonnarrative components as well as secondary sources to make 22

Games-Focused English Courses

an interpretive argument. Students are allowed to write about required games, but they frequently write about other games of their own choosing. Students have chosen, and written effectively about, everything from independent titles like The Stanley Parable and Darkest Dungeon to blockbuster games in the Fallout and Red Dead Redemption franchises. Like the Video Game History project, the Narrative Analysis goes through two drafts and a peer workshop. I want students to finish the course with a sense of video games not just as objects of analysis, but as a medium that can itself do analytic, critical work. I do not want students just to write about games; I want them to write with games. In the final unit, Arguing with Games, we turn to the ways games make arguments, and students make text-based games of their own. In the case of this unit, the final project, titled Game Scholarship, asks students to use Twine, “an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories” (Twine), to create a game that makes an argument about games. We spend the final weeks of the course playing and discussing games that make arguments about games. For example, Undertale offers a performative critique of systems that have long been staples of role-playing games. We also read about and discuss the conceptual and practical work involved in developing a game (Anthropy 143–58). But more than anything, I give students time to experiment with Twine. They work through tutorials (Hammond), play and read about noteworthy Twine games (Kopas), explore the Twine Wiki, and look at the back end of games by past students. While there are other free game-development tools students could use, Twine is a strong fit for VGAAL: it resonates with the course’s textual emphasis, builds on adventure games students have examined throughout the course (Laskow; Montfort; Salter), and takes a relatively small amount of time and programming knowhow to learn. In the in-person course, this is a collaborative project that students pursue in groups of three or four. Our computer classroom becomes a workshop space where students swap Twine tips, beta test each other’s games, and flesh out their own games. Because of the difficulty of remote collaboration, it is typically an individual project when I teach it online, although I allow collaboration if classmates express a mutual interest in working together. Because I cannot ensure online students access to the resources of a computer classroom, I also provide an alternative final assignment: a Video Game Keyword essay in which students select a key term or phrase relevant to gaming (e.g., “behavior,” “aesthetics”) and write a piece of cultural criticism focused on that term.7 However, I have found that most students choose the Game Scholarship option, and in both in-person and online courses, it has generated some of the most memorable student projects I have ever received. Students have created Twine games that make arguments about the gaming industry’s profit models, games’ representation of women and queer people, power-fantasy narratives, win-states, and exaggerated links between video games and violent behavior. Bearing such projects in mind, my hope is that students emerge from VGAAL not only with a sense of the historical, textual, technological, and cultural factors that shape narrative games, not only with a sense of how to apply and extend English studies’ conventional methods to such games, but also prepared to apply such factors and 23

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methods to the creation of games and related interactive media, using narrative analysis as a means of invention at least as much as a means of critique (see Brown). In other words, I hope not only that they are prepared to cross that frozen lake and analyze its narrative significance but also that they can go further than I ever could, collaboratively imagining a sea of analytical and ludonarratological possibilities that stretch beyond English studies’ and game studies’ current horizons.

Notes 1. Materials from other courses can be found at http://RhetEric.org/teaching. 2. For some of the resources I consulted on this last point, see “AbleGamers”; Beaton; “Video Gaming Accessibility.” 3. Warp pipes, shortcuts, and speedrunning exploits notwithstanding. 4. When introducing students to the game, which can be extremely difficult, I discuss and encourage them to use the game’s “assist mode” as needed (see Frank). 5. In most cases, I direct students to versions of historical games redesigned for or ported to contemporary browsers, such as versions currently hosted on the Internet Archive. 6. While this is admittedly a somewhat arbitrary historical marker, it corresponds to a meaningful moment in video-game history: the arrival of the sixth generation of consoles. 7. For models of this approach to writing about video games (which students read some of in the class), see Payne and Huntemann.

Works Cited “AbleGamers Blog.” The AbleGamers Charity, 2018, https://ablegamers.org/category/ablegamersblog/. Accessed Dec. 11, 2020. Adler, Rachel. “The 19th Century Moral Panic over … Paper Technology.” Slate, Aug. 4, 2017, https://slate.com/technology/2017/08/the-19th-century-moral-panic-over-paper-technology. html. Accessed Dec. 11, 2020. Anthropy, Anna. Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Dropouts, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form. Seven Stories P, 2012. Beaton, Catherine. “Access and Accessibility Links: Games.” Catherine Beaton, Rochester Institute of Technology, https://www.ist.rit.edu/~ciiics/a-a_games.php. Accessed Dec. 11, 2020. Brown, James J., Jr. “Crossing State Lines: Rhetoric and Software Studies.” Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities, edited by Jim Ridolfo and William Hart-Davidson, U of Chicago P, 2015, pp. 20–32. Conquests of Camelot: The Search for the Grail. Sierra On-Line, 1990. Consalvo, Mia. Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames. MIT P, 2007. deWinter, Jennifer. “Miyamoto/Kojima: Authorship.” Payne and Huntemann, pp. 177–84. Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Simon, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susana Pajares Tosca. Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction. 3rd ed., Routledge, 2016. “ENGL 2020/2030 Learning Objectives.” Gen Ed English, Middle Tennessee State University, May 19, 2019, https://www.mtsu.edu/genedenglish/ENGL2020_2030Objectives.php. Accessed Dec. 11, 2020.

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Games-Focused English Courses Frank, Allegra. “Celeste Is Hard, but Its Creators Are Smart about Difficulty.” Polygon, Jan. 26, 2018, https://www.polygon.com/2018/1/26/16935964/celeste-difficulty-assist-mode. Accessed Dec. 11, 2020. “Games and Gamer Magazines.” Internet Archive, 2014, https://archive.org/details/ gamemagazines. Accessed Dec. 11, 2020. Hammond, Adam. “A Total Beginner’s Guide to Twine 2.1.” Adam Hammond, http://www. adamhammond.com/twineguide/. Accessed Dec. 11, 2020. Hollinger, Elizabeth, and James Ratkos. Final Fantasy Tactics: The Official Strategy Guide. Prima Publishing, 2001. Jemisin, N. K. “On the Banks of the River Lex.” How Long ’til Black Future Month. Hachette, 2018, pp. 280–95. Kocurek, Carly A. “Night Trap: Moral Panic.” Payne and Huntemann, pp. 309–15. Kocurek, Carly A. Save Point. Kickstarter, 2020, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ carlykocurek/save-point. Accessed Dec. 11, 2020. Kopas, Merritt. Videogames for Humans. In Star Books, 2015. Laskow, Sarah. “Welcome to Interactive Fiction: You’re a Wizard-Sniffing Pig.” Atlas Obscura, Dec. 1, 2017, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/welcome-interactive-fiction-wizardsniffing-pig-controversy-video-games. Accessed Dec. 11, 2020. Montfort, Nick. “Adventure.” Debugging Game History: A Critical Lexicon, edited by Henry Lowood and Raiford Guins, MIT P, 2016, pp. 13–19. Payne, Matthew Thomas, and Nina B. Huntemann, editors. How to Play Video Games. New York UP, 2019. Retromags. https://www.retromags.com/. Accessed Dec. 11, 2020. ­Salter, Anastasia. “King’s Quest: Narrative.” Payne and Huntemann, pp. 29–35. Sierra On-Line. Liber ex Doctrina, 1990, http://www.sierrahelp.com/Documents/Manuals/ Conquests_of_Camelot_-_The_Search_for_the_Grail_-_Manual.pdf. Accessed Dec. 11, 2020. Sparks, Amber. “Take Your Daughter to the Slaughter.” The Unfinished World: And Other Stories. Liveright, 2016, pp. 81–4. Twine. Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation, https://twinery.org/. Accessed Dec. 11, 2020. “Twine Wiki.” Twine, https://twinery.org/wiki/start. Accessed Dec. 11, 2020. “Video Gaming Accessibility.” Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/nls/resources/generalresources-on-disabilities/video-gaming-accessibility/. Accessed Dec. 11, 2020. “Whose Souls? Demon Souls!” The Besties, Nov. 27, 2020, https://the-besties.simplecast.com/ episodes/whose-souls-demons-souls. Accessed May 17, 2021. Williams, Dmitri. “The Video Game Lightning Rod.” Information, Communication & Society, vol. 6, no. 4, 2003, pp. 523–50. Wolf, Mark J. P. “BioShock Infinite: World-Building.” Payne and Huntemann, pp. 75–81. Wolfe, Joanna, and Laura Wilder. Digging into Literature: Strategies for Reading, Analysis, and Writing. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2015.

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­C HAPTER 2 GAMING LITERATURE: GAMES AS AN ACCESSIBLE ENTRY INTO THE STUDY OF LITERATURE

Regina Marie Mills

When first declaring my English major, I thought I understood what literary scholars research: the classics of the field, like The Odyssey or Shakespeare’s plays. Luckily, my first class, The Novel, taught by narrative theory scholar Suzanne Keen, introduced me to a wide array of literature, including stories that were often denigrated as “genre” literature or marginalized as “ethnic.” As I gravitated toward literary studies, such courses taught me that the field is far from static. Literary studies is, and should remain, a dynamic field that engages the new and exciting ways through which storytelling occurs. While the study of games is often considered the realm of Computer Science and Media Studies departments, many scholars—for example, Astrid Ensslin, Mary Flanagan, and Henry Jenkins—convincingly argue for their literariness, their ability to create arguments, and their value as an artform. Teaching games in the literature classroom shows students the polyvalent possibilities inherent in literary studies and introduces them to the many approaches to narrative that exist, such as queer studies, trauma theory, and decoloniality. Game-focused literature courses can serve as both a recruitment strategy for English departments and a way to frame the English major as expansive and dynamic, as Suzanne Keen did for me all those years ago. In fact, games—video games, table-top role-playing games, and the communities that spring from games—bring substantial benefits to students and faculty. First, despite the fact that many believe gaming to be a high-cost hobby, many thoughtful, experimental games are available at low or no cost, making these texts in some ways more accessible than many novels. Second, games give students a broader sense of what “literature” and “literary study” entail and provide a model of the writing process that destigmatizes failure and helps students to view writing as more than an individual activity. Lastly, introducing literary studies through games creates a more democratic classroom in which student knowledge and experience can be incorporated into everyday discussions. My arguments stem from my experience teaching Gaming Literature, an introduction to the English major at a large, research-intensive, landgrant university, with additional insights gleaned from a non-mandatory student survey from the first iteration of the course,1 and a representative class assignment prompt, the Choose-Your-Own Adventure (CYOA) Creation and Analysis.2 After briefly discussing how one might structure an introductory literature course with games, I consider the central design focus of my class, accessibility. I then present

Teaching Games and Game Studies

the benefits of using games in the literature classroom, based on the data above. This chapter concludes with the challenges of studying games in the literature classroom, both for teachers and for students.

Course Design and Accessibility In designing a course that uses games to introduce students to literary studies, it is key to center the skills that instructors want students to be able to bring to future literature courses. My own course—an iteration of ENGL 303: Approaches to English Studies—is one of only two required courses of Texas A&M’s English major. ENGL 303 strives to give students foundational skills and to create a cohort that will support one another through their undergraduate years. Thus, in structuring my course, half of my lessons are dedicated to teaching six key aspects of the literary: characterization, worldbuilding, interactivity, representation, structure/organization, and narrative. While not every “text” (a term that we discuss and come to see as encompassing more than merely novels, drama, and short stories) engages with these six categories evenly, they are usually present in some way. We read scholarship that introduces us to these aspects of literariness, such as Mark J.P. Wolf ’s work on worldbuilding,3 Henry Jenkins’s essay on “narrative architecture,” and chapters from Keen’s Narrative Form (particularly those on characterization and genre). I also draw heavily from Simon EgenfeldtNielsen, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susana Pajares Tosca’s Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction for discussion of interactivity/choice and representation (realism, caricaturism, and abstractionism). The other half of the course’s skill content introduces students to different approaches to literature (and games) that they will encounter, such as queer studies (Ruberg, Anthropy), archival analysis (Kocurek), feminist studies (Chess, “Hardcore”), and critical race studies and intersectional analysis (Gray). In choosing course materials and designing assignments, I employ a three-pronged definition of accessibility, outlined for students in the non-mandatory post-course survey as follows: “1) how easy something is to use or obtain, 2) how easy something is to understand or appreciate, and 3) how welcoming something makes you feel.”4 These concepts align well with the three principles of Universal Design that Jay Dolmage outlines: ●●

●●

●●

Multiple means of representation, to give learners various ways of acquiring information and knowledge, Multiple means of expression, to provide learners alternatives for demonstrating what they know, Multiple means of engagement, to tap into learners’ interests, offer appropriate challenges, and increase motivation. (para. 3)

These three principles require attention to the course readings and games, the assignments provided, and the expectations and culture around class participation and collaboration.

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To meet my first stated accessibility point (ease of use/obtainability), instructors can assign games freely available online, including browser games and free-todownload games like When Rivers Were Trails, an Oregon Trail-esque game created in collaboration with Indigenous writers and artists, the Indian Land Tenure Foundation, and Michigan State University’s Games for Entertainment and Learning Lab. After feedback from the course’s first iteration indicated that students needed to practice close reading longer narrative-driven games together in the classroom, I assigned Gone Home, which, while not free, is frequently available on sale and is easy to access for novice gamers.5 We discussed other games that students had the option to buy, such as Her Story and Heaven’s Vault, but could also watch for free through Let’s Plays (gameplay or walkthrough videos uploaded by players to video-hosting sites) so that students could choose whatever was most financially feasible. Often these Let’s Plays add a new dimension to discussion. Heaven’s Vault, an archaeology-based mystery that explores how we interpret the past, allows students to talk about how it feels to watch others make choices they may not have otherwise made in the game and how that affected the protagonist’s characterization. For Her Story, a search-engine-based murder mystery told through interrogation room footage, a Let’s Play by a former private investigator gave students insight into the difference between detective/true crime tropes and the reality of investigative occupations. The only required cost was admission to the playall-day, unlimited-credits vintage arcade in town, Nerdvana ($10), for which they had to write an analysis of a game at the arcade (influenced by Kocurek). The final project provides another possible cost: students can buy a narrative-driven game of their choice (from an approved list) for their final literary analysis. Even in this, I provide at least one free video game option. While there is no shortage of brief games that can be played at no cost, longer narrative-driven games are infrequently free, so this can present a challenge. The second and third accessibility points—materials and lessons that are easy to appreciate and welcoming—are implemented primarily through teaching practices and assignment design. To engage with the six focal aspects of literature in varied ways and to provide diverse models of game design and representation, I assigned games by Black, Indigenous, Queer, and People of Color creators, as well as those at the intersections of more than one of these communities. In the second iteration of the class, I invited guest speakers from diverse backgrounds and fields to lecture on their methods for approaching games and literature, which provided students expert knowledge from scholars in folklore (Rachel González), queer game studies (Cody Mejeur), and critical game studies (Kishonna L. Gray). In addition to inclusive course materials and guest lectures, I wanted to build a classroom where discussion was not dominated by a few voices (usually white, male, and members of gamer communities). This concern arose when I examined the first draft of my Gaming Literature syllabus: while the games selected were inclusive, the criticism was not. Another important way to build accessibility and collaborative spaces is to include writing assignments outside of the standard literary analysis framework.

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­The Benefits of Gaming Literature: Choosing Your Own Adventures In my use of games in the literature classroom, I have had to balance the need to give students a solid foundation in literary analysis and close reading with the creative possibilities of teaching and using games in the literature classroom. Usually, I assign three major writing projects as well as a portfolio assignment for which students revise one short and one long writing project of their choice. Traditional literary analyses are the bookends of the three major assignments, but in the middle, I have students become game designers. This two-part assignment, titled Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Creation and Analysis, requires students to create their own Choose-Your-OwnAdventure, looking to the examples we have read in class, such as Depression Quest and queers in love at the end of the world, as models. While I welcome Twine-based games, students are not required to do so (and I do not offer explicit instruction on Twine), so many submit hard-copy Choose-Your-Own-Adventures, whether in the form of a book (if [blank], turn to page [#]) or another creative format. After the creative writing portion, students must analyze their Choose-Your-Own-Adventures through the lens of the six aspects of literariness discussed above. For example, they might discuss the choice to use certain character tropes or whether the story provides narrative branches or forces readers to a particular ending. This assignment is always popular, and students often create work far beyond my expectations. For example, Julia, a Hispanic woman in the class, created a horror Choose-Your-Own-Adventure through YouTube videos. With her roommates, she filmed a series of videos, and at the end of each, viewers would click a link based on what choice they wanted the actors to make. At the end was her analysis of choices and her rationale for the format. The Choose-Your-Own-Adventure assignment serves two purposes. First, students are introduced to creative writing as a possible pathway in the English major. A creative writing professor in the department (Marcela Fuentes) leads a pre-writing workshop, giving students a taste of how creative writing courses are taught, as well as a chance to brainstorm story shapes. Second, students are given a different angle from which to consider analysis. For many students, this assignment makes literary analysis “click”— they realize the scale of choices and thought that go into creating a text. In her final portfolio assignment, Hannah wrote, “While doing an analysis of our Choose-YourOwn-Adventure I got to think like a game creator because, [sic] I was creating a game. I then used this strategy to think more like a game creator every other time I went in to analyze the games we were playing.” Meredith, a white woman, stated that the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure “is a big ‘learning by doing’ moment that is imperative to literary comprehension in games.” Building what I often call “creative close readings” into literature classes more generally helps students approach literary analysis from a different angle and combats arguments that literary analysis entails “reading too much into something.” The Choose-Your-Own-Adventure and the use of games as literary texts more generally encourage collaboration among students. As LJ, a Black queer transfeminine student, indicates in her reflection of the class, “This class is very collaborative and 30

Gaming Literature

I would say that’s because games in general are also very collaborative.” LJ mentioned that, despite her history of playing fighting games, she initially did not feel like sharing in class. However, she soon saw that her experiences were helpful to share in smallgroup discussions and writing workshops. While the image of gamers as loners or social outcasts is common in media, equally common is the idea of the gaming clique, such as the main characters in Stranger Things who help each other in Dungeons and Dragons and far beyond it. Students often see games as media that inherently create community. Practices such as structured peer review in the classroom encourage students to view writing as community-based. In the class, students frequently play each other’s Choose-Your-Own-Adventures and consider one another a resource. Explicit instruction in collaboration and groupwork is needed for most students. Students frequently have negative associations with groupwork due to experiences when one student unfairly carried a heavier load than others.6 In addition, fear of plagiarism frequently makes students unwilling to ask one another for help for fear of being accused of cheating. Traditional grading structures often punish students for the very normal act of failing at a new skill the first time they attempt it. By modeling literary study after the best of gaming communities, instructors can encourage students to seek assistance when they meet a challenge that they cannot overcome on their own, just as people playing games refer to message boards, wikis, and walkthroughs. Games also normalize failure as a key part of the learning process. The reframing of failure, as queer studies scholars such as Jack Halberstam and Sara Ahmed detail, can be a powerful tool to combat shame and stigma.7 Destiny, a white woman, wrote, “While I had always been told that failure was a key part of writing, this class helped me to actually put that idea into perspective and realize its validity.” While my course design encourages collaboration and learning from failure and frames them as core values of games, I am also aware of how easy it is to read this as an idealization of games and game communities. It is not hard to find examples of harassment, chauvinism, racism, and sexism in gaming communities.8 However, when mobilized thoughtfully, games and the community-building around games model a more democratic and collaborative classroom that lowers cost barriers, builds on students’ prior knowledge, welcomes students where they are, and provides a robust introduction to the multifaceted nature of literary studies. As Destiny reflected, “Despite the fact that I am not a gamer … I felt that this class went about discussing games in a way that allowed me to feel included in the conversation.”

Challenges: Breaking the Triviality Barrier Alongside its many benefits, studying games as literature brings challenges, particularly because students come with preconceived notions about games. A struggle that occurs each time I teach this class is breaking what folklore scholar Lynne S. McNeill calls “the triviality barrier” (15). This concept proposes that the common, the mundane, and the 31

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everyday do not deserve to be thought about deeply. The survey response of Javier, a Hispanic male student, to the question “what is the biggest challenge for students in this course?” encapsulates this unease: “I would argue that it is accessibility, and previous notion[s] that some may have about games like thinking they are mindless forms of entertainment. Breaking that way of thinking may pose a challenge.” To break the “triviality barrier,” instructors need to face head-on the question of information literacy and appropriate sources as well as build an inclusive curriculum that shows the range of literary games and does not marginalize the place of identity and politics in literary analysis. As Nolan Bazinet’s contribution to this volume notes, the most effective ways to teach games have less empirical backing than desired, so finding the proper tools to teach students how to analyze artifacts that employ text, image, audio, tactile, and other senses, often simultaneously, can be a struggle. What counts as legitimate research? Are Let’s Plays, community-created and -curated knowledge wikis, and reddit posts appropriate research sources? One answer to these questions of information literacy is to encourage students to engage with middle-state publishing sites. These venues, an example of which is First Person Scholar, exist between the unvetted blog and the excruciating peer-review process.9 Another is to introduce folklore, film studies, and visual culture studies texts to students, showing them how these debates around form, art, and the popular played out in the past. Crafting an inclusive syllabus, which covers games by a diverse set of creators, can also present a challenge, because students may frequently see a lesson on a game by a Black creator such as Momo Pixel’s Hair Nah! as a one-off class on “Black issues” rather than as a game that speaks just as broadly to issues of worldbuilding or interactivity as Dungeons and Dragons. To avoid this error, do not limit discussions of race, gender, sexuality, or other vectors of identity to works by members of oppressed communities. For example, when teaching the Player Handbook for the fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons, I incorporate a player-created “zine of rules,” Gwendolyn Marshall’s Ancestry & Culture: An Alternative to Race in 5e. Created to reject racist aspects of the original game, this text asks students to consider how a game that they consider “race-neutral” expresses exclusionary racial politics. Arcanist Press, the zine publishers, include a thoughtful introduction to their set of rules, detailing what makes the concept of race so problematic in Dungeons and Dragons and why conceptions of ancestry and culture “[allow] for much more diverse characters, more interesting stories, and richer roleplay” (4). As outlined in the previous section, instructors must also showcase the diversity behind games scholarship. Including the voices of game designers alongside university-based scholars pushes students to see that these issues are not contained to the university classroom. In conclusion, games are a medium through which stories, fiction, and nonfiction, are increasingly being told. For example, Vander Caballero, creator of Papo & Yo, describes his game as autobiographical, as “a metaphor for his own troubled childhood” (Navarro). Students should feel comfortable critically engaging and employing games

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in their own right. Literature classrooms can be a space that engages a dynamic field and challenges the stereotypes lobbed against us: that we are navel-gazers, reading our classics, disconnected from “the real world.” By centering the study of games in the classroom, students develop as English majors well versed in the criticism of the cultural artifacts that they interact with each day. Students of literature should feel confident that they can broadly apply their analytic and research skills to an everchanging world.10

Notes 1. All student comments cited in this essay are used with permission. When identifying a student’s gender, race, or ethnicity, I use the term the student provided. Students could complete all or some of the survey, which was sent to them after grades were entered, so they would not fear that their grade depended on positive comments. 2. In this chapter’s Appendix, I have provided the most recent version of that prompt and a holistic rubric for teachers to use and adapt as desired. Please provide credit to Mills and this volume. 3. While I assign a short piece from Wolf and Perron’s edited collection on video game studies, one could instead use Wolf ’s Building Imaginary Worlds. 4. There is substantial research on accessibility in the classroom as well as in the gaming industry. See Hamraie and Powers, Nguyen, and Frieden, for example. 5. There is also substantial scholarship on Gone Home, so it can be an excellent piece to have students practice finding and reading scholarship about primary texts. See Ruberg (“Straight”), Chess (“The Queer”), and Wardrip-Fruin. 6. In my opinion, the best book on teaching and structuring groupwork is Joanna Wolfe’s Team Writing. 7. There is much to be said here about how certain communities are allowed to fail and learn (or not learn) from failure more than others. Creating a safe space for failure in a classroom is necessary for that cultural shift but not enough on its own; failure should not lead to such devastating consequences for People of Color in all spheres of American life. 8. As scholars such as Anthropy, Gray, Cote, and Patterson have made abundantly clear, some gamers (white, male, straight, American) are welcomed as knowledge-creators and “worth” collaborating with in gaming communities while others (Black, female, queer, “foreign”) are marginalized or outright attacked. 9. In the article “Hybrid Publishing: The Case for the Middle-State,” Jason Hawreliak points to middle-state publishing as an accessible and timely way to engage games critically. 10. Thank you to my ENGL 303: Gaming Literature students, especially those who completed the optional survey and are named in the essay. I also want to thank Eric Detweiler for his support in the classroom and in drafting this essay. Thanks also to Craig Carey and Cody Mejeur, who presented alongside Eric and me at the MLA 2021 panel that we co-organized, “Teaching Games and Game Studies in English Courses: A Curricular Walkthrough.” Their presentations helped me to reconsider and refine this essay.

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Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke UP, 2006. Anthropy, Anna. Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form. Seven Stories Press, 2012. Anthropy, Anna. queers in love at the end of the world. 2013. Chess, Shira. “Hardcore Failure in a Casual World.” The Velvet Light Trap, no. 81, 2018, pp. 60–2. Chess, Shira. “The Queer Case of Video Games: Orgasms, Heteronormativity, and Video Game Narrative.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, vol. 33, no. 1, 2016, pp. 84–94. Cote, Amanda C. Gaming Sexism: Gender and Identity in the Era of Casual Video Games. NYU P, 2020. Depression Quest. Zöe Quinn and Patrick Lindsey, 2013. Dolmage, Jay. “Universal Design: Places to Start.” Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 2, 2015. Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Simon, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susana Pajares Tosca. Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction. 4th edition, Routledge, 2020. Ensslin, Astrid. Literary Gaming. MIT P, 2014. Flanagan, Mary. Critical Play: Radical Game Design. MIT P, 2013. Gone Home. The Fullbright Company, 2013. Gray, Kishonna L. Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming. LSU P, 2020. Gray, Kishonna L. Race, Gender, and Deviance in Xbox Live. Routledge, 2014. Hair Nah! Momo Pixel, 2017 Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke UP, 2011. Hamraie, Aimi. “Beyond Accommodation: Disability, Feminist Philosophy, and the Design of Everyday Academic Life.” philoSOPHIA, vol. 6, no. 2, 2016, pp. 259–71. Hawreliak, Jason. “Hybrid Publishing: The Case for the Middle-State.” First Person Scholar, Jul. 31, 2013, http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/the-case-for-the-middle-state/. Accessed Jun. 10, 2021. Heaven’s Vault. Inkle, 2019. Her Story. Sam Barlow, 2015. Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, MIT P, 2004, pp. 118–30. Keen, Suzanne. Narrative Form. 1st edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Kocurek, Carly A. Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade. U of Minnesota P, 2015. Marshall, Gwendolyn. Ancestry and Culture: An Alternative to Race in 5e. Arcanist Press, 2020. McNeill, Lynne S. “What Is Folklore?” Folklore Rules: A Fun, Quick, and Useful Introduction to the Field of Academic Folklore Studies. Utah State UP, 2013, pp. 1–19. Navarro, Alex. “Q&A: Papo & Yo Creator Vander Caballero on How His Troubled Past Inspired His Newest Project.” Giant Bomb, Jun. 16, 2011. https://www.giantbomb.com/articles/qapapo-yo-creator-vander-caballero-on-how-his-tro/1100-3385/. Accessed Jan. 19, 2021. Papo & Yo. Minority Media, Inc., 2012. ­Patterson, Christopher B. Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games. NYU P, 2020. Player’s Handbook: A Dungeons & Dragons Core Rulebook. 5th edition, Wizards of the Coast, 2014. Powers, George M., Vinh Nguyen, and Lex M. Frieden. “Video Game Accessibility: A Legal Approach.” Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 1, 2015. Ruberg, Bo. “Straight Paths through Queer Walking Simulators: Wandering on Rails and Speedrunning in Gone Home.” Games and Culture, vol. 15, no. 6, 2020, pp. 632–52. Ruberg, Bo. Video Games Have Always Been Queer. NYU P, 2019. 34

Gaming Literature Wardrip-Fruin, Noah. How Pac-Man Eats. MIT P, 2020. When Rivers Were Trails. Elizabeth LaPensée, Indian Land Tenure Foundation, Michigan State University Games for Entertainment and Learning Lab, 2019. Wolf, Mark J. P. Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation. Routledge, 2012. Wolf, Mark J. P. “Worlds.” The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, Routledge, 2016, pp. 125–31. Wolfe, Joanna. Team Writing: A Guide to Working in Groups. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010.

Appendix Choose-Your-Own Adventure Creation and Analysis This assignment has two parts: (1) the actual Choose-Your-Own Adventure (CYOA) that you will compose and (2) an analysis of the CYOA that answers the questions posed in this prompt. Part 1—Choose-Your-Own Adventure This is the creative part of the assignment, for which you make a Choose-Your-Own Adventure based on what we have discussed in class. I’m not expecting a Jane Austen, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, or Amy Tan level of authorship. I want this assignment to focus on incorporating what we have discussed about characterization, interactivity and audience, structure/organization, worldbuilding, representation, and narrative. CYOAs are concerned with all of these game components, and your work should show that you have considered them. You may write your CYOA like a Choose-Your-Own Adventure book or Give Yourself Goosebumps (e.g., if you choose to [blank], go to page 4, if you choose [blank], go to page 7). You can also use Twine (free software), like Zoe Quinn in Depression Quest. You could make a CYOA video on YouTube, or you could handwrite the CYOA as a flow chart or map. The possibilities are endless, so do what works for you. Remember, content is more important than “prettiness.” The many ways for approaching this assignment makes giving a clear “word count” or “page count” impossible. So instead, you will meet with me in office hours (or by appointment) to talk through your CYOA plan. You are also strongly encouraged to talk through ideas with your classmates, and you will have a workshop in class to do so on [date]. Use the workshop with a creative writing instructor as a way to work on your CYOA shape and opening scene. I will provide examples from previous students. Part 2—The Analysis This is the most important part of the assignment and the basis of most of your grade. This is where you demonstrate how characterization, interactivity and audience, structure/ organization, worldbuilding, representation, and narrative come through in your CYOA. The analysis should answer most or all of the questions presented in the following rubric. 35

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Criteria Did you create a Choose-Your-Own Adventure game? Remember, the story does not need to be great, but it should allow for an analysis of the six components of a game. For each of the categories below, consider whether the analysis takes into account the following questions (as appropriate to the CYOA you created). Characterization What were your goals for characterization? Which strategies did you use to develop (or not develop) characters in the story? How did you (or did you?) interact with the reader/player as a “character”? Interactivity and Audience What audience were you aiming for? Who are the readers/players? How did you encourage them to interact with the story and to be invested in it? How did player agency and choice play into the game? Structure/Organization Why did you choose to structure the piece the way you did? What story shape did you use? Were there choices that you prohibited for the reader/player? How did you struggle with the “choice” aspect of the CYOA? Worldbuilding What strategies did you use to create the world in which the reader/player makes their choices? How “realistic” did you make your world? What is the internal logic of your world? Representation In what ways did this piece engage with “representation”? Did it try to simulate something? Did it try to make you empathize with someone? Did it try to represent experiences or people who are otherwise marginalized or mispresented? Did it depend on realism, abstractionism, or caricaturism? Narrative/Storytelling How important was narrative to your story? What kind of story did you want to tell? What topics, themes, and larger questions were you trying to tackle with your CYOA? Did you try to “queer” the narrative?

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Be as concise as possible for each question. One way to do this is to use only the strongest evidence for your answers. While you can write longer responses, please keep in mind that a brief, to-the-point response selecting a few strong, well-explained examples is preferable to a rambling, unfocused response with a long list of poorly explained examples. Another tip: keep these questions in mind as you write the CYOA. This will help you make informed choices during the more creative process.

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CHAPTER 3 LEVELLING UP: TRANSFERRING THE ANALYTICAL GAZE FROM PRINT LITERATURE TO DIGITAL LITERATURE AND DIGITAL GAMES IN THE LITERATURE CLASSROOM

Nolan Bazinet

Like their media predecessors such as film and television, digital games share an obvious kinship with literature through their treatment of narrative. Therefore, it is not surprising to see that they are increasingly integrated into literature classrooms. The teaching of narrative through digital games in the literature classroom stands as an emerging field, but a growing corpus of work from recent scholars has begun to lay the groundwork for the teaching of digital games, highlighting examples of how to use them effectively in the literature classroom (Darvasi, Farber, Schrier). This chapter presents results from a Ph.D. study conducted in 2016 in which digital games were taught in a college-level classroom in Quebec, Canada.1 Although only portions of this research are presented here, the study demonstrates that students successfully transferred literary terms and concepts related to traditional print literature to digital literature and digital games.

Context of, and Levelling up to, the Study The study took place in one of four compulsory English literature courses at Champlain College titled Literary Themes: The Self via Technology. Twenty-four students were enrolled in the course. The main competency of the course is that students, upon its completion, are able to “Apply an analytical approach to a literary theme.” The theme focused on in this course was (as implied in the title) how dramatizations of the self are negotiated by, and through, technology. In the first four weeks of the course, we looked at a variety of short fiction featuring the topic of technology, and more importantly, its representation of our sense of selves. Short stories written by Cory Doctorow, Philip K. Dick, and Jorge Louis Borges sparked many discussions and ideas about how technology affects humanity’s sense of self. During these class meetings, literary devices such as characterization, plot structure, and figurative language were (re)activated.2 It was crucial to revisit these terms because, regardless of how often students encountered them in their previous courses, it has been my experience that students quickly forget such devices; also, various instructors might interpret, and thus teach them, differently.

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Moving from traditional print texts, we then analyzed visual narratives such as television episodes and films, based on the proposition that a transition to narratives including different modes (visual and audio) would serve as an effective transition toward digital games. During these class periods we watched Spike Jonze’s film Her and the first episode of Sam Esmail’s television program Mr. Robot and discussed, among other traditional narrative devices (such as plot structure and characterization), the difference between the visual aesthetic of the soft, soothing pastels of Her contrasted to the gray, sober tones of Mr. Robot. Students discussed and presented the ways in which these formalistic elements cohered with the main message of the film: a more life-affirming theme in the former, a more cynical and misanthropic theme in the latter. The course’s final three-week module focused on digital literature and digital games. First, students were provided a list of games that they could purchase, including titles such as Gone Home, The Walking Dead, The Path, 1979 Revolution, Her Story, and Papers Please. Rather than requiring them all to play one game and discuss it in class, I wanted them to enjoy the liberty to choose a game that interested them, given that they would be writing their final essay on it. This mirrors a similar pedagogical strategy that I implement when teaching print literature: allowing students to choose from a list of short stories on which to write their final essay. Furthermore, I purposely chose games with a strong narrative presence that were available on the digital game library Steam. Given the average age range of the students in these courses of approximately seventeen to twenty, they might not have access to a credit card to purchase their games, and Steam gift cards are conveniently available at grocery stories and pharmacies. Also, these games can be played on a personal computer.

Hypertext and Hypermedia Fiction In moving from visual narratives to digital interactive narratives, hypertext media and hypermedia fiction were presented, given that they provide an effective bridge from print literature to digital games because the former relies on lexical text. Moreover, hypertext fiction relies on clicking on hypertexts to advance the narrative, a feature one can assume many young people are inherently familiar with, primarily because this is the predominant way to navigate websites and social media. For the first class on hypertext narratives, students were presented with a brief historical understanding of hypertext literature’s development in the 1990s, specifically about how hypertext fiction came to prominence with the world wide web as well as with the emergence of hyperlink website navigation. The students were also taught how the progression of internet software allowed for this new genre of digital literature to become more accessible than earlier forms, such as interactive fiction, which relies heavily on typing short-verb phrases. Finally, at this point students were taught the term multimodality, defined as the mixture of modes (such as visual, audio, lexical), and the effects of multimodality in creating meaning in a particular message (Kress). 40

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Students then played the hypertext fiction text Beneath Floes (Snow). Beneath Floes is a hypertext narrative based on the legend of an Inuit mythical creature that carries children under ice floes. Although the game’s narrative structure offers few significant choices, the unconventional story is still rather complex owing to the narrator’s frequent digressions. Beneath Floes presents an intricate, and at times, convoluted, narrative. Indeed, one could argue that both on the level of form (offering a variety of choices) and on the level of content (the narrator’s various tangents), it is a quintessential non-linear, hypertext narrative. Moreover, part of its thematic work involves the theme of “othering,” in the ways that people are made to feel like an “other.” Again, this occurs on the level of form, in the unconventional narrative development that can be unnerving, but also through the specific content presenting various Inuit cultural signifiers, including Inuit terms and allusions to Inuit culture that are never explained or defined, which can create a sense of otherness that is both essential and effective. And indeed, students’ reactions to the game could be described as being “othered.” When asked about their impressions, many found the story confusing, and when asked what they believed the thematic message to be, they had difficulties articulating possible ideas. Nevertheless, they pointed toward some interesting literary elements, demonstrating their ability to apply literary terms to the hypertext narrative. For instance, some students discussed the presence of imagery, noting that the description of the crunching sound of boots on snow appealed to their sense of sound and that the occasional evocation of the secondperson narrative point of view made them feel like they were the protagonist of the story. Despite the difficulty students experienced with this text, I would argue that it is an effective hypertext narrative to teach. Unlike many works of hypertext fiction that are purely text based, Beneath Floes is multimodal, including sounds and images in its narrative, and thus it functions as a pertinent example of a multimodal, interactive narrative. Even though students found the content somewhat confusing, it is important for students to be confronted with content that presents them with divergent, different, and sometimes unsettling, perspectives. Moreover, students need to engage with narratives, especially through digital technology, that challenge them. Admittedly however, this might also be a result of my own insecurity of others’ belief that the teaching of digital literature and digital games is yet another example of “education as entertainment” (Postman), and that there is nothing redemptive in such texts. Nevertheless, students’ confusion can be reduced through more effective pedagogy. For instance, in the subsequent times I have taught this work of hypertext fiction, I have taken inspiration from Jess Joho’s analysis, particularly in how she connects Beneath Floes to the tradition of oral storytelling and our contemporary interaction with media, and how it can represent our scattered and dispersed way of gathering and retrieving information. Thus, in subsequent teaching situations, before allowing students to play the text, I present them a brief history of oral storytelling and create discussion groups in which they compare oral storytelling with contemporary media. Students often make connections between the two, particularly in relation to agency. Hence, their confusion seems to be much more diminished, and they are able to appreciate the narrative on a deeper level. 41

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On the second day of this week, students created their own hypertext narratives. They were instructed to dramatize a number of personal life choices through their hypertext narrative and, moreover, they were to integrate literary devices into their narrative. The students could freely choose which devices they were to integrate. Students were sent a link to the free hypertext creation software, Twine, along with a brief tutorial via email that walks through the basic steps of creating hypertext fiction narratives.3 I prefer that students view the video in class on their assigned computers before working on their narrative because previous experience has taught me that sending it to them to view at home does not guarantee that they will watch it. Also, walking through the application with the entire class is ineffective because some students will ask me to stop and review a part that they did not understand while others want to continue. Thus, having them individually watch a brief tutorial walkthrough of the application is more effective. Furthermore, students could advance at their own pace with the application while watching the video. While reviewing their completed narratives, I was particularly impressed to see the ways in which students dramatized their given topics by various choices represented through the hypertext. Moreover, the application of literary terms and devices within the hypertext narrative was largely successful. Most of the students adeptly operationalized and applied these literary devices, particularly the integration of the unconventional second-person point of view. From an educational theory perspective, the ability of students to create unique narratives while applying concepts and theories seen in class appeals to higher-order cognitive processes, such as metacognitive actions, and positions the activity in the uppermost echelon of Lorin Anderson and colleagues’ revision of Bloom’s renowned taxonomy for effective learning. Yet even more fascinating was the application of their hypertext narratives to situations that they had, or will encounter, in their own lives. Two students used a “night out” of college partying for their narrative subject, recreating the consequences of binge drinking. One student depicted the choices and consequences of attending university, with another dramatizing her difficulty in choosing whether to travel or to attend university. These last examples demonstrate the ability of hypertext narratives to allow students to contemplate complex life choices and their potential consequences. Moreover, these examples point toward the importance of identity negotiation in game playing (Barab, Gresalfi, and Ingram-Goble; Gee) and through avatar creation (Beavis, O’Mara, and McNeice). In this case, however, rather than negotiating identities through fixed characters or modified avatars, students in this study had the liberty to create identities more like themselves and to create choices reflective of their circumstances. Such reflexivity toward authentic, real-world situations demonstrates the affordances these types of activities inspired by digital texts can allow. The next class content focused on hypermedia fiction. Students were briefly presented an overview of the differing affordances of hypermedia fiction, such as Flash animation and the prevalence of sound and image. From there, students were presented with the concept of procedural rhetoric (Bogost 2007a). Given that this was the students’ third or fourth English class, they likely encountered rhetoric in a previous course; I nonetheless 42

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presented a quick refresher of the concept, explaining it as the art of persuasion, and then presented Bogost’s explanation that meaning production in digital games is uniquely delivered through “rule-based representations and interactions rather than the spoken word, writing, images, or moving pictures” (ix). Some students were unclear about this concept. Therefore, I explained to them how one might look at Facebook and other interactive technologies through a procedural rhetoric lens. For instance, one might say that Facebook’s intention is to create a virtual social experience; one way that intention is manifest is by allowing users the possibility to “Friend” people, or allowing users to “Like” things, and so on. Thus, by analyzing human interactions through these algorithmic processes, Facebook’s procedural rhetoric provides people the opportunity to experience a virtual social environment. Granted, this is not exactly the way Bogost intends procedural rhetoric to be used, especially given that Facebook is not necessarily a rhetorical message; however, I felt that most students would have a stronger understanding of the concept if explained using the social media site rather than digital games. I also expected the students to grasp the concept better once they experienced it in the texts we were to analyze that day, which was indeed the case. Next, I introduced the class to The McDonald’s Video Game. Students were given twenty minutes to play the game and discuss questions asking them to analyze how procedural rhetoric functions in it, to what extent they believed it to be persuasive, and what its main message is. Students remarked that the interactivity in the game, along with its multimodal features that create stress in game players and force players to make morally questionable decisions, was quite effective. Moreover, in focus group discussions after class, students compared The McDonald’s Video Game game with more passive forms of media, such as documentaries, with one student claiming: “I think that the difference between the documentary [i.e., Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me] and the games is in the documentary, they are bringing facts and in the game, you discover the facts on your own.” The student’s comment mirrors Miguel Sicart’s claim that digital texts are effective in that “the true political effect of these objects takes place when we occupy them” (73). In other words, this type of digital functionality allows students to occupy, embody, and interact critically with the values, cultures, and discourses presented within these texts. This unique affordance has pertinent implications for the objectives of an English course, which include identifying an (implicit/explicit) expression of a value system in a text and recognizing a text as an expression of cultural context (MELS).

Final Level: Analysis of a Digital Game In the last week of the course, class time was dedicated to preparing students to analyze their digital games and to write their essays. During the final class, a number of digital game concepts were presented to the students. These concepts covered elements as broad as particular genres of games (e.g., adventure games, RPGs) and concepts specific to game studies (e.g., avatar, cutscene, nonplayer character, boss). Following the presentation of these topics, the final essay instructions were assigned. Again, given that this course was 43

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the students’ third or fourth English literature class, many were already familiar with the format and guidelines of a literary analysis essay. However, owing to the unique nature of the texts the students were to analyze, extra time and explanation was provided so that they would comprehend both traditional literary terms and game studies terms. Examples of game studies terms included multimodality, procedural rhetoric, and terms such as avatars and cutscenes. From there, students were left to play and to analyze their games on their own time, and to contact me with any questions. Overall, the students’ essays were quite impressive, and it was satisfying to see how they applied the concepts of literary analysis to digital games. For instance, some students focused on particular formal elements, such as multimodality, and how it created an affective response to their gameplay, as in the following assessment: “The use of multimodality helps provide an intriguing factor to the game [The Walking Dead]. The actions of characters can be very graphic, therefore adding intensity to the game, enabling users to feel more involved and connected to what goes on throughout the process of the video game.” The Walking Dead, as the student implies, relies heavily on graphic, visual, linguistic, and audio modes. These modes are particularly effective in involving players, and thus emotionally and experientially attaching them to the game and its characters. Similarly, another student reflected on the dramatization of ethics in The Walking Dead, explaining that the game “undeniably conveys that morals and ethics are truly tested when put in extreme circumstances that force difficult decisions to be made based on what is right and wrong.” For the student, the extreme circumstances are heightened for the player through the unique affordances of digital games. These comments echo Tobias Staaby’s claim that effective critical learning is connected to the formalistic elements that digital games offer students, affording authentic situations that they can experience literally through “another’s” eyes, creating an “element of agency that other media cannot provide” (80). Other games, such as Gone Home, also provided students with affective learning opportunities. In one analysis of the game, a student connected multimodality to tone, another literary device discussed earlier in the course: The multimodality of this game helps setting the tone of the digital game Gone Home. Outside of the house, there is a storm going on, rain, lightning and wind can be heard from the inside of the house by the player. As the tone of the story is melancholic, these sounds reflect this tone perfectly… . Sam’s voice tone has also been chosen wisely by the developers of the game as it is clear that a feeling of helplessness is expressed through her voice. These sounds help express the difficulty of being homosexual in the 1990s. Like the others mentioned above, this student responded strongly to the immersive and empathetic elements of her digital game, provided through the various modes, such as Sam’s voice, and the game mechanics of discovering the “truths” about the various family members. Indeed, the interrogations around immersion, and specifically empathy, through the playing of digital games has gained recent interest by scholars (Roussos and 44

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Dovidio) with some scholars highlighting how digital games, given their unique ability to allow players to “inhabit” characters and to enact their actions, can be considered “empathy machines” (Farber and Schrier). Such claims engender legitimate criticism (Ruberg), yet, on the whole, digital games provide an immersive interaction with various discourses that, although not perfectly recreating the various strifes and jubilations of particular lives lived, allow one to appreciate the way an artist enacts those discourses through formalistic engagement. One salient example of students’ use of multimodality to understand a game’s value system and its expression of cultural discourse emerged when a student discussed how both formal and thematic elements combine to present the game’s thematic message in Her Story. The student adeptly examined the intersection of traditional literary devices such as plot structure and symbolism with the game mechanics to provide a unique commentary about its discourse around mental health: In a certain way, the difficulty players might have to understand this complex storyline could be a mirror to the difficulty the general population has to understand mental illness … . The fact [that] the game mainly happens through an old search engine is what allow[s] the plot structure to be so complex. Furthermore, the old and inefficient search engine could represent that the fears and judgments about mental illness should be now part of the past. This student effectively examined the game’s depiction of mental health issues as well as their sociocultural antecedents, while couching this perspective around the digital processes of the game through multimodality and procedural rhetoric. As argued by scholars such as Flanagan and Nissenbaum as well as Sicart, the student explicitly presents an excellent example of how digital games can allow players to interact with, and to experience, value-laden discourses that they might not normally experience—at least not in the same way—through other forms of media.

Conclusion Integrating digital games in the literature classroom can be incredibly meaningful for students; nevertheless, it is not without its problems. First, it is common for instructors to believe that current youth, given their status as digital natives, are inherently predisposed to enjoy playing digital games; this is a fallacy. As scholars have argued (Kirschner and Bruyckere; McGrew et al.), this is a misguided notion that implicitly promotes the belief that young people today are literate in most forms of digital media, whereas the truth is that most youth are literate in specific types of media and/or applications. Granted, some students might be keen to play digital games in the classroom; however, as I encountered in this study, others seemed trepidatious. Some students may see game-playing as part of an objectionable subculture or believe that digital games are violent and misogynistic.4 Regardless, believing that all students will immediately be motivated to play digital 45

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games is as misguided as believing that our current digital natives are adept with all forms of technology. Furthermore, one must be conscious about the complexities of grafting on terms, concepts, or disciplinary biases from one medium to another. This is one of the many points of contention in the debates between ludologists and narratologists (Bogost 2007b). However, in a literature classroom, it is nearly impossible to avoid using literary terms and approaching digital games with a literary sensibility. For instance, during the study, one student attempted to use the term “foreshadowing” to describe an object in a game that was slightly highlighted, as it was obvious that the game designers were hinting to players to pick up the object. Whether one is discussing film, television, or digital games, certain concepts transfer from one medium to another, with some nuances. Nevertheless, it is an important point for instructors to consider, especially if it forces them to engage with concepts unique to digital games and media, such as multimodality and procedural rhetoric. Being reflexive about these terms and their integration in a literature course highlights that students should interrogate their current media usage. Indeed, having students interrogate the formalistic elements of digital media was arguably the most rewarding part of the study. As mentioned at the outset of this chapter, students chose their own games and analyzed them with little intervention on my part— and I was concerned that this might be a gamble. However, it was worthwhile, as the students demonstrated that they were quite adept at analyzing their games and deploying newly instructed concepts in their analysis. Much of this might be the result of how the final module was created: moving from print literature, to digital literature, to digital games. The progression toward digital games allowed students to gradually familiarize themselves with digital media, and as the texts became more interactive and included additional modes, other terms and concepts were added to their analytic repertoire, allowing them to effectively perform at this final level.

Notes 1. College-level refers to post-secondary education in Quebec, often known by its acronym CÉGEP (Collège d’enseignement général et professionnel). After the completion of secondary school (grade 11), students may continue to CÉGEP, in which they choose to complete either a pre-university program (of two years) before attending university or a technical diploma (three years) before joining the workforce. 2. It should be noted that, depending on where the students are situated in their studies, this would be the third or fourth English literature course for these students, and they would have previously learned these literary devices. Therefore, teaching these concepts simply reactivates their knowledge of them. 3. See Twine’s website, https://twinery.org/ and, for the tutorial, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=1jukyU4EK2M&t=1s. 4. To wit: in a focus group, one student stated, with a slight hint of disdain in her tone, that she does not consider herself a “gamer.” 46

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Works Cited Anderson, Lorin, et al. A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Prentice Hall, 2001. Barab, Sasha A., Melissa Gresalfi, and Adam Ingram-Goble. “Transformational Play: Using Games to Position Person, Content, and Context.” Educational Researcher, vol. 39, no. 7, 2010, pp. 525–36. Beavis, Catherine, Joanne O’Mara, and Lisa McNeice, editors. Digital Games: Literacy in Action. Wakefield Press, 2012. Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games. MIT P, 2007. Bogost, Ian. “Video Games Are Better without Stories.” The Atlantic, Apr. 25, 2007. Darvasi, Paul. “Gone Home and the Apocalypse of High School English.” Teacher Pioneers: Visions From the Edge of the Map, edited by Caro Williams-Pierce, ETC Press, 2016, pp. 120–42. Farber, Matthew. Game-Based Learning in Action: How an Expert Affinity Group Teaches with Games. Peter Lang, 2018. Farber, Matthew, and Karen Schrier. “The Limits and Strengths of Using Digital Games as Empathy Machines.” UNESCO, 2017. Flanagan, Mary, and Helen Nissenbaum. Values at Play in Digital Games. MIT P, 2014. Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. Routledge, 2007. Gone Home. Fullbright Company, 2013. Her. Directed by Spike Jonze, performances by Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson, and Chris Pratt, Annapurna Picture, 2013. Her Story. Sam Barlow, self-published, 2015. Joho, Jess. “Escape the Icy Clutches of an Inuit Legend in Beneath Floes.” Killscreen, Jan. 14, 2015. Kirschner, Paul A., and Pedro De Bruyckere. “The Myths of the Digital Native and the Multitasker.” Teaching and Teacher Education, vol. 67, 2017, pp. 135–42. Kress, Gunther. Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. Routledge, 2009. McDonald’s Video Game. Molleindustra, 2006. McGrew, Sarah, et al. “The Challenge That’s Bigger than Fake News: Civic Reasoning in a Social Media Environment.” American Educator, vol. 41, no. 3, 2017, pp. 4–11. Ministère d’Éducation loisirs et sports (MELS). Formation générale: commune, propre et complémentaire aux programmes d’études conduisant au diplôme d’études collégiales. Québec, Canada, 2009. Mr. Robot. Directed by Sam Esmail, performances by Rami Malek, Christian Slater, and Portia Doubleday, USA Network, 2015–2019. Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Penguin, 1985. Roussos, Gina, and John F. Dovidio. “Playing below the Poverty Line: Investigating an Online Game as a Way to Reduce Prejudice toward the Poor.” Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace, vol. 10, no. 2, 2016. Ruberg, Bo. “Empathy and Its Alternatives: Deconstructing the Rhetoric of ‘Empathy’ in Video Games.” Communication, Culture & Critique, vol. 13, no. 1, 2020, pp. 54–71. Sicart, Miguel. Play Matters. MIT P, 2014. ­Schrier, Karen. Learning, Education, and Games. Volume I: Curricular and Design Considerations. Carnegie Mellon University, 2014. Snow, Kevin. Beneath Floes. Self-published, 2015. Staaby, Tobias. “Zombie-Based Critical Learning: Teaching Moral Philosophy with The Walking Dead.” Well Played: A Journal on Video Games, Value, and Meaning, vol. 4, no. 2, 2015, pp. 76–91. The Walking Dead: Season One. Telltale Games, 2012.

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­C HAPTER 4 REVERSE-ENGINEERING STORIES IN THE LITERATURE CLASSROOM: LINKING VIDEO GAMES AND TRADITIONAL NARRATIVES TO FOSTER CRITICAL READING SKILLS

John Misak

Today, the majority of students play video games, providing them with narrative experiences transferrable to critical reading and writing skills. Still, many students (particularly those at technical institutions) perceive a self-diagnosed deficiency in analyzing literature. Such students often feel the opposite about their proficiency with STEM-based skills. Reverse-engineering game stories and traditional narrative designs, a practice that incorporates STEM skills, can alleviate these preconceptions and provide a bridge from student game experience to literature classroom learning outcomes. This chapter builds on research by Ian Bogost, Jesper Juul, James Paul Gee, Constance Steinkuehler, and others and illustrates a practice of narrative deconstruction through reverse-engineering game narratives to enable acquisition of critical reading and writing skills. Players often intricately break down game narratives and engage in discussions that mirror those sought in literature classes; they investigate character motivation, plot meaning, and game designers’ intentions like students might similarly study Kate Chopin or Shakespeare. Games like The Last of Us offer complex characters ripe for analysis similar to Hamlet. Instructing students on the construction (through reverse engineering) of traditional and game narratives concurrently illustrates parallels between these mediums while providing a less complicated entryway to analysis. This practice utilizes the investigative techniques common to gamers to foster greater participation for all students. “Dissecting literature” becomes “reverse-engineering narrative” and can remove initial aversion to humanities-based skills. Illustrating the similarities between two seemingly oppositional practices fosters student confidence in story analysis, thus increasing access to and agency over classroom discourse.

Background The practices detailed herein serve as curricula for the second of two required firstyear-composition (FYC) courses at a technical university. This FYC course centers on introduction to literature, although it can include technical writing elements such as

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audience analysis. Most students major in STEM areas and they generally dislike the assigned texts. When asked about this, they often cite complexity, with a perceived lack of interest a secondary factor. Because of the high percentage of college-aged Americans playing video games, many instructors draw connections among the narrative mediums of literature, movies, and games in their classes. This practice alleviates some students’ hesitation to engage with literature but can lead to avoidance of complex texts in favor of more engaging media. Students in STEM fields often distinguish between their studies and the fields of writing and literature analysis. Many avoid English classes until the end of their academic careers for fear of bad grades, and prefer core humanities courses not even be graded (Petrou et al.). This reticence toward taking humanities courses does not easily fade and is often reinforced when students see complex texts on a syllabus. A technological intervention may help here. Allowing students to access familiar skills increases engagement and can alleviate preconceived notions of inadequacy. One such technique is to allow students to reverse-engineer narrative much like they would a product in an engineering course or a building in architecture. The key is to make a concrete connection between literary and STEM-based analytical skills.

Reverse-Engineering Narrative Reverse engineering refers to the practice of breaking an artifact down with the goal of rebuilding it to learn its structure. Taking a car motor apart and putting it back together illustrates how one might reverse engineer building a motor. Those in the engineering and software fields often use this as a learning method and a way to reduce development time (Singh). This process mimics the dissection of narrative through close reading in a literature classroom. Students break down the elements of a story to gain insights into its creation and intention. The simple rephrasing of “dissecting literature” to “reverse engineering narrative” helps familiarize those in the STEM fields with the tasks expected of them in this FYC course and can alleviate the aforementioned preconceived deficiencies. Doing so makes the first connection between STEM and humanities skills. The reverse-engineering process involves two key elements. First, one must decode the product, taking it apart either physically or figuratively, breaking it down to its constituent elements. Consider this the reverse flow of the process, bringing the product back to its initial stage. The second involves recreating the product, and this can be achieved through a step-by-step recreation of the exact product or a similar one based on the design, a forward flow. For instance, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead serves as a recreation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in that it breaks down the plot of the original play and then reframes it through a different lens, that of two seemingly minor characters. This example clarifies the possible intentions of both exercises in this chapter and the practice of reverse engineering as a whole. 50

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­The Argument for Video Games Several researchers have indicated the effectiveness of games as educational opportunities (Bogost; Gee; Squire and Jenkins; Steinkuehler). Many studies address the narrative structure of modern video games and their ability to illuminate narrative investigation (Misak). Other research indicates composition specifically as a viable target for the inclusion of games (Alexander; Yancey, Roberston and Taczak). The strategies in these studies reintroduce students to the practice of analyzing narrative, a familiar habit of gamers from a young age. Bridging their worlds inside and outside the university enables more robust classroom discourse and draws parallels between games and the seemingly foreign narrative of literature. Illustrating the characterization of Joel from Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us alongside that of Hamlet helps students better see connections between their games and course materials. Both characters hesitate over their assigned mission. Although these characters share little in the details of their experiences, students readily recognize the impact of failure on the characters’ narrative arcs. Specifically, once we discuss The Last of Us, students can transfer the ability to identify character struggles from the game to Hamlet. Joel’s internal battle illuminates Hamlet’s experiences. Using games as texts for literature courses has become more mainstream (Farrell, Neeser and Bishoff) and the practice can significantly impact student engagement, along with improvements in literacy (Levine and Vaala). However, much like showing a movie in place of reading a text, it may not alleviate the core concern: many students feel disconnected from literature owing to preconceived notions of insufficiency. STEM students do not feel the same level of proficiency with close reading as they do with analyzing computer code or product-design documents because they might not see the similarities between the tasks. The act of playing a narrative versus reading becomes a high-impact practice and immerses students in course material, but it may also create a greater distance between what students know (games) and what they fear they do not know (literature), resulting in a net zero impact on learning. The entertainment element of playing games live does not encourage players to pause and reflect on the possibility of closely examining their experience, as close reading of texts encourages.

Applying Reverse Engineering to Literature with Games I started assigning games in my classes roughly fifteen years ago, when games evolved from failed interactive movies or mindless displays of flashy graphics into more engaging artifacts both aesthetically and narratively. Older designs spent nearly all resources on visuals, leaving little for story, whereas titles like Bioshock, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Heavy Rain created narrative experiences worthy of dissection in a college classroom. Students responded positively to discussing games, and incorporating them into my curriculum had an ancillary benefit: traditionally quiet “gamers” contributed immensely to class discussions. Although the talk focused more on games, students interacted with one another in ways they hadn’t before. This increased engagement 51

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sparked better classes, and I continued the practice. However, over the years, students still did not as readily engage with dense literature by the likes of Shakespeare or Chinua Achebe or texts outside of contemporary Western literature. The same barriers remained. Games enabled conversation about both their design and narrative, but little if any of students’ insights transferred to more complex works. Even a shuffling of content for the course failed to address this concern. The key contributor to this failure comes from modality. Games focus primarily on entertainment. Educators can use games as a vehicle to deliver learning by hanging a learning element on them, but this is best done sparingly. If instructors tell students that they will play a game and that game turns out to be heavily laden with learning, students often reject it. A better practice involves highlighting the narrative experience in an existing for-entertainment game, albeit with caveats. It is challenging to discuss narrative while immersed in a game environment at the same time. Learning unfortunately parallels a talker in a movie theater: a source of unwanted distraction rather than a learning tool. It is best to let the learning happen organically. STEM students’ resistance to reading and writing often surfaces at the start of the course or when terms like characterization are mentioned. I used games to counter this resistance, yet because of the complications with using games as learning tools, the resistance still had the advantage. Students understood the characterization behind Joel from The Last of Us and realized that they already analyzed game characters by communicating with other players. The bridge I imagined between games and classic texts was not complete because students stayed on the STEM side of the bridge and rejected reading complex texts. This caused me to balance the reading list with more “relatable” modern texts, but the same problems occurred. The initial barriers of aversion overcame any interest in reading. The equation of “effort=results” consistently required more on the effort side with a lesser return on the results. The STEAM movement offers greater balance and diversity to STEM curriculum through the inclusion of the arts (Perignat and Katz-Buonincontro).1 Initiated by the Rhode Island School of Design, the practice seeks to transform research policy to place Art + Design at the center of STEM (Academic Affairs). My research had led me to the intricacies of STEAM education, but I found this practice only had a flow from the humanities toward STEM. I sought something more bidirectional. If STEM students felt an aversion to the principles taught in my introductory literature course out of an expectant theory of failure, perhaps the use of familiar tools and practices would aid in achieving the course’s learning outcomes. I theorized a “CVS model” for my class, where STEM students easily recognized the skills from their major in a literature course much, like a customer can navigate a CVS in nearly every state because of similar design. This technique borrows principles from Universal Course Design (Rose et al.), albeit with a stronger focus on STEM-infused arts classes. There is benefit in allowing the mechanical within the creative, illustrating how math can convey a narrative, and how mechanically reverse engineering a story can illuminate its creative intentions. During reverse-engineering exercises, readers become users. Those users have specific needs, expectations, and proficiencies. The story morphs into a product, one crafted by 52

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the author, who becomes a designer. The product intends to meet users at their needs and proficiencies, whilst attending to their expectations. Such expectations influence the interpretation of the product. Failed products often provide the best learning experiences for designers. There are many bad video games, and reverse engineering them provides useful information on what not to do in game design. For literature, it may be more helpful to illustrate plot points where the writer may have missed an opportunity or did not develop tension or sufficient intrigue for this new group of users. This can transfer to student writing, as students understand how even great writers missed opportunities in their work. This can help demystify a process some students see as more arcane than the magic they use in their games. Such demystification aids in the probability of transfer of FYC skills, a task not easily completed (Nelms and Dively; Yancey, Roberston and Taczak). These skills include narrative analysis, which can parallel the close examination necessary for computer code or engineering documents or architectural designs. The process of reverse engineering has a mixed reputation in the marketplace. Electronic Arts, a video game company, infamously reverse engineered Sega’s Genesis console in 1989 and used this knowledge to broker a better deal with Sega on game licensing fees (LeRay). A more ethical application involves beginning writers mimicking successful writers. They explore the intricacies of the author’s works; attempt to recreate them; and ultimately, absorb some of the techniques into their own work without too much derivation. The former example is a direct copy (and often unethical in the marketplace) while the latter uses the original product as an informative inspiration. Students should know this distinction—and while they may learn it in their STEM classes—it is useful to note it for this first exercise, where they will analyze an existing game.

Level One: Reverse Process Sample Exercises Game Evaluation Report Integrating a “teaching with games” approach to narrative structure requires a constant connection between games and literature. I find it best to incorporate metacognitive practices to keep students on track while maintaining the engagement generated by the game. This exercise asks students to analyze a scene from The Last of Us and provides a short explanation of the story, the critical reception to its narrative elements, and a correlation to existing literature (in this case, Hamlet). This meta-strategic knowledge component helps students comprehend the expectations of the assignment and their specific role within (Zohar). See Appendix 1 for an example of an assignment that incorporates STEM principles and meta-strategic knowledge components. This assignment fosters the analytical and critical thinking learning objectives set forth in the course. Although the tasks seem familiar to tech-minded students of all majors, they align with the goals of teaching students to closely read narrative. It acts much like a Trojan horse; the students see analysis of a game as far different than that

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of a work of literature, yet they begin to develop skills transferable from the technical to the artistic. Specifically, they can transfer the skill of analysis, a “core” skill. Research indicates such cognitive-based key skills have a higher likelihood of transfer (Billing), and this exercise capitalizes on this potential. Reverse Engineering a Scene from Hamlet Many STEM students have more affinity for breaking down something rather than reading it. The goal is not subterfuge—students clearly understand the motivation—but instead to have students approach the material from a familiar perspective. Tying the exercise to specific learning outcomes helps attach a humanities learning element on a seemingly STEM-focused assignment. Students analyze a text and use the writing process to respond, two core learning outcomes of this particular FYC class. The difference from traditional assignments is that this approach feels more familiar to STEM students, and familiarity of task correlates to better chance of skills transfer (Brent). For this exercise, students take a short text and intuit the intentions of the writer. The scene when Hamlet meets his father’s ghost works well because of its many narrative pathways. How the reader perceives Hamlet’s experience colors their interpretations of many later events, and students understand the importance of this scene in the overall product, Shakespeare’s play. It can be compared to Joel’s daughter’s death at the beginning of The Last of Us albeit with more user variation in perception. Sarah’s death greatly impacts Joel and his later reactions to key characters. Her death explains his cold outward projection and initial refusal to interact with Ellie, a girl roughly Sarah’s age whom he must escort across the country. Although Hamlet’s vision of his father impacts his later actions, the reasoning behind this motivation is more nuanced. Readers can interpret the vision as real, imagined, or a combination of the two. Unlike the indisputable death of Sarah in Joel’s arms, the ghost may or may not exist, and may or may not have spoken to Hamlet. The reader must resolve these intricacies to interpret the entirety of the play, and students reverse engineering this key scene may, like a director who re-mediates Shakespeare for the screen, indicate a bias for one interpretation over another. These biases can be coded into a final design or great care may be taken to avoid such. Students ultimately decide their intentions, perhaps mimicking what they believe Shakespeare intended or illustrating their own perceptions and biases in their final product. Either way, they critically think about these matters. The difficulty here is audience. Shakespeare did not write Hamlet for the twenty-firstcentury; his seventeenth-century audience had different expectations and proficiencies. We as literature instructors attempt to deliver this product to a different audience and often serve as translators of expectations and proficiencies from the past. The play contains dense historical and cultural contexts foreign to many of today’s students. At best, together we can create an idealized version of Shakespeare’s intended audience, shaded with our current perceptions and insights. Classic works of literature travel through time and often have perspectives attached to them as they pass through different eras, cultures, and classrooms. Students reverse engineering Hamlet’s meeting with his 54

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father’s ghost must consider what happens when they take it apart and view it through their own introspective lenses. This creates an interesting writing assignment in which students report on their findings, indicating the ways in which their personal biases entered into the process. This reflective assignment should include a report on findings and biases, but it has all the elements of an effective reflection. In their reports, students indicate what they consider Shakespeare’s intentions for this moment. They can speculate what a seventeenth-century audience might think, but a more valuable question would be, how does this meeting play out for a contemporary reader? Did Shakespeare envision specific takeaways? Will audiences generally agree on the facts of this meeting, or is this a point of substantial debate? A balance must be sought between offering students guidance on report findings and steering their answers. The instructor should take on the role of product manager seeking answers from studentdesigners, and the report should tell its own story, one of interpretation of the scene through the student’s perspective. In writing this report, students delve deeper into the narrative underpinnings of a play they often find overly complex. For instance, both students and professors do not think undergraduates are prepared to read Shakespeare (Thew). After dissecting a small scene with tremendous structural impact, students may feel more prepared to read the entire play, if only to confirm their perceptions. Previous research (Misak and LaGrandeur) illustrates that students playing a game based on this scene provided them with more confidence in reading Hamlet. Student players felt more grounded in the play after experiencing engagement with a short scene and coming to conclusions about Hamlet’s state of mind. The practice of breaking down a small scene builds confidence in tackling the larger play. Appendix 2 provides an assignment asking students to view Hamlet as a product and to assess its effectiveness in catering to its perceived target audience.

Level Two: Tying It All Together with Twine Next comes the forward process within reverse engineering. The ultimate goal of recreating a product does not align well with teaching introductory literature on the surface. Still, reverse engineering is not complete without the forward process, the “engineering” part. I cannot expect my students to write like Shakespeare or to design narratives like the writers at Naughty Dog Studios (the creators of The Last of Us), nor is there inherent value in the attempt. Instead, students create a product that results from their investigation into the narratives of these two works and their introspection over them. Here their perceptual biases can influence design or a desire to strictly adhere to the author’s intentions, albeit the latter also indelibly colored with their biases. This dichotomy can serve as an active learning moment when students realize the effect of user perception on a product’s reality much like the unintended consequences of reader interpretation on a written work. Biases also influence the reception of major video game releases, a phenomenon most students are familiar with. 55

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The Twine game engine helps with this learning moment.2 By coordinating students’ coding proficiency with narrative structure, the engine allows students to storyboard and craft a narrative based on their perceptions of the original text. This works for both STEM and other majors, as the engine scales with its users’ knowledge of code. Those who understand HTML and Java can code with these languages while someone with no coding skill can merely write and add graphics, letting the engine do the coding work. The engine uses a storyboard design based on user decisions and input (see Figure 4.1). Text and graphics create a narrative atmosphere and help present players with decisions. The game engine intertwines STEM and humanities skills by having software code mimic the writing process. A Twine storyboard looks like that of a screenwriter mapping out a narrative. Instruction should focus on the parallels between software coding and writing in terms of input and design by the crafter with specific intentions for the end-user. The end-user in this exercise would be fellow students playing a game to better understand Hamlet. Learning how to craft a game based on an existing story—while making coding decisions that lead the player to specific results—helps student-creators see the value in analyzing literature. Students must wear both designer and user hats in this process, one that reflects both narrative analysis and product creation practices. When students consider the elements necessary to teach story elements to their peers, they learn to focus on these elements in their own reading while concurrently exercising their STEMbased skills. The craft of story and software design remove initial barriers to engagement with literature and allow students to learn skills they feel more comfortable with. The pilot implementation of this project used a group approach. Students individually completed the first two assignments, and then, after polling indicated their specific skillsets, groups formed with a mix of students proficient in coding, graphics, narrative, and beta-testing. Students conferred on the overall crafting of the narrative and accepted assignments to either write the story, add coding elements, or provide images. Those who felt insufficiently proficient in the technical or narrative elements tested the game and provided feedback on the efficacy of its learning aspects. Student feedback indicated they both enjoyed the process and learned from it. Some highlighted that, although they were in computer science and engineering fields, they had not been afforded the opportunity to craft a game from both technical and narrative aspects. Those in fine arts commented on how they liked using their craft without it being a major solo project, but instead a small aspect of a larger group one that was not solely based on graphics. Having students involved with the design of a similar game based on the Twine engine adds an additional active learning element to the process. Students must consider the narrative on several levels, most importantly how to convey it to an audience of their peers through the decisions-based Twine game engine. Not only do students have the tools of learning in their own hands and can control the pace, they also view this exercise through the lens of an instructor, providing insights on how to best teach complex texts to the target audience. This increases the active elements of the assignment and can serve as a form of flipped-classroom learning. 56

Figure 4.1  A Sample Twine Storyboard Illustrating Narrative Possibilities in Hamlet

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Conclusion Teaching students with games offers several benefits outlined by researchers in the field. Often, the practice of incorporating games into a humanities curriculum mitigates barriers to student learning, especially when a high percentage of STEM majors take humanities classes. However, this practice can erect its own set of barriers to learning. Through the inclusion of reverse engineering with game creation, students investigate narrative on a more granular level and develop a better understanding of audience analysis, narrative structure, and the basic elements necessary for successful story creation. These practices transform students from consumers of story to creators, involving an active learning practice that puts the tools of learning firmly in their hands. Research indicates active learning as a motivator of student engagement and, ultimately, better learning (Allen and Baughman). The game-creation element of the reverse-engineering process enables either an individual or a team-based approach and provides students with a tangible takeaway through structured exercises. Games designed in Twine may lack technical innovations but they are instantly playable and can serve as a storyboard for more advanced game development projects coded in Unity. In so many games and in classes, there’s always another level to level up to.

Notes 1. This is an approach to teaching STEM with an infusion of the arts or humanities. The goal is to educate STEM majors more wholistically. 2. Twine is an open source for telling interactive, nonlinear stories. It was created by Chris Klimas and is available for download at twinery.org. See Kirilloff ’s chapter in this volume.

Works Cited Academic Affairs. n.d. May 30, 2021. https://academicaffairs.risd.edu/grants-and-funding/8736-2/ stem-to-steam/. Alexander, Jonathan. “Gaming, Student Literacies, and the Composition Classroom: Some Possibilities for Transformation.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 61, no. 1, 2009, pp. 35–63. Allen, Peter, and Frank Baughman. “Active Learning in Research Methods Classes Is Associated with Higher Knowledge and Confidence, Though Not Evaluations or Satisfaction.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 7, 2016, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00279. Billing, David. “Teaching for Transfer of Core/Key Skills in Higher Education: Cognitive Skills.” Higher Education, vol. 53, 2007, pp. 483–516. Bogost, Ian. “The Rhetoric of Video Games.” The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning, edited by Katie Salen Tekinbas, MIT P, 2008, pp. 117–40.

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Reverse-Engineering Stories Brent, Doug. “Crossing Boundaires: Co-op Students Relearning to Write.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 63, no. 4, 2012, pp. 558–92. ­Farrell, Shannon L., Amy E. Neeser, and Carolyn Bishoff. “Academic Uses of Games: Qualitative Assessment of Research and Teaching Needs at a Large Research University.” College & Research Libraries [Online], 78.5, 2017, pp. 675–705. Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. kiwidust. “The Last of Us and Narrative Decisions.” DepressedPress.Com, Dec. 21, 2013, http:// depressedpress.com/2013/12/20/the-last-of-us-and-narrative-decisions/. LeRay, Joseph. “A Bit of Gaming History: EA Reverse Engineered Its Own Genesis Devkit.” Aug. 8, 2008. Destructoid. 2021. https://www.destructoid.com/stories/a-bit-of-gaminghistory-ea-reverse-engineered-its-own-genesis-devkit-99328.phtml. Levine, Michael H., and Sarah E. Vaala. “Games for Learning: Vast Wasteland or Digital Promise?” Digital Games: A Context for Cognitive Development. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, vol. 139, 2013, pp. 71–82. Misak, John. “How Fighting Games Help Enable Student/Players to Imagine and Investigate Narrative.” The Quint, vol. 9, no. 4, 2017, pp. 65–88. Misak, John, and Kevin LaGrandeur. “Perchance to Read: Developing an Augmented Reality Game to Increase Student Engagement with Hamlet.” Early Modern Culture Online, vol. 7, no. 1, 2020, pp. 19–44. Nelms, Gerald, and Rhonda Leathers Dively. “Perceived Roadblocks to Transferring Knowledge from First-Year Composition to Writing-Intensive Major Courses: A Pilot Study.” Writing Program Administration, vol. 31, nos. 1–2, 2007, pp. 214–35. Perignat, Elaine, and Jen Katz-Buonincontro. “STEAM in Practice and Research: An Integrative Literature Review.” Thinking Skills and Creativity, vol. 31, 2019, pp. 31–43. Petrou, Loukia, et al. “The Role of Humanities in the Medical Curriculum: Medical Students’ Perspectives.” BMC Medical Education, vol. 21 no. 179, 2021. Rose, David, et al. “Universal Design for Learning in Postsecondary Education: Reflections on Principles and Their Application.” Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability, vol. 19, no. 2, 2006, pp. 135–51. Singh, Niranjan. “Reverse Engineering: A General Review.” International Journal of Advanced Engineering Research and Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, 2012, pp. 24–8. Squire, Kurt, and Henry Jenkins. Video Games and Learning: Teaching and Participatory Culture in the Digital Age. Teachers College Press, 2011. Steinkuehler, Constance. “Video Games and Digital Literacies.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, vol. 54, no. 1, 2010. Thew, Neill. “Teaching Shakespeare: A Survey of the Undergraduate Level in Higher Education.” Higher Education Academy Subject Centre, 2006, https://s3.eu-west-2. amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-document-manager/documents/hea/private/ shakespeare_1568036862.pdf. Wardle, Elizabeth. “Understanding ‘Transfer’ from FYC: Preliminary Results of a Longitudinal Study.” Journal of the Council of Writing Program Administrators, vol. 31, nos. 1–2, 2007, pp. 65–85. Yancey, Kathleen Blake, Liane Roberston, and Kara Taczak. Writing across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing. Utah State UP, 2014. Zohar, Anat. “Explicit Teaching of Metastrategic Knowledge: Definitions, Students’ Learning, and Teachers’ Professional Development.” Metacognition in Science Education, edited by Anat Zohar and Yehudit Judy Dori, vol. 40, 2012, pp. 197–223.

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­Appendix 1 Games Evaluation Report Much of our discussion and analysis in these first few weeks focuses on the medium of games within a narrative perspective. Games often tell stories, as you have seen in the game montage from Week One. Although you “watched” these scenes deliver story in the montage, they are designed to be experienced as play, having the player follow the narrative and, at times, control its direction. This is similar to how, for instance, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet but directors in the subsequent centuries have developed plays and movies based on his work. For this assignment, you will analyze The Last of Us, a game developed by Naughty Dog that has been acclaimed as one of the best-developed narratives in recent years. Read “The Last of Us and Narrative Decisions” by kiwidust to gain insight into both the critical reception of The Last of Us and the balance needed between player input on story and creative control of the designers. You can choose to play the game (on PS3, PS4, or PC) or watch a demo on YouTube. Focus on the opening part, which serves as a foundation for the characters’ attitudes later in the game. Remember that a game is a product designed for a specific audience with expectations, proficiencies, and needs. A player may have freedom to do nearly anything in a game, but anything they can do is only because the designers coded the ability to do so. A play also has these limitations (especially when the play is watched rather than read), so think about how these mediums are related, along with their inherent differences. Answer the following: How does playing (or watching someone play) a game impact the delivery of narrative? What do you think were the designers’ intentions in creating this opening scene? Are they effective in achieving these intentions? What impact do the audience’s (in this case, your) proficiencies and expectations have on the interpretation of this scene? Does player choice impact the outcome of this scene? If so, how? If not, what do you think is the effect on story interpretation? Guidelines: 400–500 words Do not list the questions and then answer them but rather include your responses in report-like fashion as evidenced in the sample provided.

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Appendix 2 Hamlet as Product: Evaluation Report This assignment continues the work you started on reverse engineering Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The goal is to analyze this play as a product geared toward a specific audience and to make decisions on the writer’s intentions and his success in achieving those intentions much like a designer, engineer, or architect creates a product to fulfill the needs of a specific audience. Each product on the market, be it an appliance, a piece of software, a building, or music album, is designed to meet a specific audience’s needs, expectations, and proficiencies. Think about how an iPhone is created versus a similar Android phone or how Taylor Swift’s latest release compares to that of the rock band Haim’s. In this report, you will outline your findings after reading/viewing the ghost scene in Hamlet (Act I, Scene V). Think about the scene in terms of how it is influenced by events previous to it and the play itself (Hamlet’s father’s death, the remarriage, Claudius’s speech to Hamlet, Gertrude’s reaction, etc.) and what this scene sets up for later in the plot. Consider this through the lens of your specified audience (current readers, seventeenth-century readers, etc.). Then, answer the following questions in your report: What are the possible reader outcomes of this scene? (Belief in the ghost, disbelief, etc.) What do you think Shakespeare intended in delivering this scene as written? How debatable is this scene in terms of believability? How are the audience’s expectations, needs, proficiencies addressed in this scene? (You may comment on the scene’s setup beforehand, or reaction from other characters, etc.) Guidelines: 600–800 words Do not list the questions and then answer them but rather include your responses in report-like fashion as evidenced in the sample provided.

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CHAPTER 5 PWNING TOLKIEN’S TRILOGY: GAME STUDIES IN A MASSIVELY OPEN ONLINE COURSE (MOOC)

Don Rodrigues and Jay Clayton

As many readers of this volume probably know, “pwning” is gamers’ slang for owning an opponent, dominating completely in player-versus-player combat. In the summer of 2012, we attempted a most epic “pwn”—one that involved a pedagogical adventure through J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth that would connect us with over 85,000 students from 123 countries. As instructor (Jay Clayton) and lead teaching assistant, course design aide, and computer programmer (Don Rodrigues), we developed one of Vanderbilt University’s first Coursera Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs), titled Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative (https://www.coursera.org/learn/ interactive-media-gaming). Focusing in part on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy and its adaptations into three movies and then into a major online video game, the course—which is still running nearly a decade after its debut—uses video games alongside literature, film, and other media to highlight concepts such as remediation, narrative theory, and the long history of romance literature that informs so much of gaming culture. In this chapter, we share some of what we learned about teaching video games from our experience with a MOOC, concentrating on three of our primary course objectives: the value of remediation for examining narrative structure; the role that video games play in highlighting the persistence of romance conventions in our culture; and the value of familiarizing students with some basic principles of game studies. Along the way, we also impart practical strategies for using games and other media in a virtual environment, including online courses for remote instruction and online modules for in-person classrooms. After the hype about MOOCs transforming education had died down, several important lessons remained clear. First, we confirmed the obvious: that it is difficult to assess learning adequately in high-enrollment, online literature classes via computergraded tests. Since our MOOC was not credit-bearing, this problem did not worry us overmuch, but still we attempted to remedy this problem through peer-assessments of challenging creative projects. Second, completion rate was low—of the 85,000+ students who began the class, under 20  percent completed it. Again, this did not concern us because many students finished multiple modules before dropping out, presumably learning something along the way, and since the class was free and entirely voluntary, we were providing value at no cost to interested students. Third, we discovered that close to 80 percent of the students who enrolled had bachelor’s degrees or higher. In our naivete,

Teaching Games and Game Studies

we had agreed to teach a MOOC with the dream of bringing educational opportunities to underserved populations. Instead, we provided a form of continuing education to an already well-educated population, which in itself is not a bad result, just not what we had expected. The chapter begins with an overview of the course to provide a sense of our narrative arc, which spans four centuries of study, from early modern romance literature to modern-day Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs) such as Lord of the Rings Online. Next, we turn to the concept of remediation, which we valued as a tool to expose the affordances of three different media—literature, film, and online persistent worlds. Section three explores the link between romance narratives—a literary genre descended from medieval and early modern narrative poems that focuses on adventure, heroism, and the completion of a quest—and many fantasy role-playing games. The final section concerns how the pedagogical techniques we explored in our MOOC can assist teachers in designing large remote-learning classes or modules for in-person literature seminars.

An Overview of Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative was conceived to demonstrate that gaming culture is deeply rooted in the modern world and that these roots extend far back, into the early modern period and beyond. We found that this historical context, not always deployed when teaching video games, engaged our students and brought about an appropriate sense of rigor for a college-level course. The course was designed as a university-level English literature class—a multi-genre, multimedia tour of how literature, film, and games engage in the basic human activity of storytelling. It begins with a unit called “Game On! The History and Theory of MMOs,” which introduces students to the wide world of gaming, including a history of computer games, the growth of the gaming industry, the ubiquity of games in our culture, and the value of media studies for understanding games. We spend much of this first week on important concepts in video game theory, especially remediation, as discussed in Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s Remediation: Understanding New Media; we also examine the tension between rules and story by way of Jesper Juul’s Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. The second unit, “Lord of the Rings Online and Tolkien,” provides an overview of storytelling modes and discusses the critical role of the quest in games and literature. We start thinking specifically about romance narrative and lyric poetry in this unit, using Robert Browning’s nineteenth-century poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” as a paradigmatic example of the genre. In the third unit, “Romance and Realism,” we put concepts from preceding weeks into practice with a journey into Lord of the Rings Online’s Mines of Moria, allowing us to compare a scene in Tolkien’s novel, Peter Jackson’s film, and the game; doing so also allows us to delve into the intricacies of allegory, plot, theme, and character. Week four, “Space and Time in Three Media,” focuses on how the affordances of each medium—literature, film, and game—structured the “storyworld” of its narrative. We save the most difficult material 64

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in the course for week five, “Pwning Spenser’s Faerie Queene,” which takes a deep dive into a discussion of Edmund Spenser’s sprawling sixteenth-century romance. Here is where many of the course themes converge in a rigorous but engaging descent into a neo-medieval literary world of knights, castles, an evil seductress, and an indomitable heroine. Finally, the course concludes with “The Holy Grail: A Good End Game,” which takes a structural approach to narrative by analyzing the beginnings, middles, and ends of stories, using ideas selected from narrative theorists ranging from Aristotle to Roland Barthes to Frank Kermode. Students examine several endgame quests from Lord of the Rings Online and explore the meaning of endings through a close reading of Alfred Tennyson’s moving lyric poem, “Ulysses,” which treats the existential questions a person faces as life’s journey draws to an end. One innovation for the Coursera platform was our design of three different types of online modules: the traditional PowerPoint lecture in front of a green screen; filmed classroom sessions with six volunteer students; and playthrough videos with voiceover narration that focused on different ways of handling point of view, characterization, temporal structure, and spatial composition prominent in Tolkien’s text, Peter Jackson’s films, and Lord of the Rings Online. The lectures conveyed important terms and historical contexts for the readings. The classroom videos were largely unscripted and mimicked small discussion seminars; the six students varied in their familiarity with games from two neophytes to several veteran gamers. The in-game videos allowed the course designers to experiment with multimodal instruction as we spliced together textual passages, still imagery, film clips, and screen-capture gameplay with game sounds, dramatic music, and voiceover narration. To increase student involvement, we made extensive use of Coursera’s discussion boards, which we monitored daily, responding to over 6,000 threads during the initial six-week offering. In the second six-week session, these actions were facilitated by volunteer TAs who had done well in the class’s first iteration; these “Community TAs” came from countries all over the world, which was essential to meeting the needs of students and players from Europe, South America, Asia, and Africa. More often than not, students in the class had already responded with answers to questions and thoughtful comments before we ever saw the original posts. Simply letting the students know that the instructional staff was present and actively engaged carried enormous weight in personalizing the online experience. We also maintained a Facebook page and an intermittently active blog. In a few locations, students met in person to play alongside one another in “LAN” (local area network) parties. These events, which took place in cities from Nashville to São Paulo, added a layer of real-time engagement to the gaming and learning experience, while aiding us in fostering connections among students. Finally, we capitalized on a unique feature of online games by inviting students to log-in to the free-to-play version of Lord of the Rings Online and to complete quests with the professor and TAs. Student knowledge was assessed in three ways: ungraded quizzes embedded in all fifty-seven videos; computer-graded tests each week; and three peer-graded, multimodal design projects, required of students who elected to complete the Honors version of 65

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the course. The ungraded, in-video quizzes, all multiple choice, were designed mainly to emphasize points made in video lectures and discussions. These formative quizzes were not designed to challenge students but to keep them alert and engaged, and to reinforce learning objectives. The graded tests were designed to be more comprehensive, requiring students to synthesize information. Like the in-video quizzes, these tests were machine graded, although the tests had a time limit and questions were randomized to minimize (as best we could) cheating. The three multimodal projects required in the Honors version of the course were scaffolded to build on techniques learned earlier and offered ample room for creativity. The first assignment simply asked students to take a screenshot of their character standing in front of the Kinship house, ensuring that they had completed the game’s Introductory zone and joined the class group of players. The second assignment asked students to use a free video-capture program to document their completion of a quest to Retake Weathertop, a notable landmark in the first volume of Tolkien’s trilogy, while narrating their impression of the differences between reading the scene in Fellowship of the Ring, watching the scene in Jackson’s film, and fighting their way to the top in the game. The third assignment asked students to remediate one of the poems we had read by Spenser, Keats, Tennyson, or Browning, building their own video game using one of the free video-game design programs we recommended. Playthrough videos of dozens of these student-designed games remain on YouTube to this day—just search for “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came video game” or use similar search terms for The Faerie Queene, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” or “Ulysses.”1 Evaluation of complex projects like these at such massive scale was only possible through peer-to-peer engagement; three randomly chosen students in the Honors section assessed each submission by their fellow Honors students, offering commentary and a grade. Although an imperfect system, this approach motivated students to produce some extraordinary videos and games.

The Power of Remediation Perhaps the most important thing we learned in the process of teaching this course was that college-level students love making connections across media. In their discussion posts and numerous letters following the course, students revealed how much they relished the opportunity to analyze a story—in this case, The Lord of the Rings—across different media, noting the differences and similarities between their experiences. This cross-media study is essentially what the concept of remediation allows. As Bolter and Grusin describe it, remediation is “the way in which one medium is seen by our culture as reforming or improving upon another” (59); it is “the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms” (273). Given Tolkien’s pervasive popularity across multiple media, The Lord of the Rings trilogy offers a golden opportunity for exploring this critical concept in game studies. For example, take the encounter of Frodo, Strider, and the other hobbits with the Stone Trolls in the Fellowship of the Rings. Tolkien’s novel treats the episode, which takes 66

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place in broad daylight, as an opportunity for comedy at the hobbits’ expense. They are frightened of the immense figures until Strider reminds them that trolls are turned to stone by daylight and that these massive statues have not moved since Bilbo encountered them years before. By contrast, the film turns the scene into an eerie nightscape, the troll statues looming over the deathly ill body of Frodo, while the game uses the stone trolls to trigger a boss fight with a fiercely alive troll, one that can wipe out a group of six if they are not careful. Our class used these three treatments to explore the affordances of text, film, and gameplay for creating narrative space—what literary studies terms “setting,” film studies names “mise-en-scène,” and game studies might call the “virtual environment.” Tolkien’s fiction sketches a vivid autumn landscape, with dappled sunlight mocking the apprehensions of the hobbits; the film compresses several plot exigencies into the scene and introduces a new character, allowing the director to supplement the largely male list of characters with a dramatic role for the actress Liv Tyler (playing Arwen); the game allows players to move around the gamespace in any direction they choose and to manipulate the camera at will, even staring down from above to see the bird nest Tolkien mentions, nestled in the crook of a stone troll’s neck. Teaching media via remediation encourages students to think more intently about the objects they consume, with attention not only to content but to formal matters. A comparative media approach defamiliarizes concepts like setting and point of view that students have long taken for granted. Equally, it gives them terms for knowledge that they already possess from a lifetime of watching movies or playing video games. Contrasting the way literature can access a character’s thoughts via indirect discourse with cinema’s use of the zoom to signal interiority or shot/reverse camera angles to establish point of view can be powerful ways of exposing the “language of cinema” that most college students already speak fluently. Add to that video games’ reliance on cut scenes or exposition by NPCs (non-playing characters), and students’ insights into narrative technique increase in unexpected ways. Students in the course repeatedly indicated how pleased they were with their increased media fluency, skills that they developed by analyzing media objects not in isolation but in intimate comparison with other media. These skills enabled students to articulate what makes a scene, character, or concept within a work “tick,” and therefore gave them a firmer grasp of media ontologies as well.

Why Teach Literary Romance alongside Video Games? Leaning into literary history is an effective way to address that eternally recurring question, Why study video games? The backbone of this course—and also what makes it different from many other courses—is the joy it takes in guiding students through the curtains and cobwebs and deep into the terrain of literary romance: those enchanted forests and intimidating castles, those wizards, trolls, valiant knights, and imperiled princesses—elements that made romantic narratives fodder for so much of contemporary gaming in the first place. The conventions of romance provide an excellent opportunity to critique gender assumptions in the gaming world, while focusing attention on genre 67

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issues, such as the different forms that plot and characterization assume in realist novels versus chivalric romances. A window into literary romance is also a window into the psychologies of gaming archetypes, the wizards and mages and warlocks who will always find homes in the secret, magical, and arcane. Our course took full advantage of this aspect of literary romance to engage the imaginations of our students and to encourage them to press on when the educational quest became difficult—when, for example, they would encounter archaic forms of language in works like The Faerie Queene. With a sense of literary history connecting them to the games they already love, students came to better understand why they find games so fulfilling and compelling. In the process, they also came to value romance literature in itself, not as merely the ancient predecessor to contemporary media but as an aesthetic bridge that exists across several time periods. The examples of romance literature examined in the course cover several centuries, from the sixteenth through the twentieth. The most difficult, but probably also the most rewarding, work we studied was Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Since this epic poem is extremely long, we opted to focus on Book 3, which details the heroic exploits of the female knight, Britomart. This focus enabled the class to examine threads connecting this work to other course material, and prevented a satisfying number of students from giving up on the course altogether due to the text’s difficulty. Although its language is challenging—Spenser’s poem was intentionally archaic in style even when it was written in the 1590s, evoking a legendary time before the corruption of the modern world had settled in—The Faerie Queene proved to be largely successful in engaging students, including a significant number of students for whom English was not their first language. In addition to the romantic tropes and plots we were able to draw out of this text, it provided a surprising opportunity to consider social and political questions around gender, power, and sexuality; at more than one point, Britomart is mistaken for a man, a favorite recurring trope in video games (see Samus Aran of Nintendo’s Metroid franchise). Students reported excitement at being able to understand the text and to make meaningful connections to contemporary games and gaming culture, from popular roleplaying franchises such as Final Fantasy and World of Warcraft to the hack-and-slash exploits of God of War and Devil May Cry. In this way, students saw connections between the works we studied and games that do not fall directly or neatly into the category of “romance” or “role-playing game”; as we came to understand in the process of teaching this course, conventions in romance literature subtend more of gaming culture than we had at first imagined. Of course, teaching a work like The Faerie Queene requires knowledge on behalf of the instructor that may not make it the best all-around candidate for explorations of literary romance. Shorter and less difficult works, like John Keats’s nineteenth-century ballad, “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” distill the themes and tropes evident in The Faerie Queene, as do works like Constatine Cavafy’s “Ithaca” and Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” These shorter poems are united by the idea of the quest: a protagonist on a journey through dangerous, unknown, or haunting lands. A somewhat longer dramatic lyric, Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” brilliantly encapsulates these concerns while 68

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also providing a key critical connection to Tolkien: the “dark tower” of the poem more than superficially resembles motifs that readers see in the Peter Jackson films and likely imagine while reading Tolkien’s books. In addition to the looming and terrible Tower that constitutes the goal of both quests, Browning’s poem, Tolkien’s trilogy, and Jackson’s films share an entire repertoire images—from the marshes of the dead to the monstrous winged creature (called a Nazgul in both book and film).

Pwning Online Teaching In ways we could never have anticipated, our work in this course prepared us for teaching in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic. Pedagogical strategies we adopted following the first iteration of the course—especially, the idea of the flipped classroom, where students are given prerecorded lectures prior to discussing a given module—became widespread as teaching went virtual on an unprecedented scale. In our classrooms at our respective universities, the materials we had prepared for our MOOC took on, as it were, a second life. One of us, for example, used the video lectures on The Faerie Queene in an early modern literature course to prepare students for reading Book 3 of Spenser’s epic and to inspire them to make connections with other media; doing so also gave them a sense of virtual accompaniment as they began their daunting task of reading this work. The other instructor was teaching a remotelearning class for students who could not return to campus because of health or travel restrictions. He was able to mix asynchronous classes using videos from the MOOC with live discussion classes via Zoom. For students who were overseas in Australia, Asia, and Europe, the ability to watch asynchronous classes provided a break from having to attend Zoom classes in the middle of the night and may have been a boon to their mental health during a difficult period. We also discovered an eminently practical, perhaps even subversive, motivation behind using a flipped classroom. All teachers know that students nowadays turn immediately to the internet for quick-fix answers to problems, so instead of (tacitly) sending them off to the wild West of the internet, we directed them to our own pedagogically tested materials, which are easy to post on YouTube. Students will always be students, and so, when possible, we encourage the curation of online pedagogical venues that will direct them back to primary sources and expert guidance. Making use of prerecorded videos such as those developed in our MOOC could be one way to guide unsupervised learning. When searching for recorded material to fulfill this purpose, we recommend, for humanities classes, videos that feature a dynamic set of interactions, particularly those featuring live classroom discussion. We began this chapter by invoking the concept of “pwning,” which suggests a competitive or even domineering approach to teaching and learning. In persistent world games, though, competition can often be a means toward fostering community—a way for individuals to forge connections when other barriers, including those of language 69

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and geography, keep us apart. Through teaching this course, we saw, in abundance, the potential for games to bring people together and foster exciting learning opportunities. While it is certainly an exaggeration to say that we “pwned” online teaching, our experience taught us much about the value of game studies in the literature classroom.

Note 1. Here are a few examples of walkthrough videos of games created for the course: Browning’s “Childe Roland”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzQTGpXRwrU&list=LL&index=24; Spenser’s Faerie Queene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzQTGpXRwrU&list=LL&ind ex=24; Keats’s “La Belle Dame”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8slmsLT8eQ&list=LL& index=22; and Tennyson’s “Ulysses”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ohp5-AcT4E.

Works Cited Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT P, 1999.

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­C HAPTER 6 HOW/WHY WE READ/PLAY: CONCEPTUALIZING READER GOALS IN THE GAME OF LITERATURE

Mitchell Gunn

Advocates for the artistic and critical legitimation of video games have historically founded their cases on one of two dominant strategies: aligning video games with another, more eminently established medium such as literature or film; or portraying video games as in some way a radical departure from previous media (Parker 89– 98). Of the two, the alignment strategy seems more productive as a rationale for the inclusion of video games within the purview of literary studies—after all, if games are radically different from all other forms of media, then someone should certainly study them, but why literary scholars? Most arguments for alignment, however, have been almost entirely unidirectional, contending that video games are like literature (typically through a discussion of especially poignant, insightful, or broadly “literary” games) without recognizing that such similarity, like a mathematical equation, must work in both directions: if games are like literature, then literature must be like games. Indeed, a thorough analysis of the natures of both gameplay and reading reveals that literature has always been a game, even if not explicitly recognized as such. While contemporary video games are certainly more overt about their “gameness,” the difference is more one of degree than of kind. This fundamental recognition will help teachers and scholars in literary studies not only to incorporate video games into our classrooms, syllabi, and journals, but also to validate and analyze new forms of engagement for even our more traditional objects of study. It should be noted from the outset that the comparison of literature to a game is not unprecedented within the field of literary studies, although previous discussions on the subject have tended to be somewhat looser, more figurative, or pointedly limited to specific texts or genres. Stanley Fish, for example, repeatedly likens the practices of literary interpretation and criticism to a game, but does not explore the analogy in much detail (357–8; 366–7). Jacques Derrida famously calls for an infinite “play of signification,” but his use of the term play (or jeu in the original French) is itself rather playful, encompassing both the familiar play of toys or games as well as the potential unfixity or give of a structure or machine (280; see also Barthes 162). Elsewhere, literary critics such as Vicki Mistacco and Sebastian Knowles have deployed the concepts of games and puzzles to model the reader’s encounter with the literary text, but only in isolated cases (the nouveaux romans of Robbe-Grillet and Joyce’s Ulysses, respectively), while Michel Beaujour has described poetry in particular as a game played by the poet,

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if not the reader. Elizabeth Bruss goes much further in describing the fundamental “covert interaction” of literary encounters while noting that there are “certain individual works where one becomes acutely aware of the activity of reading, of the inferences and choices, predictions and retractions one must make, and of how much these contribute to the experience one ultimately derives. A give and take, a ‘game’ of literature, is bared in such works” (154; 153). Bruss observes that such “literary games are disconcerting to those who approach them looking for mimesis, emotive force, or formal beauty,” but in this way even Bruss’s insightful analysis leaves room for expansion: the reader’s pursuit of “mimesis, emotive force, or formal beauty” in literature is just as much of a game as the “Borgesian fragments, Robbe-Grillet’s ‘pointless’ expositions, the slippery metamorphoses of Nabokov, and the autodestructive paradoxes of Queneau” that Bruss cites as exemplars (155–6). To illustrate this conundrum, we must establish more precisely what it means to call something a game. The works of Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois on the subjects of play and games are both informative in this regard, but most useful is the definition proposed by philosopher Bernard Suits: “to play a game is to engage in activity directed towards bringing about a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by rules … and where such rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity” (36). Put another way, a game is a goal-directed activity in which the participants agree to largely arbitrary restrictions on the methods they can use to attain the goal for the simple reason that acting within these restrictions affords an enjoyable, fulfilling experience independent of the outcome. Suits’s prototypical example is a footrace around an oval track: the goal is to be the first to reach the finish line, but the participants further agree that they will follow the course rather than cutting across the middle of the oval because this agreement keeps the race fair and competitive (38). By contrast, in the kind of activity we might broadly label work, a person prioritizes the goal above all else and will generally try to optimize the achievement thereof to be as efficient as possible, only accepting restrictions on the methods they can use if these restrictions are imposed for, say, financial, legal, or moral reasons (28–9). Accordingly, if someone merely wants to get from one side of an oval track to the other, they will almost certainly cut across the middle if it is possible to do so (156–7). The parallels to reading and literature may not be immediately clear, but a hypothetical case study can be used to demonstrate just how game-like literary reading is. Consider the act of reading a novel: what basic, concrete goal is the reader pursuing? One possible response is that the reader’s goal is to reach the end of the book, in which case they could, at any point, flip to the last page and pronounce the goal accomplished. Alternatively, if the reader’s goal is to understand the novel’s story, they could abandon the text entirely and seek out a plot summary instead. Each of these would represent a more optimally efficient strategy for achieving their respective goals—and thus for reading a novel if it were treated as work—yet neither would actually provide the kind of experience that most readers desire from a novel. Readers do strive to accomplish the twin goals of reaching the end of a novel and knowing its plot (among other goals to be discussed below), but they do so through specifically restricted methods, using only the “means 72

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permitted by the rules” of reading: one must read every word and page of the book, in order, and typically without recourse to external sources. These methodological restrictions are entirely voluntary (it is not, for example, illegal to skip to the end of a book) and are accepted simply because they allow for a uniquely fulfilling and enjoyable experience—that is, because they constitute the game of reading, in which the reader’s participation is valued for its own sake and not merely as a means to an end. We can also, by way of contrast, acknowledge forms of reading that are not games because they lend themselves to precisely the kind of unrestricted optimization of efficiency more properly characterized as work. This is the type of reading that theorist Louise Rosenblatt refers to as “efferent,” derived from the Latin effere, “to carry away,” since the reader’s “primary concern” is what they “will carry away from the reading” in the form of “concepts to be retained, ideas to be tested, actions to be performed after the reading” (24). Rosenblatt locates this form of reading in a reader’s encounter with such items as “a history book, a cooking recipe, a newspaper article, an algebraic equation or a chemical formula,” but in all cases, the actual experience of reading is only a means to an end to be completed as efficiently as possible (24). This, after all, is why newspaper articles feature informative headlines and scholarly articles require abstracts: to give the efferent reader quick access to the most crucial pieces of information so that they need only read the full text if they desire more detail. Rosenblatt’s aesthetic reader, on the other hand, “pays attention to the associations, feelings, attitudes, and ideas” that arise during their experience with the text and that would be altered or entirely lost in a summary or paraphrase (25; 86). Even if the overt activities of these two reading practices are identical—namely the cognitive processing and interpretation of textual information— the distinction lies in their goals and correspondingly structured methods, as with Suits’s participant in a footrace compared to someone simply walking from point A to point B. Note, too, that the game-like nature of literature cuts both ways, implicating the author as well as the reader, and indeed, my earliest explorations of this framework came while leading an undergraduate creative writing workshop. At the start of the semester, after asking some students to describe the effect they hoped to convey to readers through a particular piece, I asked the group why anyone would choose not to simply write out their intended theme, message, feeling, and other literary features as plainly and clearly as possible—in effect, to use Rosenblatt’s terminology, why they would choose to write an aesthetic text rather than an efferent one. The answers varied, but two major threads emerged. First, students noted that an author might pointedly attempt to communicate a resonant message to their readers without explicitly saying it, or to communicate a non-linguistic (e.g., physiological, emotional) idea through language. In this case, the author is playing their own game—as Michel Beaujour observes, both “with, and also against the rules of [their] language”—somewhat akin to the performer in charades who must convey a word or phrase solely through their actions and gestures (60–61, italics original). Second, the students suggested, the author may wish to provide the reader with an experience in which not only the message itself is valuable, but also the process of discovering or assembling the message over the course of the text. This, again, is precisely the valuation that separates gameplay from work, in which case the author takes on the 73

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role of a game designer, crafting a fulfilling experience for the reader to traverse as they come to understand the plot, theme, or effect of the text. But of course, the goals and methods of “aesthetic” or literary reading, especially in an academic context, can expand far beyond the aforementioned basics of reading the entirety of a novel’s text so as to understand its plot. Readers import any number of higher-order goals that inform the techniques and attitudes they demonstrate in their encounter with a given text (and even, for that matter, the selection of which texts they will read) such that the text affords an experience that they find to be rewarding. In this way, the basic game of literature explodes into a vast plurality of literary games, a constantly shifting landscape of goals and corresponding methods for reading that a given reader may or may not individually endorse and apply when reading a given text. In fact, this formulation is more or less synonymous with the entire literary-critical enterprise, with the various competing schools and traditions arguing over what sort of games we should play in/as literature. Thus, to use a prominent example from the history of literary criticism, W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley’s essays decrying the intentional and affective fallacies, in which the significance of a literary text is located in “its origins in the mind of its maker” or “its results in the mind of its audience,” respectively, are effectively making claims about what the higher-order goals and permitted means for reading and literary analysis ought to be (xi). More recently, the debates between respective proponents of what Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus call “surface reading” on one side and “symptomatic reading” on the other provide a clear case study for the different games that readers can play even with the same literary object (1). Yet even these apparently disparate examples describe only a narrow range of the possible motivations and purposes that a given reader might bring to a text, a comparative paucity illustrated by the breadth of goals affirmed and analyzed by theorists in the field of game studies. Richard Bartle, for instance, has described a “taxonomy” of four major player types that he observed in online multiplayer games in 1996: achievers strive “to master the game, and make it do what [they] want it to do”; explorers seek “the sense of wonder which the virtual world imbues”; socializers, as the name suggests, focus on social interaction with other players; and killers “wish only to demonstrate their superiority over fellow humans,” often through competitive player-vs.-player game modes. While the priorities and activities of these player types may seem incommensurable with the interpretative processes of a reader engrossed in a literary text (no matter what critical or theoretical orientation they adopt), Bartle’s taxonomy is actually more indicative than most contemporary theories of literature of the true variety of goals that a reader might endorse in encountering a text. The crux of the matter lies in an overly restrictive conceptualization of meaning. Literary theorists have tended to limit the notion of meaning purely to the semantic realm, specifically “those elements [of a text] to which a relatively fixed connotative or denotative meaning can be ascribed” (Bernstein 12). In his contrasting viewpoint, poet and critic Charles Bernstein argues that this conceptualization, especially the resultant designation of certain non-semantic elements as “meaningless,” “is symptomatic of a desire to evade responsibility for meaning’s total, and totalizing, reach; as if meaning was a husk that could be shucked off or a burden that could be bucked. Meaning is not a use value as opposed to some 74

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other kind of value, but more like valuation itself ” (12–13, italics original). For Bernstein, meaning is thus reframed to correspond to any form of significance a reader might locate in a text or other artistic work—that is, anything that might provide a valuable or fulfilling justification for engaging with that work in the first place—of which the more typically endorsed hermeneutic or interpretative meaning is in fact only a single species. If it is true that traditional literary objects often lend themselves more readily to this singular form of meaning by virtue of the linguistic processes of interpretation, it should nonetheless be clear that this need not exhaust the potential significance of the literary encounter. Hence, for example, a reader who proceeds through a long and difficult novel—say, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time—may variously report that the most meaningful aspects of their experience therewith were coming to understand the plot and characters; thinking about the themes and motifs; or simply overcoming the challenge posed by such a monumental text (among any number of other possibilities). To discard the latter phenomenon as categorically irrelevant or below scholarly consideration simply because it may not correspond to a clear semantic articulation or a claim as to what the novel is “about” would implicitly posit a shorter text with the same “aboutness” as more or less interchangeable with the original, demonstrably flattening the aesthetic experience of reading—shifting it, that is, from self-fulfilling gameplay to instrumental work. This is especially true in cases where the length and difficulty of the text may be part of the reason that a reader sought out that particular novel instead of another, in which case the reader’s desire to overcome a challenge has structured their reading practice from the outset. Even at a more granular level, the desire to grapple with a challenging text may (consciously or unconsciously) affect the ways a reader interacts with the text, such as influencing whether they look up definitions for unfamiliar words or explore intertextual allusions, and in this way, difficulty can clearly form a meaningful and tangible aspect of a reader’s experience with a text. Contemporary video games have perhaps made this case more clearly for their medium through games that explicitly aestheticize difficulty— FromSoftware’s Dark Souls series and Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy are notable examples—but the principle is readily generalizable to traditional print literature. Beyond the specific example of difficulty, in exploring the plurality of games afforded by literature, we should broadly affirm any higher-order goals that a reader could plausibly deem to be meaningful-qua-valuable and that could accordingly structure and direct their encounter with a text, while refraining from any a priori restrictions or judgments of which goals or forms of meaning will be considered as sufficiently “literary” to merit serious discussion. In terms of specific labels and principles of organization, I propose that such reading goals comprise the following four major types, each of which includes several subtypes (which are themselves capacious and admit of multiple formulations): ●●

Performance goals: the reader aims to exercise or demonstrate their own abilities or faculties in some way through their encounter with the text. Subtypes include mastery, the aim to attain total expertise or proficiency, as by reading an author’s entire body of work; and sufficiency, the aim to overcome some obstacle or test, as by completing a notoriously difficult text.

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●●

●●

Experiential goals: the reader aims to attune themselves to a perceived effect or aspect of the text, as if to “let it happen to them.” Subtypes include comprehension, what is often referred to as “reading for the plot,” as commonly (if somewhat reductively) associated with genre fiction; and resonance, the aim to feel a poignant, powerful (and usually affective) response, as in reading strongly imagistic poetry. Analytical goals: the reader aims to scrutinize the text, in part or in its entirety, often through a particular “lens” or framework. Subtypes include interpretation, the aim to “uncover” a text’s themes or what it is “really saying”; and dissection, the aim to describe techniques, devices, or aspects of craft demonstrated in the text. This has historically been the dominant goal of literary studies. Social goals: the reader aims to situate themselves relative to other individuals, groups, etc. through their encounter with the text. Subtypes include identification, the aim to feel a sense of similarity to or difference from others, as by reading texts/authors from a particular historical era or societal group; and communion, the aim to share the text or one’s experience thereof with others, as through book clubs, informal conversation, or academic discussion.

Note that many of the overarching purposes for which we engage with literature, particularly in academic contexts, can be productively described as specific constellations of the component goals described above. For example, a professor planning to write and publish an authoritative article about a text could be described as reading it with a mastery–interpretation–communion goal in mind. Furthermore, a given reader can espouse multiple goals both simultaneously and sequentially over the course of their encounter with a given text, as with a student who starts reading a novel to analyze it for their coursework (sufficiency–interpretation) but becomes genuinely swept up in the events and emotions of the plot (comprehension–resonance). As this last example shows, the influence of goals on reader methods can also flow in the opposite direction: a reader who tries a new reading practice (e.g., attending to sound qualities such as rhyme and assonance in a poem, in addition to processing the semantic references of the words) might thereby become aware of and subsequently adopt a previously unconsidered goal or form of meaning. Nonetheless, it should be clear that literature affords a far wider range of reading goals and practices than have typically been considered within the purview of literary studies and especially literary criticism. Acknowledging this rich plurality of literary games will allow for more nuanced, multifaceted analysis of texts and readers’ encounters therewith. In particular, significant attention should be paid to the ways that texts (or specific moments, passages, scenes, etc.) enable or thwart particular goals and reading practices. This, in fact, may be a nontrivial factor in readers’ differential assessments of the quality and impact of a given text, as individual readers find their particularly prioritized goals, forms of meaning, and reading practices to be differentially accomplishable in their encounter with that text. More broadly, and specifically for the purposes of literature classrooms, we can continue to teach students the more traditionally vindicated literary games—the aforementioned 76

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analytical goals, practices of close reading, the tenets of various critical schools, and so on—but can also expand our pedagogical practices to cultivate students’ awareness of and proficiency with other reading goals that have historically been given less attention in the academy. Indeed, some literary critics and scholars have recently begun to argue for a similarly broadened range of practices in literary studies, even if not using an explicitly goalor game-based framework, as can be seen in Rita Felski’s description of her revamped, pluralistic literary theory class. While the first section of Felski’s course “still resembles the standard survey course, introducing undergraduates to structuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, deconstruction, feminism, postcolonial studies, and so on,” the second section pivots to discussions of “topics usually given short shrift in such surveys: empathy and sympathy, recognition and identification, enchantment and absorption, shock and the sublime, the pleasures of fandom and connoisseurship as they shape how and why people read” (180). Felski contends that, by directly exploring these “complex phenomena,” students and scholars alike will be empowered “[t]o forge a language of attachment as robust and refined as our rhetoric of detachment” and to “grapple with tough questions” about “[h]ow … works of art move us, and why” (180–81). After all, these dimensions of reading are not only characteristic of our “everyday” encounters with literature but also have a “continuing, if often subterranean, presence in academic criticism,” implicitly influencing the selection of texts for course syllabi, inclusion in anthologies, and even individual research (180). Bringing these processes into the open, then, rather than treating them as “ideological symptoms to be seen through,” can strengthen and diversify our critical toolkits, providing “an ampler and more diverse range of theoretical vocabularies” that we can bring to bear on a text (180, 181). One crucial direction, however, in which the above-described “gamified” framework for literary studies goes further than that proposed by Felski is its generalizability across media—most obviously to video games. The range of performance, experiential, analytical, and social goals defined here can be equally brought to bear on a reader or player’s encounter with a text, game, or other aesthetic object and will accordingly affect that reader or player’s activity and behavior. The distinctions between the various forms that behavior might take—turning a page, parsing a metaphor, choosing a path in a branching narrative, navigating a character through a virtual world—seem far less significant than the fundamental commonality that each can afford a meaningful, fulfilling experience for the individual engaging therein. Today’s cultural citizens are, after all, both reading books and playing video games, and literature classrooms have the unique potential to equip them for a thoughtful engagement with these and other aesthetic forms, so long as we continue to develop and diversify our tools to reflect the variety of aesthetic objects and approaches available to readers. In this way, the putative question of whether we should teach games in literature classrooms is revealed as long since asked and answered—our texts have always already been games, albeit of a unique sort—leaving in its place the true question of whether we should keep teaching such a narrow subset thereof. A fuller engagement with the breadth of aesthetic or literary reading would entail not only the affirmation and analysis 77

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of a more pluralistic range of reader goals and practices, but also the incorporation and consideration of other aesthetic forms, including video games—which, as demonstrated, display a great deal more continuity with the games of literature than might often be presumed. Literary studies, I believe, is fundamentally based on the study of meaning, but as Charles Bernstein argued, we must be careful to recognize the ubiquity and diversity of meaning, in both the forms it can take and the media in which we can locate it.

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. Translated by Stephen Heath, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1978. Bartle, Richard. “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs.” Richard Bartle— MUD, www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm. Accessed May 10, 2021. Beaujour, Michel. “The Game of Poetics.” Yale French Studies, no. 41, 1968, pp. 58–67. Bernstein, Charles. “Artifice of Absorption.” A Poetics. Harvard UP, 1992, pp. 9–89. Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations, vol. 108, no. 1, 2009, pp. 1–21. Bruss, Elizabeth W. “The Game of Literature and Some Literary Games.” New Literary History, vol. 9, no. 1, 1977, pp. 153–72. Caillois, Roger. Man, Play, and Games. Translated by Meyer Barash, Thames and Hudson, 1962. Dark Souls. 2011. Developed by FromSoftware, Remastered PS4 version, 2018. Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Writing and Difference. 1967. Translated by Alan Bass, U of Chicago P, 1978, pp. 278–93. Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. U of Chicago P, 2015. Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class?. Harvard UP, 1980. Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. Developed by Bennett Foddy, Steam version, 2017. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. 1949. Angelico Press, 2016. Hutchinson, Peter. Games Authors Play. Methuen, 1983. Knowles, Sebastian D.G. The Dublin Helix: The Life of Language in Joyce’s Ulysses. UP of Florida, 2001. Mistacco, Vicki. “The Theory and Practice of Reading Nouveaux Romans: Robbe-Grillet’s Topologie d’une cité fantome.” The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Participation. 1980, edited by Susan Rubin Suleiman and Inge Crosman, Princeton UP, 2014, pp. 371–400. Parker, Felan. “Roger Ebert and the Games-as-Art Debate.” Cinema Journal, vol. 57, no. 3, 2018, pp. 77–100. Rosenblatt, Louise M. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. 1978. Southern Illinois UP, 1994. Suits, Bernard. The Grasshopper. 3rd edition, Broadview, 2014. Wimsatt, William K. The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. UP of Kentucky, 1954.

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­PART II VIDEO GAMES AND INTERACTIVE MEDIA IN THE LITERATURE CLASSROOM

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­C HAPTER 7 READY PLAYER ACTION: TEACHING CLOSE READING AND CRITICAL PLAY IN A LUDIC CENTURY

Craig Carey

Teaching video games in the literature classroom unsettles traditional ideas about close reading. Games are not simply texts, players are not simply readers, and game criticism is not simply an updated form of literary criticism. Let this be word one for any pedagogy designed with, around, and about video games and literature. While close reading is often described as “the quintessential humanist methodology, born in the study of literature, and adapted to other media forms,” it is also a historical practice whose survival depends on adaptation, evolution, and development (Bizzocchi and Tanenbaum 289). Nobody knows the future of close reading in a world where literature becomes increasingly playful, games increasingly literary, and the distinction between games and literature increasingly difficult to parse. Nor do students really care. Having grown up in “a ludic century” in which “information has taken a playful turn,” they already see culture as digital, modular, interactive, playful, and participatory (Zimmerman). Their lives beat to the serial rhythms of units, systems, and configurations, not words, texts, and interpretations. They arrive in the classroom as players ready for action, players ready to level up their cultural training into metagaming practice, and players ready to capitalize on Ian Bogost’s insight that “any medium—poetic, literary, cinematic, computational— can be read as a configurative system, an arrangement of discrete, interlocking units of expressive meaning” (Unit ix). In my experience, teaching games in the literature classroom does not require that we redefine our object of study, or that we approach games exclusively from the perspective of textuality (Fernández-Vara), literacy (Gee 2007), rhetorical criticism (Bogost 2010), literary discourse analysis (Ensslin 2012, 2014; Gee 2014), textual criticism (Jones), paratextuality (Consalvo), or other methods aligned with literary studies. It simply requires that we reorient our perspective around the actions produced by literary and critical play, reclaiming the player, or the player-student in this case, “as an active configurator of the meaning of the game” (Sicart). Textual approaches to games have their place in literary study, but they risk eliding the critical role of play, players, and playercentric actions in remixing games and literature. They also prevent literary pedagogy from evolving with contemporary practices in digital humanities and new media studies, wherein, as Rita Raley writes, “speculative play (building, tinkering, experimenting) [is] coupled with critical reflection and critique” (36). As action-based practices, games offer a unique opportunity to invite literature students to play and critique, to read and make,

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to speculate and reflect, changing their orientation toward the verbs and mechanics of their own reading and play practices. Teaching games is thus a path to changing how students relate to their metagaming practice—the polyvalent actions they perform with, about, and around games and literature. It is an action-oriented pedagogy that animates literary skills into ludic verbs and mechanics. What can the literature student do with, to, and around games? How can games change their critical orientation and practice? In my classes, I have probed these questions by using games as a tool to defamiliarize literary methods, to reconfigure close reading, to translate concepts into actions, to create new feedback loops between information and interpretation, and to inspire actions that extend, modify, and transform literary criticism into its own metagaming practice.1 Because I am trained in literary and media studies, my teaching mobilizes these critical turns as both theory and practice, drawing inspiration from Alexander Galloway’s account of video games as “an action-based medium” (3), Bogost’s comparative and carpentry approach to video-game criticism as a form of bricolage (2006, 2011), and Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux’s reframing of video games as metagaming practices performed with, about, between, and around games. These scholars distinguish video games by their relationship to action and practice, illustrating how critical play involves not just “the interpretation of linguistic signs,” as Galloway writes, but “the interpretation of polyvalent doing” (105). They remind us how video games challenge students to “interpret material action instead of keeping to the relatively safe haven of textual analysis” (105), extending criticism to include actions within games, but also metagaming actions performed with, about, and around games, where players actively transform games into “equipment for making metagames” (Boluk and LeMieux 9). As Boluk and LeMieux write, “We make our own metagames, but we do not know we make them”—too often “the logic of the marketplace obfuscates this form of critical practice” (6, 5). As such, my goal when teaching games in a literary context is to make students more conscious and self-reflexive about the metagaming practices they perform when they read, write, explore, interpret, break, analyze, hack, modify, and configure different “interlocking units of expressive meaning” (Bogost, Unit ix). Rather than redefine an object of study, or pretend that literature and games play by the same rules, I find it more liberating to simply teach students how to self-reflexively change their orientation toward games and literature as platforms for reading, writing, thinking, dreaming, and making—the foundational pillars of close reading and critical play. Teaching games and game studies transforms their literary skills into actionable mechanics, the “building block[s] for metagaming practices” and the tools needed to produce critical living, critical making, critical thinking, and critical play (Boluk and LeMieux 32).2

Teaching Concepts and Actions Concepts, like games, are actions with mechanics and operations. This is the first lesson that I teach students. Just as Deleuze and Guattari conceived of philosophy as “the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts” (2), game scholars often conceive  of 82

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games as a way to produce and play with concepts. A useful reading to illustrate this point is Bogost’s “Comparative Video Game Criticism,” in which he reflects on his hybrid training in comparative literature and software development and theorizes bricolage as a metaphor for the “process of borrowing concepts and putting them to use” (42). This operation “of selection and configuration” is essential to literary and game criticism, I tell students, and the figure of the bricoleur provides a useful image to imagine themselves as skilled players, critics, or carpenters who assemble “units of preexisting meaning to form new structures of meaning” (45, 42). Concepts are the tools that help students assemble, combine, remix, reconfigure, break down, manipulate, and reverse engineer games. They are actionable verbs and mechanics, tools to be sharpened and played in class, and the building blocks to make metagames out of units. In all of my courses, I require students to maintain a running list of concepts, in addition to a play or reading journal, in which they log key terms and begin to recognize their affinity with game mechanics. As Patrick Jagoda explains, “Concepts can operate as constructivist mechanics—in the specialist sense of ‘game mechanics,’ the verbs or actions that a player enacts and experiments with in order to participate in and alter the state of play” (131). Just as games can generate and act like concepts, concepts can generate and act like games—an insight that levels up student awareness of the different mechanics used to interact with and modify states of play. In literature classes, games thus offer an excellent method for simulating and modeling concepts in action, allowing students to see how mechanics enact different concepts, and vice versa. In one early writing assignment, I ask students to analyze how the mechanics of a game “play out” a single concept, which involves close reading the game as an action that performs an idea either as a procedural argument (Bogost 2010) or as an extended metaphor (Rusch). After providing students with a selection of games and concepts, I ask them to write a short paper in which they close read how the game executes an idea into action, translating theory into practice. Students have analyzed the mechanics of scale in Katamari Damacy (2004), the mechanics of terrorism in September 12th: A Toy World (2003), the mechanics of time in Braid (2008), the mechanics of cooperation in Thomas Was Alone (2012), the mechanics of gender identity in Dys4ia (2012), the mechanics of perspective in The Witness (2016), and the mechanics of grief in That Dragon, Cancer (2016), among others. The goal of the assignment is to explore how mechanics can trigger thought by activating player participation in the exploration of a concept. While mechanics are actions that make gameplay possible, concepts are actions that transform gameplay into metagaming practice. By mobilizing thought into action, concepts thus provide students with equipment to translate thought into a critical practice performed “on, around, through, before, during, and after video games” and literature (Boluk and LeMieux 4). In this way, they become the mechanics that allow students to level up, shift scales, jump distances, reorient directions, and “alter the state of play” (Jagoda 131). In terms of method and course design, I typically introduce concepts strategically and pair them to relevant games and texts. More generally, however, I provide students with an action-based model for how to play, read, and think about games on their own. Here I draw on Espen Aarseth’s typology of user functions, remixing them as a tool for close 83

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reading games. Lest we forget, the goal of Aarseth’s seminal book Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature was to “expand the scope of literary studies to include phenomena that today are perceived as outside of, or marginalized by, the field of literature” (18). He did this by drawing on the concept of “cybertext” to activate a “perspective on all forms of textuality” (18), which allowed him to analyze different actions, or “user functions” (64), unique to games and ergodic texts. While games contain an “interpretative function” like literature, they also contain what Aarseth calls “explorative,” “configurative,” and “textonic” functions, which unlike interpretation involve some kind of non-trivial work, or material action, that generates information to be read by a game system (64). While historically used to distinguish games from literature—Markku Eskelinen famously wrote that “the dominant user function in literature, theater, and film is interpretative, but in games it is the configurative” (2001)—Aarseth’s functions can also be used as a conceptual map to orient student thinking about the actions involved when playing and reading games. Located at the intersection of users and machines, readers and texts, players and games, they are a useful set of terms that can “operate as constructivist mechanics” for students. To simplify matters, I remix them as four metagaming actions— explore, configure, interpret, modify—that students can use to analyze different actions in games, to reflect on the difference between literary and ludic actions, to reorient their relationship to reading and play, and to critically navigate the different actions used “to participate in and alter the state of play” (Jagoda 131). While this model improves close reading and critical play, the ultimate goal is to inspire students to cultivate action verbs that break and hack traditional modes of thinking, veering close reading and critical play along new trajectories.3 To illustrate what this looks like, I assign selections from Bo Ruberg’s Video Games Have Always Been Queer, in which she draws on D.A. Miller’s notion of “too-close reading” as a tool for embracing queer affects and unsettling conventional mechanics: “[too-close reading] embraces the notion of over-reading by pressing up against a game, by becoming intimate with a game in ways that undermine standard notions of gameplay itself and make space for alternative desires” (65). One way to get “queerly intimate with a game” is to track its verbs closely—so closely that the act of close reading becomes a subversive form of critical play (68). Students can practice this intimacy on different scales: climbing inside a game to play it differently and queerly; or traversing across different games to search for alternative verbs and experiences. In a recent tweet, for example, game designer Paolo Pedericini shared an exercise that he uses with students called “The Underrated Verbs Battle Royale,” in which he provides a shared document “with the 700 most common verbs in English” and asks students to “list games that revolve around each of them.” This activity prepares students “to identify the less common verbs and start to imagine experimental gameplays,” while also providing the instructor with a glimpse into their “students’ game literacy” (@molleindustria). In a literature course, a similar battle royale could be played with authors, texts, and characters, in which students play with, against, and around different verbs. In an American literature course, for example, I once asked students to imagine a game out of an Emily Dickinson poem, pitching a playable experience modeled after a poem’s mechanics. Whatever the activity, I turn 84

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close reading and critical play into metagaming practices in which students explore intimately, configure differently, interpret closely, and modify freely. Verbs become the vertices of their thought and action—the points at which different lines of thought meet, turn, and veer in new directions.

Teaching Information Games For literature students, one way to kickstart this process and investigate the interplay between literary and ludic actions is with a unit on “information games.” Developer Tom Francis coined the term “information game” to describe games that share a particular approach to player knowledge “where the goal is to acquire information” through a recursive process of exploring a complex system and gathering information about it. Drawing on Francis’s term, Michael Cook describes information games as a type of mystery game in which “the player is tasked with understanding a complex artefact—a past sequence of events, a language, a physical system—by gaining knowledge about it, drawing inferences from this knowledge, and using this to seek out new knowledge.” Recent examples include Her Story (2015), Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (2015), Tacoma (2017), Return of the Obra Dinn (2018), Heaven’s Vault (2019), and Outer Wilds (2019), all of which are designed around open exploration, hermeneutic feedback loops, and nonlinear and environmental storytelling.4 In my teaching, I have turned to these games and other nonlinear works for a variety of purposes, finding in their openness an excellent model for demonstrating how games transform interpretation into an exploratory and configurative practice. In a course on games and literary criticism, I turned to information games as a way to unsettle the formalist difference between games and literature and their dominant user functions: configuration and interpretation, respectively. Early formalist scholars in game studies argued that configuration—the action of manipulating units—was the dominant function in games and what formally distinguished them from non-ludic art such as literature, painting, and film, in which interpretation takes precedence. As Eskelinen wrote, “in art we might have to configure in order to be able to interpret, whereas in games we have to interpret in order to be able to configure” (“Gaming” 38). Given their literary and ludic hybridity, information games are useful in complicating this divide and demonstrating how “configuration and interpretation are necessarily intertwined and work together,” as Eskelinen more recently notes (Cybertext 278). This is an important lesson as literature becomes more ludic, games become more literary, and the interplay between games and literature increases. With information games, for example, do players configure in order to interpret or interpret in order to configure? I often ask this question rhetorically, but it always leads to provocative discussion in class. Indeed, I even once staged a mock debate around the question by inviting students to find evidence in Her Story to argue their case for what dominates in the game: configuration or interpretation? While it may seem like a silly exercise, it rehearses an important historical argument in game studies and teach students how many contemporary games, especially 85

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narrative games, combine literary and ludic mechanics into playful and recursive loops of exploration, configuration, and interpretation. Information games are also good tools for teaching students how to analyze three modes of cultural expression: narrative, database, and interface. In these games, players explore a complex system or artifact mediated by story elements, a designed interface, and an underlying archive. In this respect, games like Return of the Obra Dinn and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture pair well with Lev Manovich’s description of narrative and database as “natural enemies” (228), as well as N. Katherine Hayles’s rejoinder that they are better understood as “natural symbionts” (1603). After trying their hand at Return of the Obra Dinn, for example, many students express frustration at the database structure of the narrative, which prevents them from enjoying the story; with Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, on the other hand, students are often so engrossed by the human stories that they need to be reminded they are actually navigating a complex database, in which spatial location and procedural generation trigger different story elements. In both cases, the games help students to critically navigate the oscillation between database and narrative as two modes of cultural expression foundational to narrative game design. Information games also showcase the diversity of fictional interfaces and teach students how data and narrative unfold across different media and aesthetics. In Her Story, for example, students interact with the algorithms of a search engine on a 1990s PC desktop; in Outer Wilds, they tinker with DIY technology and strange physics to explore a solar system in twenty-two-minute intervals; in Return of the Obra Dinn, they audit a merchant ship using maps, ship logs, a book, and a supernatural pocket watch; and in Heaven’s Vault, they dig around as an archeologist learning to decipher symbols in an ancient hieroglyphic language. These games feature media and technologies that shape the player’s access to information, requiring students to configure interfaces to interpret information. They are ludic archives disguised as simulated environments, and thus well designed to teach students about the critical role of archives and interfaces in the production of literature, games, play, and narrative design. As Jerome McGann writes of archives, “The free play offered to the user of such environments is at least as much a function of interface design as it is of its data structure” (1588), an insight that offers another important lesson in a century in which “information has taken a playful turn” and the free play of culture is now a direct product of how stories, interfaces, and databases are designed (Zimmerman). Indeed, it is the transformation of this free play into critical play that will ultimately prepare students to analyze how games and literature combine different cultural forms and thus require a new set of literary mechanics to explore, configure, interpret, and modify them.

­Teaching Her Story One of the more frequently taught information games in the literature classroom is Sam Barlow’s Her Story, a game about a woman talking to the police. It combines elements of mystery, true crime, police procedural, and confessional monologue in a game in which 86

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the player is tasked with gathering knowledge about a woman by searching through a police database and watching video clips of her interviews. Its primary search mechanic is based on the fact that her statements to the police have been recorded, time-stamped, and transcribed as short video clips stored in the “L.O.G.I.C. Database.” Search results return only five clips per query, and thus the player must repeatedly search, watch, tag, configure, and interpret the woman’s statements in nonlinear fashion, “using her words as a means to explore her words,” as Barlow explains (Smith). When I teach the game in a literature course, my first goal is to make students aware that they are playing and reading not just a game but a narrative, an interface, a database, a story, a simulation, a nonlinear film, and a literary text. Given this hybridity, Her Story makes an excellent game for transforming close reading and critical play into metagaming applications— applications that take place in, with, around, and between different media formats. For starters, the game reconfigures the act of reading, watching, listening, and searching—fundamentals of close reading—into a metagame in which students perform different actions with and around the woman’s words. One effective way to teach the game is thus to organize activities around the different roles and actions performed by players. As they play, I ask students to log and track different actions in the game, organizing them in relation to Aarseth’s four functions. The purpose is to hold them accountable for tracking game mechanics and player mechanics before our discussion, preparing them to arrive in class ready for action—not just to talk about the game, but to reverse engineer how it works and ultimately transform it into equipment for making their own metagames (Boluk and LeMieux 9). But first we discuss how the game invites the player into different roles and actions: a detective searching for clues to solve a mystery; a reader interpreting words, images, and gestures for expressive meaning; a psychoanalyst analyzing signifiers as symptoms of psychosis or trauma; and a media archaeologist tinkering with old media to gain access to information. Since its primary mechanic involves searching the woman’s words, most of our discussion focuses on the game’s combination of literary and ludic mechanics, and how they reconfigure close reading as critical play. By remixing the play of language through the algorithmic logic of the database, the game creates an experience in which the player-detective transforms into a close reader analyzing the woman’s testimony for clues, symptoms, references, connections, allusions, and other meaningful information. Critical play becomes close reading, and vice versa, giving rise to a metagame in which the player analyzes language, image, gesture, database, media, and performance. Once this interplay has been analyzed and discussed, we turn to the more literary function of interpretation. Of the four user functions, interpretation requires far more nuance in a literature class. For Aarseth, it is mostly a foil to gamic actions and thus made to “stand in for all the forms of critical and imaginative work a game can inspire or demand of the player” (Schenold 119). And this is where Aarseth loses utility for literature students. His all-encompassing approach to interpretation elides the diversity of critical theories that make close reading a text like Her Story such a complex operation. To explore this complexity, I typically pair the game with a cluster of readings that helps students interpret its meaning from different angles and perspectives. These readings 87

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include fairy tales like “Rapunzel” and “Snow White,” both of which are indirectly referenced in the game; some definitions of the Gothic, which contextualize the game in literary and cultural history; and a few excerpts from Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic, which add nuance to our critical discussion of the woman’s “madness” in the game. These texts—and many others could be substituted—assist students in untangling the game’s complex narrative, interpreting its literary and cultural allusions, and understanding how the meaning of the woman’s story is irreducible to any one interpretation. In more advanced courses, I have also taught the game in the context of psychoanalysis, free association, and Lacan’s insight that the unconscious is structured like a language. The game could also be paired with Galloway’s chapter on video games as control allegories, using it to consider how algorithms and procedures control bodies in an informatic age, and how gameplay often reproduces this logic allegorically. These interpretative pairings prepare students for their final modification assignment. Here they take ownership of their metagaming practice by designing, writing, and building their own interactive works. For most students, this involves quickly learning the basics of Twine or Texture, two accessible platforms for writing interactive stories and configuring modular units into a nonlinear experience. Students experiment with narrative, database, and interface by creating what I describe as a “micro information game,” or an interactive experience in which they task the player-reader (“you” in second person) with understanding an artifact, event, or experience through exploration. In maintaining our focus on material actions, on the relationship between games and literature, and on the feedback loops between information and interpretation, I require students to design a work that is relatively open and nonlinear, asking them to think about their story as “a configurative system, an arrangement of discrete, interlocking units of expressive meaning” (Bogost, Unit ix). This caveat prevents students from falling back on habits and telling a story that is more linear and literary than ludic and interactive. For most literature students, the challenge with such a turn involves thinking about their work not simply as a text but as a platform for critical play; not simply as literature that warrants close reading but as a game that transforms close reading into critical play. In the end, the value of games and game studies becomes evident when students learn to move and act on this difference, leveling up their literary study into a critical, self-reflexive, and metagaming practice.

Notes­ 1. I have taught games and game studies in undergraduate electives such as Introduction to Video-Game Criticism, The Art of Video Games, and Games for Change. I have also taught a graduate course titled Games and Literary Theory and led workshops on games as faculty advisor of the Game Studies Group, a student organization at the University of Southern Mississippi. 2. In a strange way, video games remind students how literature can be used, as Kenneth Burke wrote, as “equipment for living.” In his famous article “Literature as Equipment for Living,”

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Ready Player Action Burke proposed literature as a tool for dealing with encountered situations. I find this similar to the way that Bogost, Galloway, Boluk and LeMieux, McKenzie Wark, Mary Flanagan, and others have theorized games as tools and instruments, approaching them “as a medium for creative practice, philosophical experimentation, cultural critique, and political action” (Boluk and LeMieux 4). 3. My focus on action verbs draws inspiration from the recent collection Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking. In their introduction, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert argue for a new set of action verbs in ecological thought that signals “the jolt of veering out of timeworn cognitive pathways” (xi) and “mental ruts” (ix), a methodological turn I find useful in thinking about games and literature. 4. Cook describes the major properties of information games as follows: “hard to model”; “highly nonlinear”; relying on “distributed information”; utilizing “environmental and indirect storytelling techniques”; and featuring “simple and flat interactions.” See Cook for details about these properties and readings of Return of the Obra Dinn, Heaven’s Vault, Her Story, and Outer Wilds as information games.

Works Cited Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Johns Hopkins UP, 1997. Bizzocchi, Jim, and Joshua Tanenbaum. “Well Read: Applying Close Reading Techniques to Gameplay Experiences.” Well Played 3.0: Video Games, Value and Meaning, edited by Drew Davidson, ETC Press, 2011, pp. 289–316. Bogost, Ian. “Comparative Video Game Criticism.” Games and Culture, vol. 1, no. 1, 2006, pp. 41–6. Bogost, Ian. How to Talk about Videogames. U of Minnesota P, 2015. Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. MIT P, 2010. Bogost, Ian. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism. MIT P, 2008. Boluk, Stephanie, and Patrick LeMieux. Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames. U of Minnesota P, 2017. Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form. U of California P, 1973. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, and Lowell Duckert, editors. Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking. U of Minnesota P, 2017. Consalvo, Mia. Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames. MIT P, 2009. Cook, Michael. “Generative Forensics: Procedural Generation and Information Games.” Woodstock ’18: ACM Symposium on Neural Gaze Detection. Woodstock, NY, Jun. 3–5, 2018, https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.01768. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, Columbia UP, 1994. Ensslin, Astrid. The Language of Gaming. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Ensslin, Astrid. Literary Gaming. MIT P, 2014. Eskelinen, Markku. Cybertext Poetics: The Critical Landscape of New Media Literary Theory. Continuum, 2012. Eskelinen, Markku. “The Gaming Situation.” Game Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, Jul. 2001, http://www. gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen/. Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. PlayStation 4, The Chinese Room, 2015. Fernández-Vara, Clara. Introduction to Game Analysis. Routledge, 2019. Flanagan, Mary. Critical Play: Radical Game Design. MIT P, 2009. Francis, Tom. “Design Talk: Information Games.” YouTube, uploaded by Tom Francis, Jul. 18, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFMEmS4PN00. 89

Teaching Games and Game Studies Galloway, Alexander R. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. U of Minnesota P, 2006. Gee, James Paul. Unified Discourse Analysis: Language, Reality, Virtual Worlds and Video Games. Routledge, 2014. Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. St. Martin’s Griffin, 2007. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale UP, 1979. Hayles, N. Katherine. “Narrative and Database: Natural Symbionts.” PMLA, vol. 122, no. 5, 2007, pp. 1603–8. Heaven’s Vault. PlayStation 4, Inkle, 2019. Her Story. Mac version, Sam Barlow, 2015. Jagoda, Patrick. “Introduction: Conceptual Games, or the Language of Video Games.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 45, no. 1, 2018, pp. 130–6. ­Jones, Steven E. The Meaning of Video Games: Gaming and Textual Strategies. Routledge, 2008. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. MIT P, 2002. McGann, Jerome. “Database, Interface, and Archival Fever.” PMLA, vol. 122, no. 5, 2007, pp. 1588–92. @molleindustria. “Last semester I tried a fun brainstorming exercise in my game design class: The Underrated Verbs Battle Royale / Given a shared doc with the 700 most common verbs in English, students list games that revolve around each of them.” Twitter, Apr. 22, 2021, 3:22 p.m., https://twitter.com/molleindustria/status/1385328064377376772. @molleindustria. “The goal is to identify the less common verbs and start to imagine experimental gameplays. It’s also a good way for me to get a sense of the students’ game literacy.” Twitter, Apr. 22, 2021, 3:25 p.m., https://twitter.com/molleindustria/ status/1385329032460447748. Outer Wilds. PlayStation 4, Mobius Digital, 2019. Raley, Rita. “Digital Humanities for the Next Five Minutes.” Differences, vol. 25, no. 1, 2014, pp. 26–45. Return of the Obra Dinn. PlayStation 4, Lucas Pope, 2018. Ruberg, Bo. Video Games Have Always Been Queer. NYU P, 2019. Rusch, Doris C. Making Deep Games: Designing Games with Meaning and Purpose. CRC Press, 2017. Schenold, Terrence E. “After Ergodics: Noematic Work and the Function of Diegetic Information in Computer Roleplaying Games.” Terms of Play: Essays on Words That Matter in Videogame Theory, edited by Zach Waggoner, McFarland, 2013, pp. 117–38. Sicart, Miguel. “Against Procedurality.” Game Studies, vol. 11, no. 3, 2011, http://gamestudies. org/1103/articles/sicart_ap. Smith, Adam. Text, Lies, and Videotape: Her Story Interview. Jan. 23, 2015, https://www. rockpapershotgun.com/text-lies-and-videotape-her-story-interview. Wark, McKenzie. Gamer Theory. Harvard UP, 2009. Zimmerman, Eric. “Manifesto for a Ludic Century.” Kotaku, Sept. 9, 2013, https://kotaku.com/ manifesto-the-21st-century-will-be-defined-by-games-1275355204.

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­C HAPTER 8 TEACHING JAPANESE VIDEO GAMES: PRACTICAL STRATEGIES FOR ANALYSIS AND ASSESSMENT

Ben Whaley

During one of my class’s video game “play days,” I knew something was up. My thirtyone students had been randomly divided into small groups for the entire semester so they could collaborate on assignments and presentations. Our play days were scheduled for every other week. I hauled assorted video game consoles across the University of Calgary’s frozen campus and jacked them into oversized monitors in our active learning classroom at the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning. As I scanned from table to table, each group seemed to be getting on well: one group was matching buttons to the melody line in a music game; one group was selecting fighters for their next tag team match; and one group was shaking a comically large stuffed baby a bit too vigorously and getting scolded by their babysitting simulator. My eyes fell on the last group who were sitting stoically, their controllers resting on the table. This group had been given Capcom’s action-adventure title Ōkami (2006) to play, and I was eager to discuss the game’s many textual references to premodern Japanese literature and folklore. However, an un-skippable twenty-minute introductory cutscene prevented them from playing the game. They were bored and had already pulled out their phones as the game’s narrator droned on in English. This tableau made manifest both the pleasures and perils of teaching Japanese video games in the literature classroom. Many of today’s university students enter our classrooms already possessing a keen interest in Japanese manga (print comics), anime (animation), games, and their related subcultures. As Akiko Sugawa-Shimada reflects on both the domestic and international students who take her Japanese studies courses in Japan, students spend anywhere from one-and-a-half to three hours weekly reading manga and watching anime. In fact, around 46  percent of international students report that their primary objective in studying Japanese is to experience these cultural artifacts in the original language (Sugawa-Shimada 84–9). Related scholarship agrees that students can derive positive learning outcomes from gaming in the classroom (Gee; Blumberg; Brown), yet the question remains of how best to leverage a student’s pre-existing interest in and exposure to Japanese popular culture in the service of teaching the country’s literary or cultural history. In this chapter, I discuss practical strategies for analysis and assessment taken from my upper-level undergraduate course Japanese Video Games and Gaming Culture. This course is taught in English in the School of Languages, Linguistics, Literatures and

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Cultures at the University of Calgary and requires no prerequisite knowledge of Japanese language or video games. Video games differ in many ways from literature and film, both “high culture” forms that occupy a central position in academic thinking about mediated representation. I aim not to provide a one-size-fits-all approach to teaching games but rather to reflect on my successes and failures from designing and offering this course. Indeed, it is likely impossible to speak of how a certain video game might affect all students, particularly when a game’s multiform narrative is authored by each player’s individual choices, and two students could finish a game having experienced different story conclusions. While mine was not a literature class, I approached video games with my students as texts to be played and analyzed as players interacted with them. In so doing I found that playing games constitutes both challenging and rewarding academic work for students and invites new insights into teaching for literary studies instructors like myself.

Reading Japanese Video Games Foundational Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan reminds us that games are “popular art, collective, social reactions to the main drive or action of any culture” (235). Indeed, contemporary Japanese video games serve as useful reflections of the country, culture, and auteur from which they came. However, if we are being honest, many video games seem wholly unconcerned with making political or ethical statements. While a scholar may someday write an insightful article discussing how Nintendo’s Dr. Mario (1990) relates to the affordability of prescription drugs for seniors, early Japanese video games and home systems were designed and marketed largely as children’s toys (Uemura et al. 223). Video games have traditionally resisted explicit social commentary in a way that literature has not. Hideo Kojima, the celebrated game designer behind the stealth action game series Metal Gear Solid (1987–2015) that interrogates Japan’s nuclear legacy, remarks, “Now I don’t think you see many games that … [go] beyond just being an entertainment medium. I think that’s part of my role, part of my duty, to put in my games what I experience through movies” (Peckham). While not all video games address real-world issues, working with Japanese video games in the classroom necessitates selfselecting games with strong narratives, emotional aspirations, and memorable characters upon which to structure course assignments and class discussions. In my class, before ever commenting on a specific game text, we begin by questioning the axiom that the medium is uniquely equipped to affectively engage players owing to its interactivity and immersion. In this formulation, video games, with their divergent narrative paths, customizable characters, and multiple endings, become superior to “passive” forms of media consumption. However, as we discuss, these hallmarks of ludic interactivity could equally be thought of as a natural extension of what cognitive grammar approaches to literature regard as “fictive simulation,” or the ways in which our mind actively anticipates and simulates meaning from written texts (Harrison et al. 13). On the other hand, we ponder whether the possibility of a reset button undercuts the 92

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critical stakes of a video game narrative. And, what to make of multiform narratives that alter the pace and trajectory of the overarching story based on the individual choices of players? I introduce students, via my own unpublished English translation, to Japanese cultural critic Hiroki Azuma’s project on “gameic realism” (gēmuteki riarizumu), in which he argues that the prevalence of the console “reset” button has in fact permeated certain subgenres of literature concerned with time loops and time travel as a form of textual “replay” (142, 169–70). In Azuma’s calculus, gameic realism is not about decreasing narrative stakes, it is about positively expressing the experience of playing games—that is, the negotiation of control between the player and the simulation—in a novel or novellike medium. My class therefore takes as its premise the understanding that far from isolating video games from other media, game texts can and do teach us valuable lessons about how to engage with other kinds of narratives, including literature. This approach runs counter to a prevailing current in game studies scholarship that seeks to decouple narrative and simulative analysis altogether (Frasca; Bogost). Contemporary video games complicate our standard practices of analysis precisely because they present many different registers to consider—graphics, sound, gameplay, and interface, among others. As students play, I encourage them to have notepaper nearby so they can pause the game and copy down in-game dialogue or take notes on a particular scene or gameplay mechanism. In this sense, we approach “reading” a game with the same close reading strategies we would use when engaging with a piece of literature. Recognizing Japanese cultural elements within video games is not too difficult once students know where to look. If my doctorate in Japanese studies is good for nothing else, at least I can help students appreciate that, in Super Mario Bros. 3 (Nintendo, 1990), Mario’s famous “Tanooki” suit is modeled on the real-life Japanese “raccoon dog” (tanuki). What’s more, holding the down arrow and B button on the controller enables Tanooki Mario to transform into a statue. But not just any statue—a “Jizō Mario” to be precise! With his red bib and staff, Mario’s appearance now visually appropriates the well-known image of the bodhisattva, protector of deceased children and travelers whose small statues dot temples and graveyards throughout Japan. Recognizing Japanese literary and cultural elements within games allows students to appreciate how Japanese design teams reference their literary and cultural history in the games they create. Nowhere is this more easily carried out than in relation to the aforementioned Ōkami, one of the games students encounter in my class. With prodigious in-game references to and characters drawn from classical Japanese folktales, players control the Japanese sun goddess Amaterasu in the form of a white wolf. We can compare and contrast the myths and characters from the two oldest books produced in Japan, the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters) and the Nihon Shoki (Japanese Chronicles), with their gameic representations. A more recent game such as Ghost of Tsushima (Sucker Punch, 2020), with its high-fidelity graphics and informed rendering of samurai life during the first Mongol invasion of feudal Japan, offers students an even richer experience of playable history. Approached this way, a game can become a work of experiential literature that allows students to “live” in an era from Japanese history that would be otherwise 93

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inaccessible. But this approach is not without challenges. Most Japanese games contain few intertextual or historical references, and these images, stories, metaphors, and other “cultural models” (Gee 149) must constantly be evaluated and interrogated for their veracity. If students do not already possess the requisite background knowledge about Japan, as most will not, then assigned readings and lectures must first fill this gap before students step foot into a game world. Contrary to what students, colleagues, or university administrators might assume, there is a surprising amount of reading that must take place in video game classrooms. Indeed, if we are to prepare our students to appreciate the critical stakes of these works beyond “entertainment,” not to mention having them read original literary referents or pertinent media studies scholarship in English or Japanese, including games almost always makes a course more academically rigorous by design. A different approach to reading games involves teasing out and arguing for connections between game elements and broader sociocultural issues important to Japan. I might use an earthquake simulation game known as Disaster Report (Irem, 2003) to discuss how controlling a virtual body on the ground reframes our affective relation to natural disaster victimhood when compared to literary or cinematic modes (Whaley). Or I might initiate a discussion on how The World Ends with You (Square Enix, 2007), a Japanese role-playing game that deals thematically with loneliness and social isolation, appropriates a visual novel structure and pairs it with a game mechanic that encourages players to bring their portable Nintendo DS systems outside to engage with others in new forms of connected socio-topographical play. These pairings work well because they encourage student speculation and are less reliant on specific literary or cultural knowledge about Japan. Moreover, when dealing with potentially sensitive topics with students, games provide a useful prism through which to examine both the universality and the particularization of trauma and recovery in East Asia. The interactivity of games propels students to be attuned to and critical of what immersive mechanics resonate with them, and I find that approaching games in this way, in terms of how they provide interactive ways of grappling with entrenched problems, opens up a variety of fruitful class discussions. However, simply recognizing cultural connections is not enough. Humanities students generally come to the literature classroom already familiar with the tools of narrative analysis. What is less familiar is considering how the specific mediological elements of games communicate meaning to the player and elicit their engagement. In other words, what do we gain when we play through an earthquake simulation as a user, and, conversely, what might be lost when social issues make the jump to gaming form? As teachers of games in the classroom, we must creatively consider how the narrative and simulative content align as media in the service of experiencing histories, societies, mindsets, traumas, and cultures in new and interesting ways. We must do this while resisting the urge to essentialize the supposedly “unique” Japanese (or Asian) elements of the games we play. After all, video games still mediate content through their simulations. As exhilarating a location as the Mushroom Kingdom may be, sometimes a mushroom is just a mushroom and does not hold deeper cultural roots. 94

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Aren’t Video Games Supposed to Be Fun? Strategies for Analysis and Assessment Literary scholar and linguist James Paul Gee outlines several positive learning outcomes from video game play, and he locates these outcomes in relation to commercially available entertainment games (so-called AAA titles1) that can be easily deployed in the classroom, rather than focusing on a distinct subset of informationally rich educational software. Of Gee’s positive outcomes for learning, three proved particularly useful in how I designed assessments for my video game class: video game play lowers consequences for failure in a class; game play encourages students to hypothesize and reflect; and games empower students to co-design their educational experience (216–18). My organizing principle in designing assessments was that student-directed and creative assignments could leverage learners’ preexisting passion to encourage them to think more critically, and in new ways, about the pop-cultural media they consume. While almost all of my students reported on a class intake survey at the beginning of term that they played video games and owned consoles, few admitted to thinking deeply about the games they played. Crucially, some even questioned the need for a video game class in college. Sure, the class sounded fun, students admitted, but was there much to learn from an entertainment form with which they grew up? Despite their intense familiarity with the medium, a surprising number of students categorized games solely as entertainment media meant for fun. Problematizing this assumption was something we would return to time and again during the term. To create a classroom environment that more closely resembled the collaborative nature of multiplayer or networked play, I experimented with different learning configurations and settled on asking students to work in groups of five or six and to complete collaborative assignments on video games with the same peers throughout the term. I knew from the outset that this was a difficult proposition because group work is a much-maligned aspect of university courses, and yet I wanted to minimize my role as an instructor and to create a learning environment conducive to organic analytical and interpersonal interactions among students. I also hoped that some students might become friends through the lengthy groupwork process. Every other week I brought in a variety of video game consoles and games made in Japan for our play days and let each group choose the games they wanted to experience. The final class assessment was equally student-driven, with each group asked to propose, design, and execute a project of their choosing, including the final grading criteria on which they should be evaluated. This gave them personal ownership over their education and reinforced their group as a community of learners in which everyone’s views mattered. I had imagined that this newfound freedom might prompt one group to visit a “barcade” and reflect on the experience,2 while another group might design their own video game using web tools. In practice, with the sole exception of the group who got together for dinner and filmed a “let’s play” video of themselves shrieking in reaction to Konami’s popular horror demo P.T. (2014), most groups chose less imaginative final assessments such as an in-class quiz show or a digital report. Throughout the course design and implementation process, I learned that too much choice can paralyze some 95

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students’ progress and that not all the assignments and activities worked as well as I had envisioned. Nonetheless, there is still much we can learn from deploying ludic approaches in the classroom. Games lower consequences for failure. Gee suggests that in a game “losing is not losing” because players derive some joy from the challenge of replaying and overcoming an obstacle (175). While some joy can be derived from passive spectatorship, and students were brought closer together through joking about one another’s play, games become useful primarily as students interact with them and overcome challenges together. For this reason, students preferred games that could be played as a group, and those games that lacked a steep learning curve into which students could jump quickly were even more popular. These included innocuous group party games like Mario Party 9 (Nintendo, 2012); Japanese fighting games like Street Fighter IV (Capcom, 2009), where inexperienced players could indiscriminately mash buttons and still have fun; or music and rhythm games like PaRappa the Rapper 2 (NanaOn-Sha, 2002) that relied on little more than matching buttons to onscreen prompts and appreciating the catchy music and clever lyrics. Each of these games afforded us the opportunity to discuss cultural topics important to Japan, such as racialized caricatures in fighting games or the appropriation and evolution of hip-hop in Japan. Longer story-driven experiences like the antinuclear stealth game Metal Gear Solid 4 (Konami, 2008) fared worse in the classroom and proved more difficult for students to engage with. Pacing quickly became an issue as students opted to skip narrative cutscenes and character dialogue altogether. These were the precise interactive worldbuilding elements I had hoped to analyze, and it was frustrating to watch students skip the story and rush to the next active section of gameplay. I could not guarantee that student groups would reach a particular story beat in the game during a given class session, nor could I ensure that they even played the game as intended. I winced as students opted to sneak into an abandoned building and explore distant areas of the game map in Metal Gear Solid 4 rather than to progress along the main mission objectives. These variabilities of play meant that I could not approach teaching a game narrative the same way I would a work of prose literature. Gee also notes that video games make players hypothesize, probe, and reflect. At the start of each play day, I would post some guiding questions, and it was up to each group to answer these as they played. Some questions were broadly focused on medium: “What immersive tools helped you to best engage with this game?” Others centered on a game’s message: “Did you choose to encourage or dismiss your computer-controlled partner and how did this affect the survival experience?” And some addressed Japanese culture as depicted in the games: “What Japanese cultural elements do we see on display in Pokémon, and would you consider it a ‘Japanese’ game?” Most of the available game options could only be played by one or two students at a time, so I encouraged an asymmetrical approach to play in which those not actively holding the controllers would still participate by taking notes on the guiding questions or looking up relevant strategy guide materials online to help their groupmates progress through the game. These roles were switched every twenty minutes or so to encourage all group members to stay more actively engaged in the play session lest they reach for their phones out of boredom. 96

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Lastly, according to Gee, games let players codesign the educational experience. The inherent negotiation between a player’s inputs and a designer’s code increasingly unfolds as a “spatial story,” in which a narrative is enacted as an avatar moves through and interacts with immersive environments (Jenkins 124). My course drew inspiration from this interplay with a variety of student-driven and creative assignments intended to personalize student understanding of the core course concepts and methodologies. Primary among these was a participatory assignment wherein all the students designed a simple 2D side-scrolling platform level akin to the original Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985) using a freely available web platform called Sploder. The games themselves were ungraded but paired with a graded peer-response blog to reward reflexivity over innate artistic ability. Many students reported that this exercise was more time consuming and difficult than they imagined. While not every student loved the creation they posted to the class blog, the activity gave many of them a new appreciation for the creative work of designing a video game.

Conclusion: Lessons from the Mushroom Kingdom As we approached our final class of the term, it felt as though my students and I had completed a globetrotting adventure right out of a Japanese role-playing game! Teaching about and playing video games in the classroom is surprisingly hard work. Unlike literary studies, in which accepted terminologies and methods of teaching and analysis are rather codified, video game texts continually inspire us to take up new debates, experiment with new assessment methods, and reconceptualize the traditional college course. Many of my initial assumptions and plans had to be tweaked as the class progressed, and future iterations of the course will almost certainly pursue some objectives differently. Looking back over my anonymous course evaluation comments, students praised the group learning structure for how it fit a variety of learning styles, facilitated cooperative peer-to-peer interactions, and heightened their freedom to express themselves. One student wrote that analyzing games in a group first and then volunteering their own opinions to the class at large during our wrap-up discussions was the “most comfortable I’ve ever felt speaking in class.” Another student indicated that being able to work and discuss difficult games with group members expanded a collective knowledge bank and made them “more likely to go to class and participate.” While a majority of students enjoyed the group work, some predictably found it frustrating, noting that the extreme amount of freedom and individual choice built into the class assessments made it challenging to reach a consensus if certain group members were less passionate about the assignments or contributed less work. In terms of the participatory and interactive style of teaching and learning via games, a majority of students felt that playing games helped to crystalize concepts from the required Japanese literary and media studies readings, which might otherwise have been too dense to understand on their own. “He made sure to have all the students try all the different game genres so that they could get a firsthand experience for the things 97

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we were talking about in class,” reported one student. Proving that some students can indeed have too much of a good thing, two students found the play days to be repetitive and recounted being bored watching their groupmates during single-player experiences. I subsequently changed the course by focusing more on cooperative over single-player games to involve more students at a time. I also began structuring play days by game genre to better focus our class discussions and so that all students were afforded similar play experiences throughout the term. Taken as a whole, this student feedback reveals the positive learning outcomes that can be leveraged when games are introduced into literature classrooms. As tools for learning, games empower students to take charge of their own relationship to Japanese literature and culture by providing opportunities for them to work together with their peers as a community of learners and to see themselves reflected in their own epic wins or frustrating game overs. As tools for teaching, games encourage scholars in Japanese studies to reconceptualize traditional university assignments and to examine non-traditional ways in which gameic structures inform non-game media, such as literature, and shape our everyday interactions more broadly. As renowned media theorist Janet Murray asserts, “to play Mario Brothers or King’s Quest or Myst is to open ourselves to the vision of the shaping author in the same way we open ourselves to the author’s voice in a novel” (275). Japanese classics like Space Invaders (Taito, 1978) and Donkey Kong (Nintendo, 1981) constitute key entries in our gameic canon, and their successors continue to occupy a valuable place in a global transmedia ecology. While there are many reasons to take video games seriously in a literature classroom, the necessity to critically analyze these texts within an academic context comes not solely from the student interest they will generate, but also from the unique ways in which they will allow for a virtual experience of the human condition. This is as true when a student travels to classical Japan as a sun goddess turned white wolf, as when another ever so gently rocks a stuffed baby to sleep.

Notes 1. This term refers to games published by major studios with comparatively high development and marketing budgets. AAA titles are made widely commercially available and intended for diverse audiences worldwide. 2. A “barcade” is a combination bar and arcade intended for adults. Patrons can enjoy drinks with their friends while playing classic arcade cabinets, pinball machines, or other prize games. Dave & Buster’s is a popular chain of this sort, with locations across the United States and in Canada.

Works Cited Azuma, Hiroki. Gēmuteki riarizumu no tanjō: Dōbutsuka suru posutomodan 2. Kōdansha Gendai Shinsho, 2007. Blumberg, Fran C., editor. Learning by Playing: Video Gaming in Education. Oxford UP, 2014. 98

Teaching Japanese Video Games Bogost, Ian. “Video Games Are Better without Stories.” The Atlantic, Apr. 25, 2017. Brown, Harry J. Videogames and Education. Routledge, 2015. Frasca, Gonzalo. “Simulation versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology.” The Video Game Theory Reader, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, Routledge, 2003, pp. 221–35. Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. 2nd edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Harrison, Chloe, et al. “Cognitive Grammar in Literature.” Cognitive Grammar in Literature, edited by Chloe Harrison, Louise Nuttall, Peter Stockwell, and Wenjuan Yuan, John Benjamins, 2014, pp. 1–16. Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, MIT P, 2004, pp. 118–30. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McGraw-Hill, 1964. Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Free Press, 1997. Peckham, Matt. “Interview: Hideo Kojima Talks About Metal Gear Solid V’s Humor, Violence and Finality.” Time, Jun. 12, 2014, https://time.com/2862423/interview-hideo-kojima. Sugawa-Shimada, Akiko. “Contested Classrooms: Reconstructions of ‘Japaneseness’ through Anime.” Teaching Japanese Popular Culture, edited by Deborah Shamoon and Chris McMorran, The Association for Asian Studies, 2016, pp. 79–100. Uemura, Masayuki, et al. Famikon to sono jidai: Terebi gēmu no tanjō. NTT Shuppan, 2013. Whaley, Ben. “Virtual Earthquakes and Real-World Survival in Japan’s Disaster Report Video Game.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 78, no. 1, 2019, pp. 95–114.

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­C HAPTER 9 INTERVENING IN GAME CULTURES: VIDEO GAME STREAMS AND/AS LITERATURE

Cody Mejeur

Video game streams are particularly effective at using and circulating cultural narratives in games. Streaming has proliferated in recent years and taken many forms, from casual and first-time play of a game to expert competition and “speedrunning” (attempting to complete a game as fast as possible) games (Johnson and Woodcock 337–8). Across the many types of game streams, common features include the recording and live streaming of gameplay; a camera capturing the streamer’s body and reactions in the actual world; and a chat in which viewers can interact with the streamer by submitting questions, posting memes or emotes (small images that express a feeling or concept), or commenting on the stream. Successful and/or professional game streams usually involve the streamer creating a particular identity that distinguishes them from other streamers, often by adopting particular character types or catchphrases, streaming specific games, or using their physical appearance to attract an audience (Guarriello 1755–6). In other words, popular streamers are often successful because they create their own narratives— they draw on recognizable stories and character types to create their own brand identity, and they perform their own stories and experiences as entertainment for their audiences. Of course, the forms of these narratives in game streams are somewhat different from the narratives commonly taught in literature classrooms with novels, films, or television shows. Further, game streams are not always narrative, meaning that they are not always envisioned to tell or create stories. That said, game streams frequently generate stories directly related to established forms of game narrative, interactive fiction, and digital literature that may be more familiar to a literature classroom. Like narrative in video games themselves, the narratives of game streams are variable, emergent, and interactive, although here the interaction is between streamer and audience around a game, rather than just between a player and a game (Walsh 73–4; Murnane 17). Because these narratives emerge in the interactions of streamer, audience, and game, they also open spaces for players to share their personal experiences and stories about a game, or even for streamer and audience to construct a collective, shared story about the game (Mejeur 144–7). For example, the famous streaming event “Twitch Plays Pokémon,” for which players played the original Pokémon games together by entering commands in the stream chat, generated a new collective experience that was quite different from playing the games individually. This collective experience was frequently narrativized by players and fans, many of whom created original fan art and fan fiction to tell their shared stories (James). Game stream narratives are thus a type of player or user-generated content like

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fan fiction or game modification (commonly called “modding”) that allows streamers and players to become active co-creators of play experiences in games, telling their own stories in and with the games they play (Fiesler; Newman 277). The narratives contained in game streams are formal and even to a certain extent textual, and thus they are ripe for literary analysis and can even be considered a form of digital literature. The narratives of game streams are delivered primarily via visual, auditory, and textual forms, consisting of the streamer’s gameplay (visual, auditory, and sometimes textual), the camera feed capturing the streamer’s body and play setting (visual and auditory), and the stream chat (visual and textual). The narratives come through any or all of these channels and tell stories about who the streamer is, what a particular play experience or game is like, or what larger cultural stereotypes or narratives are invoked in this space. The fact that stream narratives emerge across multiple channels and are often quite ephemeral in nature—existing in the moment as a live stream, and only preserved via recording, if at all—suggests that they are most similar to social media narratives, which Ruth Page defines as functioning with “distributed linearity” and through the efforts of multiple “co-tellers” (197, 200). Social media narratives are constructed across multiple posts and often with multiple authors in conversation with one another, working with (and sometimes against) one another to generate a common understanding and collective story about a given topic. Game stream narratives are similar in that they are constructed over time with many chat posts, actions, and utterances from the streamer, and events in the streamed gameplay. By paying close attention to these forms in game streams, one can analyze and unpack the collective stories generated in them. Such analysis quickly reveals that game stream narratives are far from neutral, and are instead embedded in complex social, cultural, and political contexts, as the following examples demonstrate. On August 16, 2014, a disgruntled ex-boyfriend of feminist game developer Zoë Quinn posted a series of stories about her on a WordPress site (Dewey). These stories detailed his experiences and relationship with Quinn, alleging that she lied to and cheated on him to garner positive reviews for her game about mental health, Depression Quest (Quinn 2013). Although Quinn and others later established that these stories were riddled with falsehoods, they sparked an intense and even violent online backlash against Quinn that came to be known as GamerGate. GamerGate was a loosely organized movement operating primarily on social media (including game streams) that targeted Quinn and other feminist game developers and critics for harassment, doxxing (publishing private information like addresses and contact information), and death and rape threats (Dewey). Those targeted had supposedly committed two crimes, for which they had to be punished: first, they were critical of mainstream games and pushed for other types of games and narratives that were more inclusive; second, they allegedly used unethical, underhanded means to promote their agenda to change games. The GamerGate hashtag remains in use on social media, and those perceived as “social justice warriors,” most often women, people of color, and queer folks in games, still face similar forms of harassment. For example, women who stream successfully are often derogatively labeled “titty streamers” by community members because they supposedly 102

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use their gender and appearance to garner undeserved attention (Ruberg et  al. 467). Similar to how the narratives constructed about Zoë Quinn were used as justification for harassment in GamerGate, narratives about “titty streamers” minimize women and their work in games, and even sometimes harass them for “cheating” at game streaming (Ruberg et al. 468). While GamerGate has been discussed extensively in both popular press and feminist and queer game studies, something conspicuously underexamined is how the hate movement was launched and fueled by narrative—by the stories about Quinn and alleged corruption in the games industry that circulated online in visual, textual forms. These stories animated and focused the frustration of some gamers who did not want games to become more inclusive in terms of gender, race, sexuality, or disability, and gave them targets to hate and attack. As Megan Condis explains, these stories construct a narrative of invaders staging a “hostile takeover” of games through corrupt journalism and industry practices, and this promotes an “us versus them” mentality that can justify violence and lead to further radicalization in white supremacist and alt-right movements (Condis). Such movements cohere around negative, stereotypical narratives about immigrants, feminists, people of color, and others that can be distilled and shared in the symbolic form of memes like Pepe the Frog that both reference the larger narratives and create a sense of shared humor, identity, and purpose (DeCook 502). Crucially, the effects of narratives like those in GamerGate are not deterministic—not everyone who read the stories became automatically or inevitably involved in hate movements, nor did video games make them violent. Rather, the cultural narratives in and about games are continually made and reinforced in game communities through social media, gaming websites, and live streams of games, and these narratives can incrementally lead people to believe exclusionary, harmful, and potentially violent ideologies (Munn 1). As with GamerGate, closer examination of game streams reveals the narrative dimensions of constructing and negotiating identity in game cultures, and further demonstrates how these narratives in game streams are currently contributing to stereotypes, exclusionary trends, and online violence. Another brief example elucidates the cultural consequences of game-stream narratives in particular. PewDiePie is one of the most popular game streamers: over 110 million subscribers follow his content on YouTube consisting of Let’s Play videos, comedy videos, and recordings of his stream chats and interactions with fans.1 PewDiePie presents himself as a humorous, carefree, non-political gamer who plays games to have fun, to gently “troll” other players, and never to take anything seriously. He constructs and constantly reinforces his brand image through his streaming content, interviews, and social media presence. Despite this narrative claiming that PewDiePie is apolitical, however, he has regularly become mired in controversies for his actions during streams. These have ranged from using the n-word to performing Nazi salutes, and on one occasion he even hired performers to hold up a sign saying, “Death to All Jews” (Romano). Far from being isolated, one-off incidents, these events are thoroughly narrative—in the sense that they collectively construct a narrative of PewDiePie’s behavior that runs counter to his self-proclaimed, non-political identity. They are also narrative in the sense that 103

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they use and amplify cultural narratives of white supremacy, anti-Semitism, and postracism, especially in his claims that these are just jokes and not ongoing, significant issues. Just as memes distill and transmit larger, implied narratives, PewDiePie’s racist “jokes” reference and circulate recognizable narratives to a broad audience. While game streams have narrative dimensions and frequently generate shared stories for streamers and participants, the question remains whether game streams might be considered literature, and thus fit for the literature classroom. Game streams are certainly not recognizable as literature in the same ways that novels, poetry, drama, films, or even television are—they rarely have any intention of being particularly artistic, they are not usually overtly critical, and it is difficult to locate a sense of craft or authorship. One could argue that game streams are a form of electronic literature, often a broader category of experimentation with new forms of literature made possible by digital media. Even this might be a stretch, though; N. Katherine Hayles defines electronic “literature” as “creative artworks that interrogate the histories, contexts, and productions of literature, including as well the verbal art of literature proper” (3). Game streams are often creative and always involve labor, but only a small subset of streams with particularly narrative or literary games meet the criteria for interrogating literature. It is only with a broad definition of electronic literature that game streams seem to fit, such as Sandy Baldwin’s: “Literature is what remains: it is open, open to all; we can take hold of these writings. The interface is an explosion. I write to bring about this explosion” (19). Game streams are electronic literature in the sense that they are an explosion of writing, mediation, and interfaces that produce narratives, and they are open to all who have reliable internet access (i.e., not actually all). Yet the point here is not that game streams meet commonly accepted criteria for counting as literature or electronic literature (for the most part, they do not), nor even that the definition of literature should expand to include them. Rather, the point is that game streams are a significant part of contemporary culture, and by including them in literature classrooms and applying skills of literary analysis to them, we open new ways for students to apply their critical, literary training in the world around them. Game streams are eminently textual and contain narrative dimensions written in visual, auditory, and linguistic signs. They are also inherently social and reproduce cultural narratives, stereotypes, and power structures in games and beyond. This means game streams are political, and, as Caroline Levine notes, literature scholars and students are uniquely equipped for analyzing forms of textual, social, and political meaning-making: “Literary critics, who excelled at spotting the difficult overlayings of multiple structures, who understood precisely how complex forms could be, seemed to be missing an opportunity to read social structures—politics—in the same alert, insightful ways” (xi). By including games and game streams in the literature classroom, we can both deepen students’ understanding of the contexts of the games they play and demonstrate how they can apply their growing skills in literary analysis to the overlapping, “colliding” social and cultural structures around them (Levine 19). Ultimately the goal of considering game streams in the literature classroom is to engage games as both texts and cultures. In other words, the aim is to intervene in not 104

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just the content of games, but also what gets said around that content in “affinity spaces” like game streams (Gee 70). James Paul Gee originally described “affinity spaces” as the spaces around games where players meet to share tips, secrets, and stories that help them learn more about a game and connect with others, and players certainly do this via game streams. Yet there is another sense of affinity at play in game streams that has to do with social and political affinity—the cultural narratives of who belongs (or does not) in games, how certain games should be played, and whose stories are worthwhile. To return to the examples of GamerGate, “titty streamers,” and PewDiePie, these are all instances when cultural narratives were reproduced and circulated via the affinity spaces of game streams, sending clear messages to groups such as women, queer folks, Black people, and Jews: you do not belong here. Including game streams in the literature classroom will not single-handedly fix these exclusionary trends. However, by drawing students’ critical attention to these narratives, their forms, and their platforms, we can empower our students to intervene in their own networks and contribute to positive change in game cultures and beyond. If these problems are made and perpetuated at least in part through narrative, then narrative and literary studies can play a role in addressing in them. The remainder of this chapter describes my experiences (and lessons learned) teaching a project with game streams in undergraduate courses at multiple universities over the past six years. I have used the project in both literary studies courses and media/ game studies courses. Whereas the final projects produced in these two settings looked somewhat different in terms of content, tone, or intent, I have been amazed each time in how students have taken the assignment, made it their own, and even shared their projects outside the course with family, friends, and game groups. Only one or two of my students have gone on to careers in game streaming—one produced a video series that was a finalist for the Unity Awards and now works at a major game studio—but many have used their projects within their own spheres of influence to make their game spaces more critical and inclusive than they were before.

Course Project: Critical Let’s Plays and Game Streams I call this game stream course project “Critical Let’s Plays,” drawing on the popular Let’s Play video and stream format to engage students in gameplay but with an emphasis on critical analysis and storytelling. The learning objectives of this project are twofold: first, for students to understand the forms of meaning-making in game streams, including analyzing them as texts and narratives; and second, for students to locate that meaningmaking within its cultural contexts, including systems of power and positionality present in game streams and in students’ experiences with games. These objectives are addressed in several phases described below that typically unfold over the duration of a fifteenweek semester, but they can be adapted to a shorter games unit in a literature course. For example, I have shortened the phases and project requirements and taught this project in a games unit of a sophomore-level introduction to a literary studies major program. 105

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In such a setting, I made this project an option and also offered a traditional research paper option. Either way the students choose, the “critical” element of Critical Let’s Plays is essential—they must engage with peer-reviewed, scholarly research, and also provide a particular analysis and argument about a game or game stream. A final note about the overall project is that it is guided by the slogan, “the personal is political,” which has long been a key point in feminist (and especially Black feminist) epistemologies, practices, and activism (Hanisch; Combahee River). An understanding of the social, cultural, and political contexts of games and game streams is incomplete without attention to the systems of power structuring these spaces, and students, as players and viewers, will have their own personal, embodied positionalities within such systems. In other words, students will often have different experiences of particular games, game communities, and streams based in part on who they are. To address this reality and equip students to do the same, this project encourages students to consider their personal experiences in games and game streams as an essential part of their analyses. By drawing on their experiences with games and putting them alongside critical research and analysis, students see the social and cultural forms that structure their experiences, and the knowledge produced becomes relevant, meaningful, and actionable for them. They are then able to take that knowledge and apply it in their gaming communities and experiences, and hopefully become a small part of social critique, justice, and change.

Level One: Starting Area and Foundations The first phase of the project introduces students to game streams as textual sites of meaning and power, and asks them to think about their personal experiences, positionalities, and differences in games. To begin with, students read scholarship and creative work that explains why identity, intersectionality, and power are significant for analyzing the stories and forms found in games. A particularly insightful essay for this is Audre Lorde’s “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference.” As the students discuss in class, Lorde does not mention games or video games in the essay, but the concepts Lorde introduces, such as difference, mythical norms, and power in literature and poetry, are clearly applicable to their experiences with games and game cultures. For example, Lorde’s theorization of the mythical norm describes how concepts such as whiteness, masculinity, and heteronormativity become inscribed in a culture (her example is United States culture), and students draw connections between mythical norms and well-documented trends in video games that primarily feature straight, white men (Lorde 116; Malkowski and Russworm 3). Partnered with these readings, students complete a reflective activity that asks them to chart their personal stories with games, considering which games have been important to them and why, and what their experiences of identities, norms, and power in games have been. Next, students engage directly with game streams as sites where these concepts are put into practice, shaping experiences of games and gaming cultures. Before coming to class, students read scholarship examining the formal elements, genre conventions, 106

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and dominant trends and narratives in game streams.2 While most existing scholarship does not focus on the stories, narrative, or literary elements of game streams, these articles give students a critical vocabulary for understanding what game streams are and how they work, and this provides them with a foundation for interpreting them in class and in their eventual projects. In class, we construct Critical Let’s Plays through group play and viewing sessions. During these sessions, we keep a running commentary about the game we are playing or the stream we are viewing, deconstructing its formal elements and interpreting its meanings. For the game streams we watch together, this involves paying close attention to the content of the game being played and the story of the game emerging through gameplay; to the streamer and the story or brand they construct for themselves; and finally to the stream chat, where other viewers contribute comments, ideas, and emotes to the experience. In each of these elements we examine what meanings and messages are added to the stream, and how the collisions between them either challenge or reinforce larger cultural narratives and norms.

Level Two: New Tools and Gaining Experience At the end of Level One, students have a foundational knowledge of positionality and power in games and a critical toolkit for analyzing narratives in games and game streams. Using this foundation, they craft a proposal for a Critical Let’s Play of their own on a particular game or topic in game culture, and begin planning their stream and/ or recording. Phase two supports students on two parts of their projects: conducting research related to their chosen game or topic, and learning the tools they can use for their stream or recording. The first part is accomplished through themed weekly readings addressing current topics in game analysis and research, such as gender and sexuality, race, postcolonialism, genre studies, industry studies, or game history. Some of these topics and readings have remained the same across different iterations of this course, but many have changed according to current discourses and student interests. As part of engaging these texts in class, students also complete workshops that address where and how to find relevant research on games and literature, how to use and cite scholarship in traditional papers and streams or recordings, and different types of venues where they might publish or post their work, including student publications. The second part of this phase is learning necessary tools for their Critical Let’s Plays, which are taught via weekly workshops in class. These tools include platforms like YouTube and Twitch.tv (for streaming games), Open Broadcast Software (OBS, opensource software for streaming or recording games), and OpenShot (open-source software for editing video recordings). A final, essential resource for students is the Center for Solutions to Online Violence, which shares many links, toolkits, and strategies for protecting oneself online. This resource is critical particularly for students who choose to post their Critical Let’s Plays publicly, as anyone posting publicly with critiques of games or gaming cultures can face trolling, harassment, or online violence like that faced by Zoë Quinn during Gamergate. Thankfully this has yet to happen to any of my students, 107

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but we work together in this workshop to develop emergency online protection plans in case it ever does. At the end of Level Two, students give informal, in-class presentations about their projects with opportunities for feedback and critique.

Level Three: Final Bosses and Lessons Learned Throughout Levels Two and Three, students have brief, weekly check-ins with one another or me about their progress and any obstacles they face. The final phase of the project tasks students with taking everything they have learned and using it to produce their Critical Let’s Play stream or recording. The topics for each week’s discussions and readings are determined by student interests earlier in the semester, and the focus for their projects is on honing the argument, storytelling, and craft of their streams. Each week in this phase has a particular benchmark for the project, such as completing an outline, a script, or having a certain amount of gameplay recorded, and this steady progression helps students avoid too much crunch time at the end of the semester. A crucial consideration in the final phase is whether and where students will publish, post, or share their Critical Let’s Plays. There are of course many options for this, and in the weekly check-ins we discuss the benefits and limitations of platforms like YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, and more. Specifically, we work together on establishing who the target audiences for their streams are, and which platforms might be best for connecting with those audiences. Throughout these check-ins and discussions, I emphasize that posting or publishing their work publicly is not required for the course. While getting students to apply their literary analysis skills to game streams and sharing their work beyond the classroom are certainly goals for this project, it would be unfair and unethical to require them to post work online that could put them in harm’s way, even with their emergency online protection plans. Usually about a third of the class shares their projects either by posting them online or by sending them to family, friends, or game groups. One of the greatest benefits of this project is helping students become informed, critical, and empowered agents in their media consumption, and that requires giving them the agency to choose when, where, and how they put their skills into practice. I have taught this course project in this semester-long form or in abbreviated forms almost a dozen times now, and each time I am amazed at what students produce. I have seen excellent, critical game streams on topics ranging from race in sports games to gender representation in League of Legends (Riot Games 2009) to new strategies for dealing with trolling and harassment in online games. I am under no illusions that these course projects alone will lead to massive shifts in gaming cultures and their exclusionary trends—only some of my students ever share their Critical Let’s Plays publicly, and of these far fewer pursue careers in games or streaming. Yet the sheer ingenuity and passion of many of their projects gives me hope. In them I see the immense potential for what can happen when we take the skills of literary analysis and apply them to forms related to but also beyond literature, such as the ephemeral, emergent, and playful narratives of game streams. In them I see the ways we can create change if we focus on sharing 108

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stories, differences, and critical perspectives interpersonally, intervening in our own networks and communities. As literary scholars and teachers, we are uniquely equipped to empower students to analyze popular culture, including the narratives of games and game streams. By including game streams in the literature classroom, we can further empower them to critically create and share their stories to fight for better, more just worlds.

Notes 1. Let’s Play videos are a common genre of game video or live stream that features the streamer inviting the audience to play through a game together. Let’s Plays frequently connote that the streamer is playing the selected game for the first time along with the audience, although this is not always the case. 2. A non-exhaustive list includes Hannah Gerber’s “eSports and Streaming”; Nicholas-Brie Guarriello’s “Never Give Up, Never Surrender”; Johnson and Woodcock’s “It’s like the gold rush”; and Ruberg et al.’s “Nothing But a ‘Titty Streamer.’”

Works Cited Baldwin, Sandy. The Internet Unconscious: On the Subject of Electronic Literature. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. The Combahee River Collective Statement. United States, 2015. Web Archive. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/lcwaN0028151. Condis, Megan. “From Fortnite to Alt-Right.” New York Times, Mar. 27, 2019. https://www. nytimes.com/2019/03/27/opinion/gaming-new-zealand-shooter.html. DeCook, Julia R. “Memes and Symbolic Violence: #proudboys and the Use of Memes for Propaganda and the Construction of Collective Identity.” Learning, Media, and Technology, vol. 43, no. 4, 2018, pp. 485–504. Dewey, Caitlin. “The Only Guide to Gamergate You Will Ever Need to Read.” Washington Post, Oct. 14, 2014. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/10/14/the-onlyguide-to-gamergate-you-will-ever-need-to-read/. Fiesler, Casey, Brianna Dym, and Jed Brubaker. “‘They’re All Trans Sharon’: Authoring Gender in Video Game Fan Fiction.” Game Studies, vol. 18, no. 3, 2018, http://gamestudies.org/1803/ articles/brubaker_dym_fiesler. Gee, James Paul. Situated Language and Learning: A Critique of Traditional Schooling. Reprinted, Routledge, 2006. Gerber, Hannah R. “ESports and Streaming: Twitch Literacies.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, vol. 61, no. 3, 2017, pp. 343–5. Guarriello, Nicholas-Brie. “Never Give up, Never Surrender: Game Live Streaming, Neoliberal Work, and Personalized Media Economies.” New Media & Society, vol. 21, no. 8, 2019, pp. 1750–69. Hanisch, Carol. “The Personal Is Political.” Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation, edited by Shulie Firestone and Anne Koedt, Radical Feminism, 1970. Hayles, N. Katherine. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. U of Notre Dame P,  2008.

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Teaching Games and Game Studies James, Eric Andrew. “Using Rhetorical Criticism to Track Twitch Plays Pokémon Fans’ Attachment to Sacrifice.” Transformative Works and Cultures, vol. 28, 2018. https://journal. transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/1438. Johnson, Mark R., and Jamie Woodcock. “‘It’s like the Gold Rush’: The Lives and Careers of Professional Video Game Streamers on Twitch Tv.” Information, Communication, & Society, vol. 22, no. 3, 2019, pp. 336–51. Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton UP, 2015. Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. 1984. Crossing Press, 2007. Malkowski, Jennifer, and TreaAndrea M. Russworm, editors. Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games. Indiana UP, 2017. Mejeur, Cody. “Pokémon GO, Narrative, and the Construction of Augmented Reality.” The Pokémon Go Phenomenon: Essays on Public Play in Contested Spaces, edited by Jamie Henthorn et al., McFarland, 2019, pp. 136–54. Munn, Luke. “Alt-Right Pipeline: Individual Journeys to Extremism Online.” First Monday, vol. 24, no. 6, 2019. Murnane, Eric. Emergent Narrative: Stories of Play, Playing with Stories. 2018. University of Central Florida, PhD Dissertation. ­Newman, James. “Minecraft: User-Generated Content.” How to Play Video Games, edited by Matthew Thomas Payne and Nina Huntemann, New York UP, 2019, pp. 277–84. Page, Ruth E. Narratives Online: Shared Stories in Social Media. Cambridge UP, 2018. Payne, Katherine, et al. “Examining the Learning Effects of Live Streaming Video Game Instruction over Twitch.” Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 77, 2017, pp. 95–109. Romano, Aja. “YouTube’s Most Popular User Amplified Anti-Semitic Rhetoric. Again.” Vox, Dec. 13, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/12/13/18136253/pewdiepie-vs-tseries-links-towhite-supremacist-alt-right-redpill. Ruberg, Bo. et al. “Nothing but a ‘Titty Streamer’: Legitimacy, Labor, and the Debate over Women’s Breasts in Video Game Live Streaming.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, vol. 36, no. 5, 2019, pp. 466–81. Steinbeck, Hendrik, et al. “Teaching the Masses on Twitch: An Initial Exploration of Educational Live-Streaming.” Proceedings of the Eighth ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale, ACM, 2021, pp. 275–8. Uszkoreit, Lena. “With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Video Game Live Streaming and Its Potential Risks and Benefits for Female Gamers.” Feminism in Play, edited by Kishonna L. Gray, et al., Springer International, 2018, pp. 163–81. Walsh, Richard. “Emergent Narrative in Interactive Media.” Narrative, vol. 19, no. 1, 2011, pp. 72–85.

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­C HAPTER 10 ETHICAL SIMULATION GAMES IN THE LIBERAL ARTS CLASSROOM: CIVILIZATION V, SIMEARTH, AND SWEATSHOP

Harry Brown and Nicole Lobdell

In his 2011 book How to Do Things with Video games, video-game designer and theorist Ian Bogost describes one property of video games as “their ability to put us in someone else’s shoes” (18). As an educational model, the liberal arts has similar aims and outcomes. With its emphasis on interdisciplinary study and the centrality of the humanities, a liberal arts education presents its benefits as empathy, critical thinking, and social and global awareness. In recent years, the practicality of liberal arts education has been called into question, as students turn more toward pre-professional programs for job training and career placement. This turn has had the unfortunate result of producing students less aware and less capable of tackling global and social issues that require empathetic awareness. One solution to this erosion of empathy might come in the form of ethical simulation video games. Bogost claims that “Simulations used to celebrate realism. Now they help us see the space between reality and video games … . To call a game a simulation is always in part to divorce it from the excesses of enjoyment and to send it to work” (How to Talk 111–12). In simulation games, decision-making is the primary mode of gameplay, but in ethical simulation games, those decisions come with consequences, and how players feel about their decisions is important to the game experience and outcomes. In the discussion of games as ethical simulations that follow in this chapter, we explore two distinct methods for using games as a means for fostering students’ ability to reason through complex problems. In general, we propose adapting such games in literature courses, in which conventional reading and interactive gameplay form a complementary and enhanced pedagogy that allows students to apply their own decisions and creativity to issues introduced by the texts. Class discussion accounts for close readings, as well as the dynamic range of perspectives, contingencies, and consequences enabled by interactive simulation. By foregrounding design elements and player decision as ludic tools for exploring essential questions in environmental literature and ethics, Civilization V and SimEarth usher students toward that “space between reality and video games” that Bogost describes. Sweatshop, on the other hand, furnishes students with a platform for self-reflexive examinations when faced with ethical choices within a capitalist system that often obscures the impact of individual decisions. In these two ways, we intend to show the versatility of games as pedagogical tools that enhance students’ ability to walk in “someone else’s shoes” and, ultimately, foster sharper ethical awareness.

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Happiness Is a Hatchet In the Civilization series and other simulations of world domination, happiness often begins with a hatchet. The game of building a civilization opens at some hazy point in the Stone Age, and the player’s long train of decisions and actions frequently begins with commanding some idle forager to chop down a tree. With the wood from the tree, the player builds a farm. The farm expands into a market and then a town, whose expanding population chops down more trees, builds more farms, more towns. The player extracts stone and metal from mines to build cities, create new technologies, raise armies. Then the cities send their armies to capture more cities. The player razes more forests, builds more farms, digs more mines to satisfy the bottomless appetites of this teeming empire. The player devises entertainments for the citizens and constructs wonders to mesmerize them, ensuring their everlasting prosperity and happiness. One of the victory conditions in Civilization V, the most critically lauded iteration of Sid Meier’s long-established series, is “Utopia,” in which the player develops a concerted series of social policies, technologies, and architectural achievements that add up to permanent cultural hegemony, ending the game. In Civilization V as in life, happiness is the victory condition, the end goal of all our efforts. The game denotes the relative happiness of the people, sure enough with a smiley face icon that rises in value with the acquisition of luxuries, the construction of monumental buildings, and the creation of benevolent social policies. It falls with resource shortages, overcrowding, and war. For all its complexity, teachers might introduce Civilization V to students as a long series of investments to maximize the value of the smiley face: a utopian algorithm in which players navigate a complex decision tree, balance resources against desires, and lead their civilization toward ultimate happiness. And it all begins with that Paleolithic forager, the father of civilization, making his way to the nearest stand of trees, hatchet in hand.

More, Malthus, and the Growth Imperative What does this forager with his hatchet have to do with teaching environmental literature and ethics? In a way, Sid Meier simply provides a fluid visualization for the utopian algorithm that moral philosophers and economists have been gaming out for centuries. In his survey of early modern “ideal world narratives,” Utopia and the Ideal Society, J.C. Davis distinguishes works within this genre according to the particular way they reconcile limited resources with unlimited desires. Earthly paradises such as Eden or Cockaigne, Davis explains, simply elide the problem, imagining unlimited human desires satisfied by unlimited natural abundance. In Arcadian societies, human desire somehow never exceeds human needs, and natural contentment moderates the consumption of resources, perpetually preserving their abundance. Utopian narratives impose limits on desire with a code of laws or a social system that controls desire and rationally apportions resources in the interest of the greatest happiness for the greatest number (Davis 20–40). 112

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Davis discusses Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) as the primary example of a rational resolution to the problem of resource and desire through a just social system. More’s narrator, Raphael Hythloday, imagines the perfect society in the context of the imperfections of early modern Europe. The death penalty, Raphael begins, is “quite ineffective” because “no penalty on earth will stop people from stealing, if it’s their only way of getting food” (44). It would be more reasonable, Raphael argues, “to provide some means of livelihood, so that nobody’s under the frightful necessity of first becoming a thief, and then a corpse” (44). Raphael believes the root problem is the limit of available wealth or, more accurately, the inequitable and irresponsible mismanagement of limited wealth resulting from a flawed social order. Because the problem is a flawed system that fosters inequitable consumption and produces waste and disorder, Raphael proposes a new social order that sets resources and desire in balance. He recommends redistributing wealth, reviving agriculture, and eliminating unemployment as the first steps toward his perfect society. With lands divided equitably between cities and families on the island and production surpluses in wealthy cities distributed among other cities with greater need, Utopia seems to illustrate a resolution to Davis’s resource dilemma through a rational code of laws. A closer look, however, reveals an essential irrationality of More’s highly regulated society, which resonates as a fundamental cognitive and ethical dilemma in current environmental discourse. In fact, the Utopians do not really find a rational resolution to the problem of resource and desire. As Raphael explains, when the population of Utopia increases beyond the limits of its resources, the island does not impose stricter moral or social limits on its desire but rather expands into new territory and appropriates new resources to satisfy the demands of a growing population. If the natives will not adopt Utopian agriculture and law, they are “expelled,” and if they resist removal, the Utopians declare war. In other words, the solution to scarcity always lies beyond the far horizon, with more territory to feed the appetites of an ever-expanding civilization (More 79–81). For More, writing in the wake of the Columbian discovery, infinite growth seemed like a reasonable answer to any economic or social problem, something like expanding the border of an empire across more hexagons in Civilization V. He envisioned Europe on the edge of an illimitable plane stocked with more resources than any race could practically consume in many generations. Thomas Malthus, however, famously proved this assumption a form of magical thinking, a vision of Cockaigne essentially ignorant of the finitude of the planet. In his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus predicted that the geometric multiplication of people over time must inevitably outstrip the arithmetic increase in cultivated land and food supply. While colonies may answer immediate needs, and while we may ignore, like the Utopians, the moral quagmire of annexation, the absolute limit imposed by the size of the planet, however great, would eventually leave us with no more lands to colonize and cultivate, no place left to annex, ne plus ultra. Malthus concluded that “considering the present average state of the earth, the means of subsistence under circumstances most favorable to human industry, could not possibly be made to increase faster than in an arithmetic ratio,” leaving many 113

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millions “totally unprovided for.” As a result, the “strong law of necessity,” rather than a social contract, checks growth (Malthus). Malthus’s essay is the taproot for contemporary visions of catastrophic collapse resulting from overpopulation, resource exhaustion, and sociopolitical chaos. In this increasingly dominant narrative of the future, collapse always manifests itself as a fatal metastasizing of the growth imperative. Global warming represents only one component of a feedback loop of overpopulation and overconsumption, driven by the suicidal economic imperative of infinite growth. In the many expressions of this narrative, including Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” (1968), Herman Daly’s Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development (1996), Sing Chew’s The Recurring Dark Ages (2007), Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down (2006), and Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), the ideology of infinite growth represents the terminal malaise of modern civilization. As a form of magical thinking, it imagines a limitless number of people with the right to consume a limitless amount of resources. It recalls both More’s Utopia in its promise to dispel all want in an infinitely expanding colonialist dream world. Failing to recognize the fundamental physical limits of the planet to sustain life, the growth imperative violates reason, natural law, and our moral obligation to future generations, whom we place in jeopardy by our wanton misuse of the planet. And what about that forager with his hatchet? Civilization V, likewise, construes the progress and happiness of civilization as a function of limitless growth without consequences. For many prophets of catastrophic collapse, we can gauge the global tragedy of the commons most visibly in the deforestation that invariably attends the rise of great civilizations. Sid Meier’s game, for example, resonates with Sing Chew’s interpretation of environmental history. “Trees,” Chew explains, “have fueled the socioeconomic transformation of every social system,” providing the means to some to become world powers. As such, the overuse of trees represents the first and most reliable sign of a society approaching collapse. Deforestation causes soil erosion, agricultural stress, and a loss of biodiversity. Climatic shifts follow, leading finally to economic and political instability, the decline and displacement of human populations (Chew 45–65). In Collapse, Jared Diamond similarly attributes the rapid decline of other ancient societies, including Easter Island, the Maya, and Norse Greenland, primarily to wanton deforestation (107, 169, 248). Chew and Diamond suggest that collapse in Civilization is inscribed in the game’s initial moves, from the moment players click on the forager and send him to the trees.

­SimEarth and Alternative Ethical Paradigms But what if we could use classroom simulations to help students imagine a different first move, a different course of civilization that does not begin with a hatchet, that made the growth imperative seem less inevitable and more contingent upon the ethical choices we make? Will Wright’s classic SimEarth (1990), played in dialogue with Civilization V, 114

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or a comparable growth simulation, offers students one such alternative paradigm. Fundamentally, SimEarth is a simulation of complexity thinking, an attempt to illustrate in ludic form the interrelation between planetary systems and the cascading impact of industrial and technological development on the atmosphere, biosphere, and oceans. While the primary mechanic in Civilization V is the extraction of resources like wood, stone, and metal, the player’s first moves in SimEarth occur at the opposite end of the causal chain, with the adjustment of atmospheric gasses that determine the conditions for life on Earth and the subsequent course of evolution. Different mixtures create conditions that are hospitable to some taxa and lethal to others, and mammals do not necessarily play the leading role in the story of civilization. One of the most enchanting things about the game, in fact, is the way that it allows players to simulate many possible Earth histories with different life forms attaining sentience and building a technologically advanced civilization. Ticking up atmospheric oxygen, for example, might lead to the evolution of arthropods with body plans accommodating larger brains, and within a few million years lobsters are colonizing the stars. SimEarth not only features a nonanthropocentric narrative useful in classroom discussions of environmental ethics; it also invites students to think on time scales transcending human history. Whereas Civilization V follows a human narrative from deforestation to Utopia, SimEarth follows a planetary narrative from the coalescence of an atmosphere to the death of the sun. Developed in consultation with the environmental scientist James Lovelock, whose book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979), famously introduced the notion of planetary sentience, the game invites players to think about the life of the planet rather than the life of a civilization. Its victory condition is not cultural hegemony or maximum smiley faces but rather systemic balance that favors the evolution of many life forms. While Civilization V invites students to play with and ponder the extractive and consumptive logic that make for expansion and collapse, SimEarth invites them to expand their ethical consciousness beyond the growth imperative, toward nonhuman life and nonhuman time scales. Just as Meier’s simulation invites players to look back to More’s Utopia and the cultural roots of the growth imperative, Wright’s Gaia simulation shows students a path back to generations of environmental ethicists, from George Perkins Marsh and Aldo Leopold to Rachel Carson and E.O. Wilson. These theorists have sought a new algorithm for Utopia that respects the limits on human expansion, which allows students to understand the complex interrelations between planetary systems and extends the human ethical responsibility across scales transcending human scales of time. An especially lucid intersection between SimEarth and this ethical tradition appears in Lynn White, Jr.’s essay, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” which implicates Christianity in the perpetuation of the growth imperative through dogma that leads us to feel “superior to nature, contemptuous of it, willing to use it for our slightest whim.” White proposes instead the equality of all living things, embodied not in pagan animism but in the “radical” theology of Francis of Assisi, who proposed to “substitute the idea of the equality of all creatures, including man, for the idea of man’s limitless rule of creation” (White 6, 10). Although White and Lovelock stand on different epistemological 115

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foundations in their respective claims for the “equality of all creatures,” students may find in them occasion to interrogate and synthesize the religious, historical, ethical, and scientific claims underlying the vast literature contemplating the human place in creation and the games, like Civilization V and SimEarth, that bring this literature to life for students in new ways.

Little Sweatshop of Ethical Crisis Developed by Littleloud in 2011, Sweatshop is described as “a dark and comedic strategy game about offshore manufacturing” that “presents a series of moral dilemmas to the player, who must juggle the needs of clients with the welfare of the workers.” Part strategy game and part business simulation, the game positions the player as a mid-level manager who must “balance the unreasonable demands of Boss, the temperamental factory owner, and Boy, a gentle, hard-working child labourer” to meet ever-growing demands for clothing and accessories from their Western retail customers (“Sweatshop”). Games for Change describes Sweatshop as a serious game “littered with real facts about the fast fashion industry and aims to provoke teenagers into thinking about their fashion choices more carefully” and, according to Littleloud, introduces “worker types and real-world sweatshop problems such as fires, unions and the lack of toilets to add authenticity to the game mechanics” (“Sweatshop”). Game designers worked with the British charity Labour Behind the Label, a nonprofit campaign group aimed at raising awareness “on labour rights in the global garment industry” (“Who We Are”). Playing the game, however, does not prompt one to think about their fashion choices so much as their gaming choices. In his work on simulation games, Ian Bogost points to the origins of such games as rooted in mechanical activities such as flying planes, performing surgery, or “some variety of a career mode, allowing players to advance in their chosen expertise” (How to Talk 113). In this framework then, how does a simulation game teach ethics? Is it possible for players to feel complex emotions, such as guilt or shame, as a result of ethical choices they make in a game? Can players feel more emotions firsthand through gameplay than through other media such as literature and film? And, what can games teach us about the ethics of our life’s choices? At different levels, players are presented with ethical choices with financial and potentially deadly consequences. These choices range from hiring cheap unskilled child laborers who are prone to making mistakes and slower on the production line or hiring more expensive skilled adult laborers. Passing each level requires producing a certain quantity of quality items from shoes and handbags to hats and clothing. Selecting the child laborers, while cost effective, may result in slow production and poor-quality items. An additional twist is added at later levels when the middle-manager player must decide whether to provide workers with water, cooling fans, and first aid. Keeping the workers healthy and fit can increase profits, but each of these humane choices detracts from profit margins. A player may allow child workers to die on the assembly line from illness or injury because it is cheaper to replace them with new workers than to spend the 116

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money to treat or heal them. Throughout the game, players find themselves balancing profit with (virtual) human life. The top-down 2-D graphic design of Sweatshop relies upon rather cartoonish aesthetics, featuring flat character designs with exaggerated facial expressions and emotions that bely their stereotypes. At different points throughout the game, Boss, the factor owner, explodes into verbally abusive tirades against both the player and the workers, including such exclamations as “Dead workers are no use to me” (Sweatshop). With each level completed, anecdotal and factual data about global garment workers appears on the screen. The longer one plays, however, the faster one moves past such information to return to the game. In “Anthropological Video Games,” Betsy Morais details the game play experience as one of abstraction: “as I continued to play, I began to skip past [the Boss’s] angry monologues, as well as the interjections of a child worker who popped up at the bottom of the screen to plead for decent treatment … . The longer I played, the more each moving part—workers, children, hats—became abstracted into the image of one big machine.” In this, the player comes to embody fully the middle manager working ever toward promotion as part of the global supply chain. The real challenge of the game, therefore, is not to complete levels but to resist becoming a willing participant in exploitative labor practices. Even if one resists hiring child laborers, there are no other options if a player wishes to win. A player must hire child laborers, allow them to die from injury or illness, and then replace them with new ones. Hiring adult skilled laborers leads inevitably to uprisings and attempts at unionization, both of which slow or halt production, and thus a smaller profit margin. Introducing Sweatshop to undergraduate students is a rewarding experience. Students have a complex series of emotions and reactions to the strategy that the game demands, and these reactions can lead to important conversations not only about global labor practices but also about player emotions ranging from guilt and shame from the decisions they make within the game to happiness and pride at advancing within the game. In the liberal arts classroom, Sweatshop pairs well with literature about labor and the working class, such as Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills (1861), Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), as well as with contemporary nonfiction readings such as Erik Loomis’s A History of America in Ten Strikes (2018) and Dana Thomas’s Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes (2019). As an ethics simulation game, it is in league with other “serious games” such as the big business simulation Big Pharma (2015) and Papers, Please (2013), a game about immigration, border controls, and police. As a text, we might think of Sweatshop as a work of digital literature with characters, plot, setting, conflict, and action. Its reliance on second-person point of view is reinforced by other characters addressing the player, an experience that further integrates the player into the sweatshop business simulation experience. For example, when starting the game, Boss addresses the player: “Hey you, lazybones! Yeah, that’s right: YOU! My useless layabout factory manager handed in his notice today. I treated that guy like a SON, a SON I tell you. Oh, well. You’ll take his place. OK? Yes? OK? … Else, y’know, I’ll fire you too. BWHAHAHAHA” (Sweatshop). Such an 117

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introduction implies that the player is already a worker and therefore well-integrated into the factory system. The new role of middle manager, however, places players into a position of power through the options they select, and the game becomes a navigation of ethical choices and financial reward, an experience that is reinforced when the Boss returns to berate the player’s poor performance or when Boy pleads with the player to consider his safety and wellbeing. One of the ironies of Sweatshop is that the game opens with a broken factory system and it is the player’s task to make it functional again. In this, the game accords with Bogost’s idea that “You don’t play a game to experience an idea so much as you do so in an attempt to get a broken machine to work again” (How To Talk 1). Even as the game seeks to educate players about the exploitation of global garment workers, the goal is to keep the factory system and global supply chain operating. System breakdown is failure. Perhaps it is ironic then that, in December 2020 (a year in which the precarity of the global supply chain was on full display as a result of the pandemic), Adobe ceased support of Flash Player, and with that, Sweatshop, along with other Flash-supported games, broke down permanently. As of May 2021, many of these games have been rescued by Internet Archive and similar digital archive websites, and although Sweatshop remains inoperable at the current moment, there is a strong probability that it will be restored in the near future.

Towards Procedural Ethics In Persuasive Games, Bogost introduces the critical notion of “procedural rhetoric,” which he defines as “the practice of authoring arguments through processes … [in order] to change opinion or action” (29). While Bogost’s analysis focuses on ludic design as a means of making a political argument, we propose that games, in parallel fashion, can likewise inform ethical inquiry. As models of what we might call procedural ethics, games function in different but conversant ways with the objects of study in humanitiesbased disciplines central to the liberal arts education, such as history, literature, and philosophy, and their presence in the liberal arts classroom offers students and faculty new opportunities for ethical inquiry that puts into practice what other media, such as film and literature, can only theorize.

­Works Cited Bogost, Ian. How to Do Things with Videogames. U of Minnesota P, 2011. Bogost, Ian. How to Talk about Videogames. U of Minnesota P, 2015. Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games. MIT P, 2007. Chew, Sing C. The Recurring Dark Ages: Ecological Stress, Climate Changes, and System Transformation. AltaMira, 2007. Civilization V. Firaxis Games, 2010.

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Ethical Simulation Games Davis, J.C. Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing, 1516–1700. Cambridge UP, 1981. Diamond, Jared. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Penguin, 2005. Malthus, Thomas. “An Essay on the Principle of Population.” Library of Economics and Liberty. Liberty Fund, 2000, http://www.econlib.org/library/Malthus/malPop1.html. Morais, Betsy. “Anthropological Video Games.” New Yorker, Dec. 7, 2012. More, Thomas. Utopia (1516). Translated by Paul Turner, Penguin, 1965. SimEarth. Maxis, 1990. “Sweatshop.” Games for Change, http://www.gamesforchange.org/game/sweatshop/. Sweatshop. Littleloud, Web/Online, 2011. White, Lynn Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis.” The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, U of Georgia P, 1996, pp. 3–14. “Who We Are.” Labour behind the Label, https://labourbehindthelabel.org/who-we-are/Extra.

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­C HAPTER 11 PROCEDURAL BIBLIOGRAPHY: A LUDOLITERARY PEDAGOGY FOR THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOOK

Chloe Anna Milligan

The continued development of video games as industry and art presents perhaps the best argument that literature isn’t just for books anymore. But even if artistic and/or academic snobbery admits that literature can exist beyond the book, too many are still arguing over whether that means video games themselves can qualify. These questions over “what counts” or not can be presumptive and tedious. Even so, the pedagogical use of video games in the literature classroom should encourage interrogations into what we consider the teaching of literature (broadly construed both in and out of books) is intended to accomplish. Are we training students to read broadly and deeply, to hone the critical thinking skills that close reading can develop, and to appreciate the meaning making capabilities of literary media? Or are we merely reinforcing canons and rewarding literary pretension by making it our purpose to preserve The Way of the Book, narrowly conceived? Video games offer, in service of a more forward-thinking literary pedagogy, a digital contemporary means for expanding the applicability of wide sampling, critical thinking, close reading, and meaning making. So not just literature, but literary skillsets too aren’t just for books anymore. This volume of essays offers several justifications for the ways in which video games contribute effectively to the literature classroom; I want to leave readers of this chapter a way to teach students and to perhaps learn themselves that video games and/as literature can teach us something new about books in overwhelmingly digital cultures—and, of course, why that meaningfully, materially matters. I focus most prominently here on video games with aesthetic and procedural emphases on the manipulation of remediated print artifacts, for these games test a way for thinking about the book outside the book. They do so through ludic, or playful, mechanics that narratively scaffold thematic explorations of how human subjectivity and bookish representation intersect. In that case, the importance of manipulation cannot be understated. Video games are regularly theorized as an interactive medium; they require human activity and prioritize action—they “are actions” (Galloway 2, emphasis in original). But too much game scholarship has treated previous “old” media (books) and their associated practices (reading) as passive experiences in complete contrast to video games. Games “that reference print culture metamedially” therefore present a necessary corrective that suggests print artifacts can be interactive and the action of reading them is often an experience of physical manipulation (Ensslin 164). So, to help students learn how video games have become a new form of literature,

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I recommend teaching these types of bookish games in tandem with experimental print literary texts that similarly deconstruct the affordances of the book form through embodied interaction. I have derived a pedagogical tool for this type of instruction from the scholarly discipline of book history and combined it with game studies in an effort to question how a book history of more than books might include video games. Relearning literature, from print to digital and game to book, as an exercise in materiality that explores the corporeal and cultural connotations of its representational technologies, should, of course, be a playful enterprise. In this chapter, I propose a new pedagogical concept for the teaching of video games in the literature classroom: procedural bibliography. To coin this term I extend the methodologies of “physical bibliography” (the study of books as physical objects) as a “literary subdomain” to the analysis of video games (Hancock et al. 74). Procedural bibliography, as I adapt it from Ian Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric (how video games present arguments through processes), in turn is the textual study of in-game, remediated print artifacts players must interact with to advance the story. I posit procedural bibliography as my “ludoliterary” (ludic + literary) pedagogy for demonstrating how video games can pair with—and be—experimental literature through multimodal emphasis of materiality (Ensslin 4). This format of close reading beyond the book can craft classrooms that critically emphasize the material textualities of print and digital literature. In my own classroom, I teach students to analyze and question the primacy of the book object in literary study across both print and digital media. This chapter describes a brief course sequence that contextualizes procedural bibliography in the avant-garde print literary tradition before it, explores its uses in classic and contemporary video-game examples, and applies it in a literary game creation assignment. This pedagogical trajectory demonstrates to students a continuum between literature and video games that hybridizes more than transcends distinct print and/or digital media. Students thus learn from my ludoliterary pedagogy for thinking outside the book to reevaluate both print literature and digital games in light of each other as culturally intertwined, similarly interactive, and hands-on, traditions.

Bibliography, Procedurality, (Ludo)literariness The kinds of classrooms I create draw on the interdisciplinarity of the larger English subject area we situate literature within. I design courses in which literature interacts with book history, digital humanities, and media studies in ways that deepen the impacts of their humanistic learning outcomes. In these spaces students come to understand what literature and video games have to offer each other as meaning-making exercises on similar aesthetic trajectories. I can especially testify to this interdisciplinary strength in my career of integrating digital media in literature courses and literature in digital media courses. These experiences frame my formation of procedural bibliography by drawing from seemingly disparate subjects to enhance how I teach both print literature and digital games. My pedagogy pulls from the subdomains of book history, game 122

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studies, and electronic literature to frame this new concept for classrooms and scholarly conversations. Book history offers a crucial corporeal corrective for steering literary scholarship away from the long legacy of hyperfocus on only the linguistic qualities of literature. We can help students see the importance of materiality to literary meaning in what feels like increasingly digitally dematerialized times by (re)turning attention to the technology of the book itself. If “things … shape our access to what we read and how we construct our mental universes through them” (Piper x), then the book has long been the primary interface for literature in specific material ways that frame our subjective reception of its texts. That reception is of course cognitive on some level, but it too is cognitively embodied and occurs at the level of feeling where the closeness of close reading literalizes through physical contact. In this case, the physical, material, tactile thingness of the book is crucial to the concerns of (print) literature. Andrew Piper goes so far as to say that “books are things that hold things. They are proxies for our hands” (11). Getting our hands on these proxies is the first step of physical bibliography, what Kari Kraus calls “a hands-on discipline” (Hancock et al. 74). She and her co-authors explain: To study the book as a material object, then, is to make use of the hands. Such “tinker-centric pedagogy,” as Jentery Sayers calls it (2011, 279), deepens the alterity relation by enabling us to engage more fully with the thingness of books—with their tactility as much as their visual properties. The tactile experience draws on an expanded range of gestures and manual operations to reveal the secrets of the book’s material composition. (Hancock et al. 74–5, emphasis in original) Study of the book intersects with the analysis of literature when we encounter experimental print texts that make alterity relations an inseparable part of their thematic points. Alterity relations, according to Kraus and company, are the affective effects of “intrusive technolog[ies]—one in which the medium continually distracts us from the message, or the object relentlessly asserts its status as object”—they “allow us to look at a technology, rather than through it or with it” (Hancock et al. 74, emphasis in original). But avant-garde literature often works with the at, thus reenacting Marshall McLuhan’s endlessly cited motto: “The medium is the message” (7). To wit, we cannot think outside the book without first taking stock of it. Book history deepens what Lisa Gitelman calls our Paper Knowledge, especially when we move beyond the revered codex to treat more “lowly” forms just as seriously (13). This book history of more than books and the experimental print literary texts I teach along its timeline help us arrive at the unexpected destination of bookish video games. Piper assesses the double bind of this kind of intermedial scholarship by saying that “historians of the book who stray into the fields of digital media are disciplined by accusations of anachronism. Media historians who stray into the world of books are threatened with irrelevance” but he moves forward anyway to “attempt to bridge that divide” (xii). The classrooms I create always fit at the juncture of this tension, so I too move forward, now onto discussion of game studies. 123

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Game studies has long been a field with a bit of a “will they, won’t they” relationship with literature, but I situate my contributions to it firmly on the side of they will. Espen Aarseth famously harrumphed that “Even if important insights can be gained from the study of extraliterary phenomena with the instruments of literary theory (cautiously used), it does not follow that these phenomena are literature and should be judged with literary criteria or that the field of literature should be expanded to include them” (15– 16). Past disciplinary turf wars within the field over narratology versus ludology illustrate the historically bad blood some game scholars have stirred up fighting for independently recognized academic legitimacy. But there are just as many leading voices in game studies with less antagonism for literature, such as Anastasia Salter, who helpfully suggests that “drawing clear distinctions between games and other media, such as books and film, was at first essential to appreciating what video games can do that other media do not so readily offer, which is interactivity. However, the desire to divorce play from seemingly passive experiences like reading can lead one to overlook the hybrid roles in between” (7). To recognize the aesthetic richness of this hybridity, I adapt Ian Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric to purposes far beyond his aims. Let’s delve now into the still useful raw material of procedural rhetoric as a concept ripe for tweaking. Procedural rhetoric describes the way that video-games function as rhetorical artifacts. Bogost defines it as “the practice of authoring arguments through processes. Following the classical model, procedural rhetoric entails persuasion—to change opinion or action. Following the contemporary model, procedural rhetoric entails expression—to convey ideas effectively” (125). Given that “video games make arguments with processes,” then “procedural rhetoric is the practice of effective persuasion and expression using processes” (125). By way of brief explanation, the rules and mechanics of particular video games and what they allow, as well as what they do not, make implicit arguments about certain social, cultural, and political realities. The first example that Bogost offers is the social simulation game Animal Crossing (2002), which “creates a representation of everyday life in which labor and debt are a part” of the structured play (122–3). In these games and all others, we understand “the practice of procedurality to craft representations through rules, which in turn create possibility spaces that can be explored through play” (Bogost 122). The chief limitation of Bogost’s concept is that he often discusses procedural rhetoric almost exclusively through treatment of code and hardware. I join Aubrey Anable in an effort not to shy away from “analyzing how video games matter as representations and how they are bound up with contemporary subjectivities” (xv). Attending to video games through affect, their thingness understood not as objective objects but material interfaces for subjective feeling, can provide “a way to read across code, images, and bodies without reducing video games to either their representational qualities or their digital and mechanical properties” (Anable xv–xvi). In bookish video games where procedurality (how play is structured) meets bibliography (what textual artifacts are represented), a more affective rhetoric of gameplay negotiates with literary goals can emerge. According to Astrid Ensslin, “in computer games/gaming as literary art … literary and poetic techniques are employed in order to explore the affordances and limitations of rules. Literary gaming therefore implements Bogost’s … concept of procedural rhetoric in that 124

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it involves artifacts—part  game, part digital literature—that are persuasive” (36). We see then, as I regularly tell my students, that literature too is rhetorical. We can further understand digital literature like video games as digital rhetoric by turning to electronic literature as a field that stretches across multiple camps. Electronic literature, often abbreviated to “e-lit” or digital literature in the European academy, is how I came to understand the (hyper)link between literature and video games. N. Katherine Hayles, in her primer on the form and field, posits that “electronic literature, generally considered to exclude print literature that has been digitized, is by contrast ‘digital born,’ a first-generation digital object created on a computer and (usually) meant to be read on a computer” (3). Many genres of e-lit in new varieties of new media offer aesthetic content in conversation with the literary traditions influencing them and thus shake up the bookish assumptions often brought to literature. The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO), founded in 1999, tracked examples of this practice dating back at least as far as Michael Joyce’s hypertext novel, afternoon, a story (1987). Acknowledging e-lit in the literature classroom helps students learn through the literary to appreciate critical aspects of digital media so many of us uncritically use day in and out. So too can it prompt a fresh look back at the book as the traditionally approved literary vessel. The constant attention to metatextuality and materiality in e-lit as a critical and creative exercise prompted me to rethink my relationship to books as physical texts and not just invisible containers of words. That being said, however, e-lit and most of the texts that the ELO promotes as its canon are academically insular affairs, often made for scholars by scholars. As a result, they are often difficult to access both aesthetically and practically, due to their avant-garde sensibility and dependence on software that is vulnerable to technological obsolescence. To put it bluntly, few have heard of e-lit, making it a hard sell for students accustomed to more “traditional” (i.e., bookbound) literary forms. Video games, on the other hand, constitute a multibillion-dollar medium ever gaining in popularity. And despite notable skepticism from e-lit’s old guard, video games are gaining critical standing in the field too, thanks to scholars such as Salter and Ensslin. So, in spite of e-lit’s obscurity, exposing those trained in more canonically approved approaches to literature to a few of its classics can ease the transition from literature to video games. Video games as a form of electronic, or digital, literature can teach us something new about (ludo)literariness. These literarinesses lead toward pedagogies for the critical combination of books and games in “novel” ways. The term literariness, or the determination of what makes a work a literary work, was first coined by Russian Formalist Roman Jacobson. Victor Schlovsky believed that literariness was accomplished through defamiliarization (“ostranenie” in Russian). Defamiliarization is the artistic technique of presenting common things in a strange new light to prompt new perspectives on them. Experimental print literature enacts defamiliarization through the (deconstruction of the) material form of the book itself. Meeting literary video games in the middle through these types of avant-garde print texts reveals a trajectory of defamiliarization that makes us rethink both books and games. Ensslin states that “literariness, if and when applied to computer games, 125

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tends to be embedded in ludic-mechanic structures, much in the same way that ludicity in electronic literature is embedded in specific literary macrostructures” (6, emphasis in original). E-lit as an interface between experimental print literature and literary games therefore maps a territory for ludoliterariness: what makes this text a “literary-ludic hybrid” (Ensslin 6)? My formation of procedural bibliography presents a ludoliterary pedagogy that embraces the aesthetic play we find beyond strict delineations between print and digital, game and book.

Playing Books and Reading Games In this final section, I illustrate the application of these interdisciplinary scholarly aims in a course sequence that I have taught in various literature and digital media courses and am still tinkering with. I begin with discussion of how I teach specific experimental print literary texts, then a central focus on the uses and learning objectives of procedural bibliography in my approach to various video games, and finally a brief description of a game making assignment that translates the critical concerns of the course into a creative outlet. The course sequence I call “Thinking Outside the Book” starts with print literary examples of deconstructing the book form. Students read William S. Burroughs’s “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin” (1963), and then practice the technique with that day’s newspaper and a pair of scissors to learn how hands-on avant-garde composition can be beyond typically disembodied notions of reading and writing as mental exercises. After that comes B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969), a “book in a box” full of loose-leaf pages to be read in almost any order, which usually prompts a discussion of what “counts” as a book. Next is typically Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee (1982), a searingly brilliant novel that interrogates Cha’s estrangement from her identity as a Korean American woman through the format of the book itself, which helps students come to understand how experimental print texts can exhibit activist poetics. Sections include poetry in untranslated languages; photographs, images, and diagrams; pages that have to be read then reread in hypertextual order; a poetic effect that relies upon the translucence of the page, which allows the black text from the next page to superimpose; and much more. Students then read Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine (1991), which requires the reader to pull letters out of envelopes on certain pages to recreate the narrative effect of the titular characters’ Extraordinary Correspondence, a text providing a different angle on the long literary tradition of epistolary novels. And last, we conclude this unit with Anne Carson’s Nox (2010), her accordion book epitaph for her brother by way of translating Catullus’s “Poem 101.” This text creates an exciting opportunity to share with students nonwestern histories of book and printmaking, as Carson’s text is clearly inspired by the Japanese orihon style. These various texts prepare students for the work of critically close reading and analyzing games because they have by this point been learning to read in playful ways that push the limits of the book form. And more

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specifically, it frames the introduction of procedural bibliography well because students now are hyper aware of a wide variety of document styles. Transitioning from print to digital to digital print, I then discuss what procedural bibliography offers the ludoliterary analysis of a few different games. My specific learning objectives for procedural bibliography train students to ask: 1. What types, forms, and genres of books, book-adjacent, and/or other print artifacts do I encounter in this game? What is their role in this game’s ludoliterary experience? 2. What are the typical associations or assumptions we bring to our understanding of these kinds of print artifacts? How does the game’s story and/or mechanics play off those understandings? 3. What does the fact that this game presents digitally remediated print artifacts highlight or nuance about our associations, assumptions, understandings, etc. of these bookish forms? 4. What does this game ultimately teach us about reading, playing, reading-asplaying? What does it teach us about the material forms (books, video games, print, digital, etc.) for these ludoliterary methods, or about the concepts of embodiment and affect imbricated in both form and method? 5. What do we learn about literature, video games, and video-game-as-literature from playing this game? These questions that I believe procedural bibliography can equip us to ask and answer are what form the discourse around video games and/as literature in my classroom. Here I provide a brief survey of what kinds of games I teach and what procedural bibliography teaches us about them. I find I cannot teach this concept without first covering a brief history of Infocom’s (1979–89) “feelies,” which were included with their text-based interactive fiction games. Feelies were print and/or other physical materials included with their games that served as paratexts for extending the diegesis of gameplay into “the real world.” This practice was then turned outside in with graphically supported bookish games, such as Robyn and Rand Miller’s Myst (1993). Myst, one of the most famous computer games of all time, casts players as an unnamed Stranger, transported to Myst Island to solve puzzles using linking books that teleport them around the island; players discover pages ripped out of magical books that have people trapped inside them. But these aren’t the only books players read, as there’s also a bookshelf stacked with texts crucial to filling in the Island’s backstory, not just through written histories but also through completely destroyed, illegible books hinting at the apocalypse that befell the island before players arrived. From this mechanic, players learn to see how books (with or without words) serve as narrative extensions that better depict what gameplay cannot. I then introduce students to Fullbright Studio’s Gone Home (2013), in which they play as Katie trying to discover where her sister Sam has disappeared to by searching a house she’s never been to. Set in the early 1990s, the house is replete with various personal writings full of clues for solving certain puzzles. But more than that, 127

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students learn from encountering these documents how different handwriting stands in for characters’ personalities as an embodied trace of subjectivity. I pair this game with Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please (2013), in which players become a border patrol agent for the fictional country of Arstotska in 1982, heavily coded as an alternate historical Soviet Union. Much of this game involves reading, quickly but closely, because the immigrants’ lives and livelihoods literally depend on it, as the border patrol agent processes passports and other official documents to decide who gets in and who does not, all so they can house and feed their family. This game offers an excellent case study for procedural bibliography because the rules structuring its play experience directly relate to the textual artifacts representing it: both work together to make an argument about dehumanizing bureaucratic processes and the fate of the undocumented from 1982 to today. And last but never least, I teach Eliza Velasquez and Casey Gu’s OneShot (2016). In OneShot players control the catlike child Niko working to relight the sun of his world, but players play as themselves. Niko refers to the player by name (how does he know it? from the username the player’s PC is registered to) and requires the players’ help with puzzles that send them out of the game and into their files, onto their desktops, etc., for digital documents that demonstrate how print gets remediated in and out of bookish games. Players play by navigating files on their computers, like so many of us do all the time without thinking about why they are called documents, filed in folders, etc. as print metaphors digitally pile up. Does this make OneShot an eBookish game? Each of these games reveals something unique about affective and embodied approaches to both reading and playing through procedural bibliography. Students culminate this analytical work by applying its lessons in a literary game they design themselves. I utilize the hypertext editing software Twine for this assignment, given how Porpentine says that “Twine is the closest we’ve come to a blank page. It binds itself and it can bind itself along an infinite number of spines extending in any direction.” Twine is crucial for my purposes because, as a software for the creation of text-based games it combines the properties of both literary text and procedural rhetoric in an introductory manner for students. Plus, on a practical level, the coding knowledge required to create a good game is minimal, thus allowing students to focus on its representational qualities and feel less intimidated by programming proficiency. I allow them to make their game about whatever they want as long as its plot or mechanics reinforces metanarrative awareness of their game’s material textuality. Alongside their game, they must turn in an artist’s statement detailing their intent behind their game composition and no less than three examples of feelies for paratextually externalizing its storyworld. Both within and outside of the game they create, this assignment performs the purpose of procedural bibliography as game-specific artifacts scaffold the gameplay. In the books they play, games they read, and stories they make, I hope students learn from my courses that ludic mechanics are as important as material textualities in literary games. In this chapter, I have endeavored to demonstrate what my ludoliterary pedagogy of procedural bibliography can facilitate for the teaching of video games in the literature classroom. As students learn to think outside the book, they should come to understand something new about games and play through print literary texts. And they should 128

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furthermore learn something more about the matter and mattering of books and print through literary video games. Literary media, from print to digital, from game to book, is not encountered just through the conditions and requirements of readability and/or playability; it takes place across physical, material, tactile surfaces, even digital screens where we paradoxically come to understand “the feel of not to feel it” (Stewart 3). This final point is to me the most important to finish upon: that I hope to teach students something new about books through video games, to pedagogically act out the conditions of digitality continually reshaping our reading habits, rhetorical concepts, and literature classrooms. Thinking outside the book, as I describe it, an ethos of which procedural bibliography is only one part, may be the only way left to really think about books, or reading, or literature now. And that’s not a scary thing; this is not a lament. Literature is not just for books anymore, and that’s a good thing. Reading/playing literary, bookish games provides a digital/print means to process where literature has been as we keep teaching where it’s going.

Works Cited Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Johns Hopkins UP, 1997. Anable, Aubrey. Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect. U of Minnesota P, 2018. Bogost, Ian. “The Rhetoric of Video Games.” The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning, edited by Katie Salen, MIT P, 2008, pp. 117–40. Ensslin, Astrid. Literary Gaming. MIT P, 2014. Galloway, Alexander R. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. U of Minnesota P, 2006. Gitelman, Lisa. Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. Duke UP, 2014. Hancock, Charity, and Kari Kraus, et al. “Bibliocircuitry and the Design of the Alien Everyday.” Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation, vol. 8, no. 1, 2013, pp. 72–100. Hayles, N. Katherine. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. U of Notre Dame P,  2008. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. MIT P, 1994. Piper, Andrew. Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times. U of Chicago P, 2012. Porpentine. “Creation under Capitalism and the Twine Revolution.” Nightmare Mode, Nov. 25, 2012, http://nightmaremode.thegamerstrust.com/2012/11/25/creation-under-capitalism/. Salter, Anastasia. What Is Your Quest? From Adventure Games to Interactive Books. U of Iowa P,  2014. Sayers, Jentery. “Tinker-Centric Pedagogy in Literature and Language Classrooms.” Collaborative Approaches to the Digital in English Studies, edited by Laura McGrath, Utah State UP, 2011, pp. 279–300. Stewart, Garrett. The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text. U of Chicago P, 2006.

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­PART III GAMING IDENTITY AND IDEOLOGY IN THE LITERATURE CLASSROOM

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­C HAPTER 12 TEACHING THE IÑUPIAQ VIDEO GAME NEVER ALONE AND/AS LITERATURE

Natalie Neill

While films and graphic novels have long been used in literature classrooms to teach visual storytelling, the practice of using video games to achieve this goal is “only just starting to gain traction” among those of us who teach literature (Clutton 1). Inspired by scholarship on video games and learning (e.g., Squire; Dial-Driver, Emmons, and Ford), I decided to take the plunge and include a video game—the award-winning puzzle platformer, Never Alone—in an introductory literature course for English majors and non-majors in 2019. Based on Native Alaskan oral storytelling, Never Alone was created in collaboration with Iñupiaq elders and the Cook Inlet Tribal Council. It features two player characters, a girl named Nuna and her pet fox, who undertake a quest across the frozen tundra to discover the source of a blizzard that has ravaged Nuna’s village (see Figure  12.1). Students were expected to play the game, which is available for Android, iPhone, PC, and gaming consoles, and to read the unipchaaq (legend) “Kunuuksaayuka” upon which it is based. Over two classes, we explored the similarities and differences among video games, oral stories, and literature, considering how the greater interactivity of games affects narrative elements. We also analyzed “Kunuuksaayuka” as told by legendary storyteller Robert Nasruk Cleveland and transcribed by his daughter, Minnie Gray, putting the story in dialogue with the game adaptation. As someone who has little experience with playing video games, much less teaching them, including the game felt somewhat risky. However, I approached it as a fun experiment in teaching and learning in the spirit of James M. Lang’s philosophy of “small teaching.” In Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning, Lang argues that even a small modification to course design and teaching, such as trying out a new method, exercise, or text, can enhance students’ learning and increase their engagement. By adding the game, I hoped to catch the interest of students by introducing a new element to a course I had taught for several years. I embarked on the experiment with several questions in mind: How much technical expertise is needed to teach a video game effectively? (Did I have enough?) What new methods and critical vocabularies are required when we teach and analyze narrative games? Are post-millennial students as digitally literate as they seem? What knowledge, skills, and insights are we expecting students to acquire when we assign a game? This chapter describes the pedagogical approaches I took in teaching Never Alone, as well as what I discovered about the benefits and challenges of including video games in course “reading lists.”

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Figure 12.1  The Player Characters Nuna and Fox from Never Alone © E-Line Media and Upper One Games, 2014

Never Alone: Choice of Game and Approach Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna) by Upper One Games joins classic side-scrolling gameplay with the traditional lore of Alaska Native culture. Released in 2014, it is the first in a “new genre of ‘World Games’ that draw fully upon the richness of unique cultures to create complex and fascinating game worlds for a global audience” (http:// neveralonegame.com/). The idea for Never Alone originated with Iñupiaq elders and members of other Alaskan Indigenous groups who collaborated with video game publisher E-Line Media (Bledstein 2). The game’s lead writer is Ishmael Angaluuk Hope, whose script adapts Cleveland’s version of “Kunuuksaayuka.” In the game, storyteller James Mumigan Nageak narrates the adventure in voiceover. The story also progresses through intertitles, and its plot shapes the gameplay. The collaborative design of the game is reflected in its cooperative gameplay, which allows the player to switch back and forth between Nuna and the fox to solve puzzles. Players can also play with a partner in “co-op mode.” Whichever approach is taken, collaboration and teamwork are key: players must “rely on the unique skills of each character to succeed in [the] quest. Nuna can climb ladders and ropes, move heavy obstacles, and throw her bola [a throwing weapon] at targets to solve puzzles. Fox can fit through small areas that Nuna can’t reach, scramble up walls, and jump to great heights” (http://neveralonegame.com/game/). A particularly interesting feature of the game, several short videos, referred to as “Cultural Insights,” are unlocked as Nuna and the fox move from one level to the next. These Cultural Insights are miniature documentaries in which Iñupiaq tribe members explain various aspects of their culture and belief system. The game has been praised for its “stunning visual beauty,” its aesthetics inspired by Native Alaskan art, most notably by the “traditional scrimshaw carvings that Inupiaq use to record and share their stories across generations” (Colleps 141), which are described in one of the first Cultural Insight clips. 134

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I chose Never Alone for several reasons. First, the game is thoughtfully designed and narrative based (my most important criteria). The fact that it is an adaptation of a short story makes it an especially good fit for a literature class. Screen adaptations are often included in literature classrooms to help “explicate the text” (Cartmell and Whelehan 2), but they can be used more interestingly to teach the features of different storytelling media and to develop students’ skills in comparative analysis, both of which were intended outcomes of the Never Alone unit. Never Alone has the added benefit of being an Indigenous game. I teach at a large university with a diverse student body, and it is important for reading lists to be diverse and inclusive both so that students will see themselves represented in the texts they are assigned and so that they will have the opportunity to learn about traditions and perspectives that are not their own. The Cook Inlet Tribal Council developed Never Alone to preserve and share Iñupiaq culture: the goal was to use a twenty-first-century entertainment medium to promote “cultural pride” in Iñupiaq youth (Bledstein 2). “I hope [the game] will touch young Alaska Native people,” remarks Ishmael Hope, and “do its humble part to unlock centuries of oppression and colonization of indigenous people. We need more positive images of ourselves and we need more equal collaborations and opportunities such as the one this game provides” (Hope). The cultural and educational aspects of the game appealed not only to me, but also to my students. On our online discussion board, one student volunteered: “I really like that you get to unlock videos and learn more about the culture as you progress further into the game.” Another student agreed: “I enjoyed watching all the video snippets[;] it helped me gain knowledge while playing the game. The videos really highlight … what the Inupiat cherish and how they live their day-to-day life surrounded by nature.” Certainly, Never Alone is a welcome change from the reductive stereotypes of Indigenous people found in many video games, from Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter to the mobile game Survival Island 3 (Bledstein 2–3; Clutton 2). In fact, with the history of racism in mind, Mark Clutton used Never Alone in his twelfth-grade English class to “[encourage] discussions about cultural depictions” (2). Whose story is being told, how, and by whom? These are questions worth asking about works of literature and stories in any form. I also chose Never Alone because it is easy to purchase, download, and play on a personal device or computer—important practical considerations. Never Alone can be downloaded onto a smartphone or PC from the online gaming platform Steam. Registering on Steam is free; the game itself costs about the same as a book. It is a relatively short game. According to one reviewer, it can be completed within three to six hours (Reinhard), which is a reasonable amount of time to expect students to spend on a text that will be covered in two weeks. Moreover, while the game is challenging enough to engage experienced gamers, it is not so difficult as to discourage those who are new to gaming. As Andrew Reinhard explains, “[s]tripped of its one-of-a-kind story, the game is one long jumping-puzzle.” From a technical standpoint, the challenge consists of figuring out how to complete the level and then “press[ing] the proper buttons … at exactly the right time to make a successful leap to safety” (Reinhard; see Figure 12.2). Students were asked to acquire the game and to play it before class, just as they had been expected to buy (or borrow) and read books on their own. Even though the game 135

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Figure 12.2  Nuna and Fox Leaping across Ice Floes from Never Alone © E-Line Media and Upper One Games, 2014

was chosen with accessibility in mind, I knew that some students might not have the ability or technology required to play it. So, while I encouraged students to play the game if they could (at least the first few levels), I also shared links to several full-length walkthroughs so that everyone could participate in class discussions. A Google search using the terms “Never Alone walkthrough” helped me to find the walkthroughs, most of which were approximately two hours long (the length of a feature-length movie). In terms of organization, I divided the two-week unit by topic. In the first week, we discussed the general features of video games and the relationship between video games and literature. I used Never Alone as a point of reference, but I also encouraged students to draw from their knowledge of other games. For the second week, students were expected to read “Kunuuksaayuka” and consider the game as an adaptation. I started the unit by explaining that this was my first time including a game in a literature course and that I would be seeking student feedback when we finished. I found that being open with my students made them more invested in their learning experience. They seemed excited about participating in a teaching and learning pilot project. I did not conceal my relative inexperience: I have played the game and conducted research, but I am not a video game expert. My honesty about this set appropriate expectations about my technical knowledge, as well as the amount of technical knowledge I expected students to have—which was none at all. It also created an opening for the more experienced gamers among the students to share their expertise, something I made a point of seeking during discussions. Playing the Story: Teaching Literature through Video Games In Understanding Video Games, Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susana Pajares Tosca review recent research on the educational use of games (232–44). They discuss both “edutainment” games designed to teach specific skills 136

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like math or problem solving, which “can be clearly mapped onto a curriculum,” as well as commercial games that can be used for educational purposes even though they were not designed for that purpose (e.g., using SimCity to teach urban planning principles) (232). In both cases, they argue, the teacher’s role is “imperative”: “video games should not be thought of as explicitly educational, but as tools which provide opportunities for interested teachers” (241). “This is especially true,” they continue, “of [games] which find their way into educational settings … and which have not been developed with the curriculum explicitly in mind” (241). The teacher’s role is to provide “facilitation or scaffolding” that will help “students in meeting specific learning objectives in playing the game” (241). In literature classrooms, video games are arguably most valuable as texts to be studied, that is, as objects of analysis—an idea that Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Smith, and Tosca do not consider in their discussion of the pedagogic value of games. I asked my students to analyze Never Alone, in short to “read” it, much as they had read previous texts on the course. Because the course was an introduction to literary study, the outcomes included identifying the characteristics of different literary forms and genres; understanding the basic elements of fiction; and—most importantly—honing the ability to think and write comparatively about a broad range of texts. When I introduced the unit on Never Alone, I began by asking rhetorically, “Why are we studying a video game in a literature course?” I then explained why I included the game and how it fit into the course objectives: namely, by considering how narrative elements operate in other storytelling media, we can better grasp how literature works. An entirely new critical vocabulary is not needed to discuss games in the context of a literature classroom; however, it is helpful to introduce some new terms. When the students and I analyzed the graphic novel Maus in an earlier unit, I provided a handout of basic comics terms (e.g., “panel,” “gutter,” “spread”) taken from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. The terms helped us to discuss Maus in a way that was attentive to formal characteristics. Similarly, at the beginning of the Never Alone unit, I defined a few key video game concepts, including “cut-scene,” “gameplay,” “gamespace,” “interactivity,” “levels,” “ludology,” “narratology,” and “platform games.” The glossary at the back of Understanding Video Games served as a useful resource (285–88), as did Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron’s The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies. To provide a further critical framework for analysis, I gave students an overview of scholarly conversations in the field of video game studies. For example, we discussed Johan Huizinga’s oft-cited “magic circle” theory of games, which is introduced in his early study Homo Ludens (57). According to this theory, to engage in a game is to “enter into … a magic circle … cut off from the outside world” (Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al. 29)— an idea that prompted a lively warm-up discussion when presented together with the opposing view of games as not “separate from the outside world,” but as “reflections of culture” (Egenfeldt-Nielsen et  al. 33). Students were quick to point out that while some players may approach Never Alone as escapist entertainment, the game is clearly an expression of Alaskan Native culture. The real-world coordinates are thrown into relief 137

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by the Cultural Insights videos. I prompted students to share examples of how other video games (from first-person shooters to survival horror games) reflect, perhaps less intentionally, the culture from which they come. Even more relevant to the learning outcomes, I described what Souvik Mukherjee calls the “ludology-narratology debate” (91): in brief, ludologists approach games as games, whereas narratologists study games as yet another kind of narrative with unique underlying structures. (For outlines of the debate, see Mukherjee 4–9 and EgenfeldtNielsen et al. 214–16.) I told students that we would be approaching Never Alone from a narratological perspective, but that one of our main tasks would be to reflect on how the game differs from other narratives we had studied simply because it is a game. In other words, students were prompted not only to consider Never Alone in terms of narrative elements like setting, plot, character, and point of view, but also to consider the specificity of the video game medium. Through mini-lectures interspersed with discussions, we explored the relationship between games and literature. Although narrative video games may incorporate the written word, the story is conveyed primarily through moving images and sound (ambient sound, sound effects, music, and vocalization, including voiceover narration). Moreover, games include distinctive narrative devices like cut-scenes and levels. The former interrupt the gameplay to provide information or to establish a new location; the latter are the “unit[s] of place (and time) in the progression of a game” (Picard 99). Video game elements have analogues in other narrative forms. For example, the levels of a game can be likened to the chapters in a book. However, the comparison is imperfect because levels are not simply divisions of narrative; rather, they are the “subspaces inside the more general game world” (Picard 99). In Never Alone, the levels represent the various Arctic settings through which Nuna and Fox travel. As such, Never Alone is more like a “playable map” (Picard 99) than a chaptered book. The most significant difference between narrative games and other kinds of narratives is that games require the participation of the individual in a way that other stories do not. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman define a game as “a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome” (80). Their definition is a useful way to consider what sets video games apart most from literary narratives: namely interactivity. Conflict (external or internal) is an essential ingredient in both literary narratives and most narrative games. That said, when we engage with a video game, we do not simply read about the conflicts of others; instead, we participate vicariously by controlling characters. Similarly, prose narratives have rules in the sense that there are literary conventions, but those are not like the rules in a video game, which determine how the player characters can be made to act. Finally, in a video game, the story is not told just for its own sake; rather, it provides an imaginative context for the gameplay. The story is there to explain the mission or quest (the “quantifiable outcome”) that the player attempts to achieve. In short, as Lori Landay argues, “to read or watch a narrative unfold without having interaction with it other than interpretive is not the same as playing a game” (180).

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When it comes to a narrative game like Never Alone, we do not merely follow the story; we play the story. The interactivity of the video game medium influences every narrative element. For example, the settings in a game are not just backdrops to the characters’ experiences; they are virtual spaces that players themselves can experience. Additionally, interactivity affects how video games are plotted. The plot of a video game will always be more flexible than the plot of a novel if only because games rely on player choice and story branching. As Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Smith, and Tosca explain, “No matter how many times a book is read, by no matter how many different people, the text is always the same; but in a video game, no two game sessions will be exactly the same” (203). The interactive nature of video games also impacts character and narrative point of view because characters in games are manipulated by players. A video game protagonist is at once a “separate, fictional entity” and an “extension of self ” (Aldred 355). For Salen and Zimmerman, the player’s relationship to their player character therefore necessitates a state of “doubleconsciousness” on the part of the player who alternates between identifying with the character and regarding the character as an external fictional construct (Salen and Zimmerman 453; qtd. in Aldred 355). Having brainstormed similarities and differences between games and literature (as outlined above), we were ready to consider Never Alone in intertextual relation to the legend of “Kunuuksaayuka.” “Kunuuksaayuka” tells a compelling tale about a young hunter whose village is visited by a fierce, unceasing snowstorm. As food stores dwindle, Kunuuksaayuka sets out to find the cause of the storm. On his journey, he encounters a giant (a “big man”) who is mashing the snow with an adze and shovelling it into the wind, “creating blizzard after blizzard” (Cleveland 102). Kunuuksaayuka steals the adze and returns with it to his village, where he damages the blade so that it can no longer be used. Kunuuksaayuka then returns the blunted adze to the big man, who accepts it gratefully and sings, “tomorrow when you go outside / You will see caribou feet”; that is, with the blizzard at an end, it will be possible to track and hunt caribou again (Cleveland 104). In one of the Cultural Insights videos, Hope describes “Kunuuksaayuka” as a “masterwork.” The story conveys important ideas about interdependence with the land, animals, and one another. The game updates the story for twenty-first-century audiences by making the young hunter a girl; additional changes emphasize ideas of interconnectedness, suggesting the enduring relevance of the story’s central theme. For example, Kunuuksaayuka has no companion, but Nuna is given a “co-protagonist” in Fox (Bledstein 1), as well as many spirit helpers, without whose assistance the game cannot be completed (see Figure 12.3). As Amy Fredeen, lead cultural ambassador for Never Alone, explains in another Cultural Insights video, Nuna may be heroic, but she is unable to save the day by herself, in an important message of mutuality and humility. As previously suggested, the collaborative nature of the game is a powerful reflection of how it was designed with “equal Native collaboration on every level” (Hope).

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Figure 12.3  A Spirit Helps Nuna and Fox from Never Alone © E-Line Media and Upper One Games, 2014

Students were invited to examine the story and game side by side and to consider how and why specific “adaptations” were made. They found that the exigencies of the video game medium shaped many of the changes. To give one example, the transcription of Cleveland’s story runs only a few pages in length, but levels and challenges stretch it into a longer, episodic narrative. “Kunuuksaayuka” consists of a single round-trip journey. Following the basic structure of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, Kunuuksaayuka sets out on his quest, fulfills it, and then returns home. In the game, however, multiple missions challenge the player within the larger quest: Nuna and the fox must jump over ice floes, outsmart the polar bear to escape its den, and so on. The many new settings and levels reiterate, in the manner of repetitions in oral literature, the themes of struggle and cooperation. We did not worry about the preeminence of the “original” text or the game’s “fidelity” to it, notions that can constrain discussions of adaptations. As a story that has been passed down through oral tradition, “Kunuuksaayuka” challenges such ideas. Cleveland’s version is, itself, an adaptation of a legend for which there is no ur-text. The video game is part of the story’s long history of transmission. The students and I moved beyond the “‘compare and contrast’ mindset”—a limiting pedagogical approach to adaptations (Cartmell and Whelehan 7)—by acknowledging the many sources from which the writers drew when they adapted the story into a game. Nuna and Fox encounter many creatures and characters from Alaskan lore that are not found in “Kunuuksaayuka,” including Little People, the Manslayer, and Aurora Borealis. Similarly, Fox dies in one of the later levels and is reborn in a new form as a flying boy, a reflection of the Iñupiaq belief in reincarnation and animal spirits. As such, the game is a compendium of legends and traditional beliefs, and not simply an adaptation of one story, an idea we discussed at the end of the unit. 140

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­Conclusion Overall, students responded positively to the Never Alone unit. One upper-year student appreciated the novelty of the experience: “I personally found the experience of ‘playing the story’ very interesting as it is quite different than anything I have done in all my undergrad. I am a very visual learner, so getting to physically see the story play out before my eyes was refreshing.” Another felt the same: “I am happy that we had this chance to explore a video game in a literature course. [It is] something I never got to do before.” Including the game was not without problems, even despite such encouraging feedback. For example, some students who saw the benefit of analyzing literature resisted the idea of analyzing games. One avid gamer wrote on the discussion board: “games can be analyzed alongside books, [but] the gold is found in the experience of [the game] and not in picking it apart.” Interestingly, such criticisms are directed to literature, too, by students who insist that literary analysis ruins the enjoyment of reading. I also discovered that many students were less adept at games than I had expected. As one acknowledged near the beginning: I did purchase the game. Unfortunately, I am not very far through it as I am having serious difficulties managing the running, jumping and movement on my smartphone. I love the use of the spirits as helpers throughout this game as well as the fox accompanying the main character. It is quite well done, and I won’t hold it against them [the makers of Never Alone] that I am terrible at video games! Several students told me that they relied on the walkthroughs to obtain a fuller sense of the game, and so I would use walkthroughs again to ensure that everyone is able to participate. Indeed, students enjoyed the walkthroughs; “it felt like I was sitting down and elders were telling me the story” is how one student expressed it. There are many reasons to include video games in the literature classroom. Games not only engage students—Kurt Squire calls this the “fun factor” (5)—but they can also be used to help students understand narratives through a comparative lens. Additionally, a game like Never Alone shows the value of teaching works outside the literary canon. Never Alone enables students to think about whose stories are (re)told and how stories are circulated. Games can be used to teach narrative techniques and an understanding of diverse modes of storytelling. Analyzing games also increases visual literacy and critical thinking. As Clutton notes, “With so many students passively playing games in their spare time, now is a great time to challenge them to become actively aware consumers of the medium” (1). In the end, including a video game in the literature curriculum is a fun and meaningful “small shift” (Lang 5) that we can make to level up our teaching game.1

Note 1. Thank you to the students of The Literary Imagination 1201 in summer 2019.

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Works Cited Aldred, Jessica. “Characters.” The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, edited by Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, Routledge, 2016, pp. 355–63. Bledstein, Max. “Gaming Together: The Communal Journey in Upper One Games’ Never Alone.” RoundTable, vol. 1, no. 1, 2017, pp. 1–16. Cartmell, Deborah, and Imelda Whelehan. Teaching Adaptations. Palgrave, 2014. Cleveland, Robert. “Kunuuksaayuka.” Stories of the Black River People [Unipchaan͡ gich Imaġluktuġmiut]. National Bilingual Materials Development Center, 1980, pp. 101–4. Clutton, Mark. “Interactive Literacy: Studying Videogames in the Classroom.” Screen Education, no. 87, 2017, pp. 60–6. Colleps, Donovan Kūhiō. “Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna) (review).” Marvels & Tales, vol. 30, no. 1, 2016, pp. 140–2. Dial-Driver, Emily, Sally L. A. Emmons, and Jim Ford, editors. Fantasy Media in the Classroom: Essays on Teaching with Film, Television, Literature, Graphic Novels, and Video Games. McFarland, 2012. Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Simon, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susana Pajares Tosca. Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction. 2nd edition, Routledge, 2013. Hope, Ishmael Angaluuk. “Interview Series: Ishmael Hope.” Never Alone [Kisima Inŋitchuŋa]. Upper One Games, E-Line Media, 2014, http://neveralonegame.com/interview-never-alonewriter-ishmael-hope/. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Beacon, 1960. Landay, Lori. “Interactivity.” The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, edited by Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, Routledge, 2016, pp. 173–84. Lang, James M. Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning. Jossey-Bass, 2016. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. HarperPerennial, 1994. Mukherjee, Souvik. Video Games and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books. Palgrave, 2015. Never Alone [Kisima Inŋitchuŋa]. Upper One Games, E-Line Media, 2014. Picard, Martin. “Level.” The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, edited by Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, Routledge, 2016, pp. 99–106. Reinhard, Andrew. “Review of Never Alone [game].” Internet Archaeology, vol. 38, 2015, n. pag. Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. MIT P, 2004. Squire, Kurt. Video Games and Learning: Teaching and Participatory Culture in the Digital Age. Teachers College P, 2011.

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­C HAPTER 13 FIRST PERSON IN TRANSLATION: GAMING PERSPECTIVES ON INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES

Jillian Sayre

Shing wauk! Shing wauk! nin ge ik id, Waish kee wau bum ug, shing wauk Tuh quish in aun nau aub, ain dak nuk i yaun. —Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, “To the Pine Tree” (ca. 1842)

Through the Pine Trees Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s early-nineteenth-century poem “To the Pine Tree” is a short, evocative work in which the poet hails and celebrates this arboreal figure as emblematic of her native land. Like her poem “To the Miscodeed,” Schoolcraft’s ode to the pine makes use of European (and Euro-American) poetic forms to make space for Native visions of the world, visions that see the woods of the US-Canada borderlands that the Ojibwe and Métis communities call home as a space of belonging, kinship, and deep beauty rather than as a romantic fantasy of uninhabited wilderness. Schoolcraft’s poem is not only significant for where it directs the reader’s attention, though. After the Englishlanguage title and two-line descriptor of the occasion to which the poem responds (“on first seeing it / on returning from Europe”), the entirety of its eighteen lines are presented in Anishinaabemowin, the language of Schoolcraft’s mother and the Ojibwe community in which she lived. Only after the poem is complete does the author offer an English translation, an arrangement that argues for the poetic significance of Indigenous language while at the same time producing a significant and signifying estrangement for an English-only reader. That is, the experience of alienation preceding the access granted by translation is meaningful, requiring a relationship to the poet and her subject that respects difference while still opening space for communication and understanding. When I teach “To the Pine Tree” in my Native American Literature course, students preparing for class usually skip the first iteration of the poem and focus only on the translation. But in class discussions, I drag them from “The pine!” back to the initial “Shing wauk!” to have them think with their experience of linguistic estrangement, of being alongside but not equal to the poetic “I” who cries out for the tree. I ask students to revisit the poem with questions like: what does it mean for non-Native readers to approach Native American literature from a position of humility or not knowing? of

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respectful distance? Is there a way to read the poet’s “I” without consuming or absorbing this identity? How might Schoolcraft’s use of Anishinaabemowin undermine any pretense of mastery by English-language readers? The majority of students I teach in this class are non-Native, and for most of them (Native and non-Native alike) it is often their first time reading Native American authors in any course, let alone one focused solely on Indigenous writing. I want these students to experience Native worldviews without the temptation for appropriative reading, collapsing sites of difference into a white, European model of subject and form that they have likely encountered before in literary studies. At the same time, I want students to appreciate and respond to Indigenous writers in a way that requires understanding and sympathy—a feeling with rather than as. This model of proximity to, rather than identification with, a writer is key for ethical modes of teaching multicultural literature, and this model is evident in the uncertainty, distance, and difference we are forced to grapple with when we think in or about translation. To help my students to think about the poet’s work in this way, I ask them to pick up a controller and play a video game.

First Person in Translation Pine trees populate the landscape of Assassin’s Creed III (2012), although the player has to direct the actions of a Native American character to see those trees as an extension of the world rather than as its limits—the Anglo character whose actions the player periodically directs cannot move through the high trees. The series is centered around historical conflicts between two groups, the Assassins and the Templars, experienced through a present-day simulation by Desmond Miles, a descendent of various Assassins. Miles revisits the life of one of his Assassin ancestors in each game, first a twelfthcentury Syrian fighter and then a sixteenth-century Florentine nobleman, to uncover sacred material and save the world. The third installment of the franchise is the first to locate its historical action in North America, and the choice of a Mohawk protagonist is described by the designers at Ubisoft, the Montreal-based company responsible for the Assassin’s Creed series, as a way to offer a new perspective on the game. “You realize after a while that you play a lot of young white protagonists,” one designer explained in an interview, “I thought it would be really exciting and sort of progressive, for a big game company like ours to [create] a minority, someone who’s an outsider—in our case, a Native American—who’s pretty underrepresented in most media, let alone video games.” “They christened him,” the interview notes, “Connor Kenway” (“Mohawk Hero”). I do not offer my students this game as a tool for understanding the work of writers like Jane Johnston Schoolcraft on the basis of this representation. Schoolcraft, it is important to note, is of Ojibwe and Scots-Irish heritage, part of an emergent Métis community, and not Mohawk. Kanien’kéha, the Mohawk language used in the Assassin’s Creed game, is not Anishinaabemowin. A central concern for our class addresses the collapse of diverse Indigenous languages, cultures, and perspectives, into a single group noun: “Indian.” Teiowí:sonte Thomas Deer, a cultural consultant for Assassin’s Creed III, argues 144

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that the cultural specificity of the game, the “true language, our songs, and our historical experience,” counters the tendency of mainstream culture to “amalgamate the vast and distinct cultures of each indigenous nation into a sort of pan-Indian cliché” (Venables). Instead, I ask students to consider the game as a useful method for approaching Indigenous writings in our course and to think about how its narrative, procedural, and design elements produce precisely that tension between proximity and distance essential for their close readings. In studying video games, we start with narrative, the clearest intersection between game studies and literature. After playing the game individually or in small groups outside of class,1 we initiate our in-class discussions by mapping our experience of the game’s story. While constructing these maps, students focus on how the narrative creates a relationship between player and character, how it might change over the course of the game, and how that relationship can be both intimate and estranged, proximal and yet distant. In mapping our experiences, expectations, and progress through the game, we come up with a first-person narrative for the gamer’s role as/alongside Connor to use as a reference when thinking about game mechanics or making arguments about the work. An example of such a narrative follows: In the game, when I become Connor, I actually become Ratohnhaké:ton, a very young boy living with his mother and her family—my mother, my family—in a village of the Kanien’kehá:ka not terribly far from pre-Revolutionary Boston. My mother encourages me to play in the surrounding hills with my friends, which I do. I teach my best friend Kanen’tó:kon to hunt. I play hide and seek with the other kids from my village. We joke. We laugh. I climb trees with my friends. We gather things for the village. Until a group of men burn down the longhouses. And my mother dies. Now orphaned, an elder tells me that I am charged with protecting a sacred amulet. She tells me to leave home to receive training so I can do this. Only then do I become Connor. My new mentor cannot pronounce my name and refuses to try. Concerned about my ability to pass in Boston—at least for Spanish he says—he renames me, gives me this not-very-Spanish-sounding name, and uses it exclusively for the rest of the game. When I finish the last mission, I discover that this was the name of my mentor’s dead son who is buried out back, next to a grave marking the person I assume to be his mother. But my discovery is belated; Ratohnhaké:ton already knows of this place, these graves. He travels there with a purpose: to bury the sacred amulet with my namesake. I only know of his intention when I discover the graves and see him secret away this treasure. It is at this moment of estrangement from Connor that I go back to being Desmond Miles, Connor’s descendent, the man who is in a simulation of what the game calls a memory, a reconstruction of a historical present as it was experienced by Ratohnhaké:ton. I have actually been Desmond all along, even when I have 145

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also been Ratohnhaké:ton. Now, with/as Desmond, I go to the grave and retrieve the amulet I just buried there some two hundred and fifty years ago with different hands and a different name. And with this amulet in Desmond’s present, I save the world. While we call this exercise “narrative mapping,” the results are often disorienting, never able to serve as sufficient locative or explanatory devices for people who have not experienced the game directly. They are also incredibly subjective, but again in a disorienting way rather than as a key to understanding an individual gamer’s subjectivity. For our purposes, this disorientation is generative and significant, and instead of clarifying or simplifying the structures they create, I draw students’ attention to the way their sense of self—the gamer’s “I”—intersects with but also departs from the central character, frustrating any sense of seamless identification with Ratohnhaké:ton, Connor, or Desmond. Instead, the game’s layered timelines and narrative multiplicity entail that the player is always engaging with multiple perspectives in the story. The narrative is unsettled, moving between positions. It is also mediated, filtered through the mechanics of simulation and the presentist work of Desmond and his team. Touching back on our earlier work with Schoolcraft’s poetry, I offer this experience as a way to think about translation itself. Translation gives readers access to the original writing but with difference, adapting the original language to a new linguistic context that carries along with it different understandings of the world it describes. It is the alwayspresent but often-ignored gap between original and translation that leads Paul de Man to describe the work of translation as one of inevitable “failure.” “The translator,” de Man writes, “per definition, fails,” a failure grounded in the inability to reproduce the linguistic immediacy of an original text (80). When we read the translation of Schoolcraft’s work, I remind them, we are not actually getting the original poem but rather one among many possibilities. To help them consider this, I offer another poem in Robert Dale Parker’s collection of Schoolcraft’s work. “On leaving my children John and Jane at School, in the Atlantic states, and preparing to return to the interior” is another occasional poem written primarily in Anishinaabemowin. The poem was originally accompanied by a “free” translation of the work in the memoirs of Jane’s husband Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, a white Indian agent whose knowledge of Ojibwe language and culture were largely if not entirely accomplished through the work of his wife. Even though they do not read Anishinaabemowin, I ask students to observe the form, language, and length of the original poem. They note that it is comprised of short lines, that the poet frequently repeats words, and that there is no punctuation in any of the four stanzas. I then ask them to compare those observations to the same structures and language in her husband’s translation. In that version, the poem grows to six stanzas with a rigid rhyme scheme. The brevity of the original lines is lost as the translation stretches across the page, and in this version the punctuation that completes each line fixes the poem’s rhythm. Even without access to the original, students become aware that these textual changes shift the way we interact with the poet’s words. I then show them a new translation of the poem completed for Parker’s collection in 2005 by three Ojibwe speakers, Dennis Jones, Heidi 146

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Stark, and James Vukelich (141). Students note immediately the way this new translation appears more faithful to the original, with four short stanzas alternating between five and four lines as in Anishinaabemowin, although several students point out that this translation, too, resists being collapsed into the original with the parenthetical inclusion of emotional direction, an “[emphatically]” that appends to the opening of the fourth stanza. Even if this translation is more direct, that added comment shows us that English is limited in its capacity to make present certain structures or words in the original. I offer them the image of the asymptote to think about this “gap” in translation: we can approach but we can never get all the way there. What does it mean to acknowledge this “failure” in a generous and generative way? Returning to our video-game method for thinking through these questions, I ask students to consider how their experience playing as Connor is an experience in translation. That is, there is a gap the player cannot breach that keeps Connor removed, but this gap is accompanied by a feeling of closeness that allows the player to reject the idea that relation or understanding is impossible. Citing our original poem, I ask them to think about “the pine!” and “shing wauk!” as this kind of unequal proximity: the translation gets readers close enough to understand while reserving the original from access. By presenting the poem in Anishinaabemowin first, the poet requires us to acknowledge that there is something the English reader cannot have. But video games, as many have argued, cannot be reduced to story. In the decades of debate on the importance of narratology versus ludology in understanding games, the critical consensus seems to be a “both … and” solution. In Unit Operations, Ian Bogost summarizes the longstanding tension between the “rule-based systems” of ludology and the “story-based systems” of narratology (67–9) and argues instead that “we should attempt to evaluate all texts as configurative systems built out of expressive units” (70). That is, what is describable in narrative form, as in the mapping exercise, must be put placed in conversation with the other elements that configure gameplay. The significance or meaning of an artifact is constructed by a complex interactive network rather than a single authority or system of interpretation. Following Bogost, if we can use an experience of gameplay to understand translation, any conclusion based solely on narrative would be insufficient. Luckily, the ludic elements of Assassin’s Creed III reinforce, even require, a tension between proximity and distance. After students map their experience of the story, we use our ideas about translation and perspective to inform our understanding of design and game mechanics in Assassin’s Creed III. To think about and with these ludic elements, the class uses live play-along sessions of distinct moments in the game, usually more character-centered moments or “quiet” engagements with the world rather than action-packed fights. These include moving from one place to another, engaging with non-narrative “scenic” elements like animals, and exploring Ratohnhaké:ton’s relationship with his Kanien’kehá:ka community. In our live play sessions, we rely on the assignment of roles to help students focus on our guiding questions and to keep conversation lively and generative. Students choose to be a “player,” “prompter,” or “archivist” for the day. In the first role, the student selects a two-to five-minute window of play in one of the three character-centered areas listed above. The 147

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players are encouraged to talk through their gameplay experience, and the “prompters” ask leading questions, such as “Do you feel like you are playing as Connor right now?” or “Are you trying to complete a task or just explore the world?” Prompters are also encouraged to make critical observations that the players or archivists can respond to or build from. Archivists take notes, images, and videos from our sessions that are kept on the course website for future reference or citation in unit papers. To build on our central question of relation and estrangement or familiarity and distance, the class narrows its focus to consider how a particular graphic interaction, that of gaming perspective, can help us think about fraught or fractured representation. In the Assassin’s Creed series, gameplay is structured by what designers call “third person” perspective. That is, gamers encounter the protagonist as separate from themselves. This is most easily understood in contrast to the popular first person of first-person shooter games, in which gameplay is focalized internally as the perspective of the protagonist. Third-person perspective is designed to give the player a more complete sense of the character, a full rendering of movement, costume, even facial expression (EgenfeldtNielsen et al. 127–31). It should be noted that in play the player does not see Connor head-on, as in the advertisements for the game (see Figure 13.1). Instead the player sees him from a slight distance (see Figure 13.2), following closely, although not too close. A typical moment of live play looks something like this: The player is pursuing a side mission to collect feathers with the help of the onscreen map. While Connor moves across the ground, the player’s perspective is a “close follow,” directly behind Connor and moving between a three-quarter to full view of the character. As the player approaches and climbs the tree with the nest, the player’s perspective pulls further away but stays even with the character as he ascends. The player’s perspective remains at Connor’s back and side, even as they direct Connor around the trunk in search of usable limbs for climbing.

Figure 13.1  Still from Ubisoft North America. “Assassin’s Creed III: E3 Cinematic Trailer.” YouTube, June 12, 2012. www.youtube.com/watch?v=nL6chDa7T8Q 148

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­Figure 13.2  Still from Assassin’s Creed III Playthrough on PlayStation 3. Author’s own, 2017 When the player succeeds in reaching the feather, the character crouches and remains still, partially obscured by the trunk of the tree. A prompter asks the player to “spin the camera” to see if they can change perspective and see the front of the character, and the player does. But when the player initiates Connor’s descent, the perspective returns automatically to a rear view. Prompters observe that while free to change orientation while the character is at rest, the game’s mechanics seem to require this particular “following” perspective when the character moves. Archivists make note of this observation and take pictures and video as examples of this perspective and the class opens a broader discussion of how this particular perspective might encourage identification with the character (“I never see my own face except in the mirror,” one prompter notes) or an operation that insists on difference (“I feel like I’m following Connor, not being him,” the player says). In studying gameplay and relationship to character, I encourage students to be dissatisfied with the easy importation of narratological terms to the medium. Although the physical separation between player perspective and character creates distance, as when the player spins the “camera” to see Connor’s face at the end of the live session example, the mechanism of gameplay counters that distance by giving the player direct control over Connor’s action. That is, the sense of distance or distinction crumbles in the hands of the player, whose own real-world actions moving and pressing different parts of the controller produce the character’s movements on screen. At the same time, the movements by player and character are not simple reflections of each other. The player presses a button or pushes up on a joystick to make the character jump, climb, or walk. This tension between proximity and distance is evident in one of the students’ favorite 149

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non-narrative engagements: petting animals. Whether petting cows, pigs, dogs, or even turkeys, when a player directs Connor to act in this way, the accustomed distance of the third-person perspective collapses. Stopping to pet a pair of cows on the outskirts of Boston, the player’s perspective is distant enough for a full-rendering of the character. But as soon as the player selects “Pet Animal,” the character responds with an established action (not controlled by the player) and the player’s perspective shifts suddenly to extreme proximity, the player positioned at the character’s right shoulder and the frame centered on the act of touch. As the animal turns and acknowledges Connor, the player’s perspective retreats to its standard distance and the player regains control over the character’s movement. Third person, with its emphasis on externalization, seems insufficient to describe the fractured, hybrid experience. Any reduction of this gameplay relation to third person, predicated as it is on division, by non-relation, does not suffice to explain the simultaneous and contradictory assertions of access and alterity, of being Connor and being alongside Connor at the same time. This dissatisfaction produced by the gamer’s experience of story and game mechanics may play an important role, as game studies scholar Adrienne Shaw argues, in the failure of “mere” representation in gaming diversity, as the Ubisoft designers intended. Shaw describes this attitude regarding representation in the game industry as a standard one, implying an easy one-to-one of character and gamer, with gamers tending toward a simple identification with their avatars or characters. But gamers, Shaw argues, tend not to identify with their avatars or their actions, or at least their identification is more complex than simple substitution (97–102). While Shaw approaches the complexity surrounding the question through the work of ethnography, interviewing minority gamers about their feelings regarding the characters they play, I ask students to think about this gap between player and character not as a failure but as meaningful, and particularly significant when playing alongside characters whose identity actively resists being absorbed by the player at the level of game design.

­“I’m reading! Tell me if I miss something!” To bring us back from the abstractions of gameplay to the work of relating to Indigenous figures and through Indigenous language, we conclude our live play sessions by spending time with/as the young Ratohnhaké:ton in his Kanien’kéha:ka community. It is in these moments when the player experiences life not only among the Mohawk, but also in Mohawk, the Kanien’kéha language itself. If the game was structured to create an experience of absolute immersion, of seamless identification with the Native American protagonist, then the Kanien’kéha in these moments would not be translated. Why would one need a translation if they are Ratohnhaké:ton? But the Kanien’kéha that appears in the game is translated, appearing in subtitles while the characters converse. While our first reaction as players was understanding (the translation gives me access to what the characters are saying), when we put this in conversation with our previous investigation of narrative and player perspective we can begin to see this experience of translation as 150

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reinforcing the same strained identification. When the subtitles appear on the screen, the student playing shifts from a sensual relationship cultivated by touch, movement, sound, and graphics, to a literate one. Students describe these subtitles as distracting them from their work of observation by requiring them to focus on the text alone. “I’m reading,” one player announced to his partners, “tell me if I miss something!” The intervention of the text makes the Indigenous characters more accessible to players insofar as it not only makes them privy to their conversations, but it also reminds the player that this relation is not immediate but rather mired in levels of mediation. Using Richard Lanham’s model for thinking about digital texts as a theory of translation writ large, we might say that the subtitles require players to look at the text, at objects that interrupt the physical relationship players cultivate as the character, but also through it to see, hear, and interact with the context of those words (5–8). That is, this moment of translation in the game confirms that relationship of simultaneous proximity and distance, access and alterity that the player experiences in gameplay. Thinking through this relation which is and is not a relation, a being alongside instead of a being as, helps students think about the importance of moments of estrangement in our readings and allows us to approach writings like the poetry of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft from a position other than mastery, a position sensitive and open to unknowing. Schoolcraft’s pine may seem tantalizingly familiar to a reader steeped in European models of poetry, as an ode and as an example of romanticism’s appreciation of nature. But the poet’s use of Ojibwe as the primary poetic language displaces those same readers, requiring them to account for a more complicated perspective that includes multiple languages, traditions, and histories. In this way, the dispersed experience of the video games provides a provocative model for understanding this accessible-yetresistant voice and points to the insufficiency of (Western) narratological terms in capturing non-Western experience. Building from our meditation on Schoolcraft’s pine and our trips through the pine trees with Connor, through the shifting perspectives of play and the various translations and retranslations of Schoolcraft’s work, we move from the incursion of text in gameplay to other ways of “missing out” in our final poem, Schoolcraft’s “Absence.” In “Absence,” the poet pines to be reunited with her husband who was often away from home, writing of her inability to find solace without her “dearest friend.” The poet finds comfort in her role as a mother (“Stranger I am to all delight,— / Save when I gaze upon my child”), which requires her Christian piety (“To heav’n I breath a fervent pray’r: / That He the God of love and pow’r, / May bless and guard him through each hour”), placing Schoolcraft well within the cultural framework of a familiar European and Euro-American “true womanhood” (Welter). But in the closing lines of the poem she turns from comfort back to melancholy, this time at the idea of her husband’s own loss created by this absence. Describing her son’s disappointment at sighting a canoe that is not his father’s, she urges her husband home to “share the bliss a mother feels” in her child’s calling on both parents (“to each parent appeals”). The poem builds on themes of sentiment and piety that connect her work to Anglo women writing at the time. But even as the themes of her poetry put her in conversation with popular poets like Lydia 151

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Sigourney, Schoolcraft’s verse complicates that idea of the feminine presented by white, elite, east-coast writers by making her Indigenous identity central to these concerns. “Absence” consists of four numbered sections and is written in English, but each section is titled in Anishinaabemowin and the poet offers no translation of these singleword headings. The first three sections address her husband and their separation, Nindahwaymau, Neezhicka, Neenawbame, and in his notes on the poem, Parker translates these terms as “my sibling of the opposite sex,” “alone,” and “a husband’s absence,” respectively (122–3). The final section of the poem, which turns from the poet’s longing to consider how the separation harms her husband in so far as he cannot fulfill his role as a parent, is titled Ningwisis (“my son”). Schoolcraft’s lament and its comfort in maternal happiness and Christian piety are thus framed first by her cultural specificity and linguistic difference. In reading the poem alongside our experience with Assassin’s Creed III, I ask students to consider the way her titles frame the content of the poem, allowing the reader to look through them at the content of each section, but also remaining present, even containing that work. Her untranslated Anishinaabemowin directs each section and so challenges the English-language reader to consider her claim to a recognizable figure of the Christian mother without assimilation or erasure of her Indigenous identity. In The Poetics of Imperialism, Eric Cheyfitz argues that subjects of power have used translation as a kind of “foreign policy,” rendering difference legible through a process of translation that allows for the extractive violence of imperial or settler colonial incursion (xi–xiv). But as with other scholars invested in what Harriet Hulme describes as the “ethical turn” in translation studies (6), Cheyfitz also identifies the way translation undermines or undoes this violence and posits that the movement between languages requires that “the eloquent orator relinquishes the illusion of mastery,” undermining the position of knowing and control cultivated by the “drive to master the foreign” (135). In moving my students from a place of familiarity to a recognition and respect for difference, attending to (and through) translation, as well as to what remains untranslated, we discover nonappropriative approaches to cultural difference. In thinking expansively about translation, both as a pedagogical model and as a crossing between linguistic and paralinguistic experience, I follow and build upon a history of scholarly attention to this practice and how it attunes us in generous and important ways to a sense of irreducible alterity. Paul Ricœur, for example, asserts that translation is a “paradigm” rather than a specific act (Ricœur). For Ricœur, this paradigm feeds an ethical mode of living, recognizing and responding to difference with hospitality and tolerance. Gayatri Spivak offers translation as a way of reading, one attentive to (even if unable to grasp) what exceeds the reader’s understanding, what cannot be contained in language or consumed with ease or in its entirety. Spivak calls this excess the “disruptive rhetoricity” through which we “feel the selvedges of the language-textile give way” (398). It is at these “fraying” edges that we bear witness to alterity as such. It is precisely the centrality of relation to this paradigm or model of reading that makes gameplay so helpful in encouraging students to attend to this difference. As a way of thinking, as a way of relating to a text, translation draws not solely on figuration but also 152

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on configuration, subjective and rhetorically entrenched engagements. At the “frayed” edges of disciplinary isolation and media-specific criticism, my students can discover new ways of seeing and engaging with texts and the worlds they describe.

Note 1. Like most games from major studios, Assassin’s Creed is expensive, and so it is not required that students purchase it. I keep a copy of the game at the Digital Studies Center at Rutgers-Camden, where students can play in small groups or individually. As the game ages, it has become less expensive and is now widely available for sale in used condition in multiple formats. It is also important to note that the open-world adventure game requires a substantial investment of time if playing to completion. Students are required to complete four hours of play over two weeks and to supplement their gameplay with online playthroughs so they understand the narrative. One successful strategy used by students is to form small playing groups, using a shared profile so that members can play at different times and report their observations back to the group.

Works Cited Bogost, Ian. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism. MIT P, 2006. Cheyfitz, Eric. The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan. U of Pennsylvania P, 1997. de Man, Paul. “Conclusions: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’.” The Resistance to Theory, vol. 33, U of Minnesota P, 1986, pp. 73–105. Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Simon, Jonah Heide Smith, and Susana Pajares Tosca. Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction. 2nd edition, Routledge, 2013. Hulme, Harriet. Ethics and Aesthetics of Translation: Exploring the Works of Atxaga, Kundera, and Semprún. UCL P, 2018. Lanham, Richard. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. U of Chicago P, 1993. “A Mohawk Hero in the Not-So-Diverse Gaming World.” WBUR News, NPR, Oct. 31, 2012, https://www.wbur.org/npr/163883218/a-mohawk-hero-in-the-not-so-diverse-gaming-world. Parker, Robert Dale, editor. The Sound the Stars Make Rushing through the Sky: The Writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft. U of Pennsylvania P, 2007. Ricœur, Paul. Reflections on the Just. Translated by David Pellauer, U of Chicago P, 2007. Shaw, Adrienne. Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture. U of Minnesota P, 2014. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “The Politics of Translation (1992).” The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, Routledge, 2000, pp. 397–416. Venables, Michael. “The Awesome Mohawk Teacher and Consultant behind Ratonhnhaké: ton.” Forbes, Nov. 2012, www.forbes.com/sites/michaelvenables/2012/11/25/the-consultantsbehind-ratonhnhaketon. Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860.” American Quarterly, vol. 18, 1966, pp. 151–74.

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­C HAPTER 14 PLAYING IN THE DARK: TEACHING REPRESENTATION, APPROPRIATION, AND IDENTIFICATION WITH ASSASSIN’S CREED III

James K. Harris

Teaching about race and identity can be tricky work. We as instructors seek to strike a careful balance between being overly judgmental on the one hand or too permissive on the other. We do this work knowing that the stakes are high, life or death for some of our students. It is not the kind of work that easily accords with video games, a subject that students often approach as inherently frivolous in contrast to the kinds of ideas they encounter in books. There is a familiar, everydayness to video games, a medium many people are more likely to encounter on YouTube or Twitch than in a classroom, where their presence can be either unnerving or disarming depending on the student. Still there is real benefit to incorporating video games into the literature curriculum. Students expect games to entertain, to challenge, occasionally to frustrate. Forcing through the frustration, a practice so common as to have its own parlance in gaming circles—“grinding”—is a part of the process. There is often a willingness to engage despite these barriers that are not as present when the task at hand is, say, a nineteenthcentury slave narrative or a personal account of Indian Boarding Schools. But that familiarity cuts both ways. Video games encourage players to identify with their avatars and the worlds they inhabit. When game protagonists of color are concerned, this mode of identification sits in uneasy relation to a long history of unequal representation and cultural appropriation. Are we as players appropriating the identity and culture of another people? Are we participating in the kinds of cultural exchanges that make empathy easier? How do we balance the need for representation against the desire to avoid rewarding, or worse trivializing, appropriation? With their enduring focus on rethinking the terms of identification and empathy, video games offer fertile terrain for rethinking some of the foundational ideas in studying literature and culture. While it is not without risk, including video games in literature classrooms can enhance the ways we think and talk about identity. In the past when I have integrated video games into my coursework, it has been in one of two contexts. The first, and perhaps the more straightforward, came in the form of an introductory level methodologies-focused class pitched toward second-year students and non-majors. The capacious framework of this course allows that it has in the past served as everything from Introduction to Film Studies to Introduction to Comics. In this space I designed an Introduction to Game Studies course that borrowed heavily from folklore, sociology, and media studies. The fundamentally interdisciplinary nature

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of this course entailed that video games could sit comfortably alongside a range of other media. The more challenging approach has come in my attempts to integrate games and key ideas of game studies into my courses on Ethnic Literatures of the United States. In many ways, the pairing has always struck me as somewhat intuitive given that both fields are preoccupied with questions of performativity, identity formation, and the politics of empathy (to name but a few points of overlap). Such connections, however, run the risk of becoming superficial. Conversations about race in video games can far too often become reductive and repetitive, rehashing old arguments about stereotypes without contributing much new. In an effort to break out of such stale patterns, I designed this assignment unit to bring key concepts of each field into an interdisciplinary conversation. While I have chosen to highlight a specific game, many of the principles here would pair nicely with a range of titles. Still, there are a few things to bear in mind when considering this (or similar) assignments: ●●

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Just like written texts, video games require a certain literacy, which entails that some students will be more adept at navigating game worlds than others. To overcome the limitations of students less familiar with video games, it is helpful to create groups with varying levels of expertise. Most open-world games—that is, games in which the player controls an avatar who can roam freely throughout the game environment and approach tasks or objectives at will—are fairly substantial in length and include a range of optional objectives that may or may not impact the primary storyline. Most open-world games are designed for a single player and most game consoles limit the number of simultaneous save files. The benefit of dividing the students into groups is that they can share a save file and build on one another’s progress instead of each being responsible for completing the main story.

This assignment was originally designed for a class introducing fundamental concepts of Game Studies, but it would be well at home in a variety of literature courses, particularly those focusing on ethnic literatures. For this assignment, students were asked to play the game over a period of two weeks and to keep a “play journal” archiving both the details of playing (including character names, important plot points, etc.) as well as any early observations they may have concerning the game’s broader themes or motifs. Some of these journal entries may be guided by specific questions while others allow the students to freewrite. Following their time with the game, students produce a piece of criticism that engages with one of the key terms of the unit: identity, appropriation, performativity, or race. Whichever term they choose, the assignment invites students to think beyond the text itself and toward some of the metacognitive questions driving the study of culture and its outputs. In what follows I lay out some of the critical stakes underpinning each of these key terms and highlight some of the ways instructors might invite students into these conversations.

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­Identity and/as Appropriation in Assassin’s Creed III Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series incorporates various gaming modes. Part stealth-action game, part parkour relay, one of the secrets of the series’ success has always been its commitment to developing a less conventional mode of gameplay: historical simulator. Beginning with the first game in the series, which was set during the time of the Third Crusade and saw players taking on the role of assassin Altaïr adventuring throughout the cities of Jerusalem, Acre, and Damascus, the franchise has long treated historical tourism as one of its main draws. The sense of the game space as “historically accurate” is further reinforced by later games in the series that layer optional historical facts into its world. Rounding a corner in a major city in a later game set during Renaissance Italy might reveal a digital recreation of the Roman Coliseum, and pressing a button gives players access to an encyclopedia entry about that location’s historical significance. Yet, while the series was built on a foundation of historical tourism, its first two games managed to stay far enough away from the contemporary moment to become invested in conversations about race and identity in the context of the United States. For the third game in the series, and the first set in the Americas, the developers not only addressed the legacies of race and racism in the colonial world, but indeed made those aspects into focal points of the game. The result is a game that demands further critical examination for having something to say about race, even if the message becomes a bit muddled. Set immediately before the American Revolutionary War, Assassin’s Creed III sees players returning to the role of Desmond Miles, who must venture once more into the past to acquire the skills of his ancestors. The first portion of the historical sequence follows the life of Hatham Kenway, a British nobleman and member of the Redcoat army. After killing a slave trader and freeing Mohawk captives, Hatham befriends a young woman named Kaniehtíio. The two develop a romantic relationship that results in the birth of their son and the game’s main protagonist, Ratonhnhakéton, who also goes by the English name Connor. In many ways, Assassin’s Creed III, or at least the portion set during the eighteenth-century, plays out as a family melodrama against the backdrop of the American Revolutionary War. This particular family melodrama addresses themes of miscegenation, racial passing, and the construction of whiteness as property that would be well at home in many introductory or second-level literature classes. Following Connor’s birth, the player learns that Hatham is a member of the Knights Templar, chief rival of the Order of Assassins, the main heroes of the series and the group to which both Connor and later Desmond belong. As the story progresses, the lines of allegiance between Knights and Assassins, Colonist and British, become increasingly blurry. As Connor comes to understand the precarity of the Native community’s position at the edges of the rapidly burgeoning American experiment, the game reminds players that allies and enemies can come from anywhere. Mechanically, the game builds upon the formula established by its predecessors: players take on an avatar from a third-person perspective and traverse the open game world hunting down specific targets to execute. The game employs a mission-driven structure that typically requires players to complete a series of smaller tasks that build 157

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up to a climatic encounter with a particularly powerful foe. As is typical of most openworld games, players are given a fair amount of freedom to determine the best path for completing a given objective. For example, a mission early in the game finds the player, as Connor, tasked with rescuing friends and fellow warriors from a military compound. Players can opt for a stealth approach and use the game’s robust cover system that allows Connor to blend in with crowds or to hide in conveniently positioned bales of hay. They can slowly eliminate targets one-by-one en route to their goal or they can run in without cover and attempt to fight their way through. Naturally, each choice carries its own set of benefits and drawbacks, and the challenge of selecting the correct approach is one of the strategic hallmarks of the series. While much of this formula has been standard since the series’ inception, the third iteration includes some noteworthy additions. Each game in the series equips the player’s assassin avatar with a range of period-inspired weaponry. For the third iteration, the game includes a tomahawk and bow and arrow along with new additions to the arsenal. The most significant change from the earlier games in the series is surely the setting. Whereas the earlier games were inspired by the densely populated cities of Europe and the Middle East, the third game is set in the decidedly less developed terrain of early America. Although later segments of the game take place in detailed recreations of early Boston and New York, most of the game finds players visiting small villages and their surrounding forests. Consequently, the developers were forced to redesign the parkour movements of the player’s avatar to account for a new feature: the ability to scale trees with ease. Whereas earlier games limited players’ stealth options to blending in crowds or jumping into barrels, Connor can hide in tall grass and dense foliage. Additionally, Assassin’s Creed III built out the in-game weather system to add different seasons, summer and winter, with blistering sun and plentiful game for hunting or blizzards and snow drifts accordingly. After spending some time navigating the game world, students begin analyzing whether design choices about weaponry and character movement perpetuate stereotypical notions of Native peoples as inherently more connected to the natural world or if their depiction appears to be a contextually appropriate resolution to a design issue. This presents a productive opportunity for students to use their play journals to ponder the narratology versus ludology debate present in much of the early conversation around the study of games and video games in particular. That conversation was concerned with, among other things, whether games should be treated first and foremost as vehicles for narrative or as interactive systems of cleverly designed interfaces. Assassin’s Creed III collapses that distinction by mobilizing racial knowledges as specific aspects of gameplay. As a means of working through concerns that a certain video game is not “about” race or identity, it can be helpful to demonstrate how much of character identification is enmeshed with cultural assumptions about how the other “actually” is. Although the game trades in familiar tropes about Native identity, it is also an occasionally poignant meditation on the conflicted positions Native peoples were forced into by the beginning of the formal American nation. In keeping with the series’ commitment to historical fiction, Connor’s story frequently overlaps with the conventionally accepted narrative of America’s colonial past. Major figures like 158

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Thomas Jefferson, Paul Revere, and George Washington play key roles in the narrative. But far from being deified, they are more likely to be presented as obstacles to the quest for Native equality. In this retelling of the nation’s founding, the displacement of Native peoples moves to the center of the narrative. When players are introduced to Washington, for example, he is depicted as an ambitious general who plotted the raid on Connor’s village that killed his mother and now plans to have the Native populations removed from their lands for fear that they might support loyalists to the British crown. Nevertheless, for all its investments in telling the intentionally forgotten or overlooked stories of Native peoples, the invitation to inhabit a Native identity temporarily and only “for fun” recalls a much longer and more insidious tradition. Here it can be helpful to introduce some key thinkers in ethnic studies to contextualize the issue further for students. In his seminal work Playing Indian, Philip Deloria makes a case for the centrality of Native presence to the formation of American identity. He examines the long history of Western cultural practice that mobilizes some stereotypical image of the “Indian” as idealized Other against whom to construct a sense of the (white) self. From stories of colonists disguising themselves as Mohawk Indians during the Boston Tea Party through the appropriation of Native attire and the images of Native peoples themselves during the counterculture movement of the 1970s, Deloria demonstrates how persistently generative the concept of “Indianness” has proved to be for the Western imagination. As he explains: “Indianness provided impetus and precondition for the creative assembling of an ultimately unassemblable American identity” (5). Deloria further describes how “the practice of playing Indian has clustered around two paradigmatic moments—the Revolution, which rested on the creation of a national identity, and modernity, which has used Indian play to encounter the authentic amidst the anxiety of urban industrial and postindustrial life” (7). Arguably both of these modes can be seen at work in Assassin’s Creed III, a game that takes place simultaneously during the American Revolutionary War and a modern day (2012) catastrophe threatening to destroy the world. Yet, unlike Deloria’s examples, Assassin’s Creed III goes a step further and invites players not just to dress up in the attire of a Native but indeed to imagine themselves becoming a Native. As such, it is an ideal game for discussing the politics of representation and the uses and limitations of stereotypes. Deloria suggests that the persistent appeal of playing Indian lies in its ability to reconcile questions of national character or identity. The “Indian” embodies all the contradictions inherent in the concept of the noble savage and serves as a potent and surprisingly flexible metaphor in moments of crisis. As he explains: The indeterminacy of American identity stems, in part, from the nation’s inability to deal with Indian people. Americans wanted to feel a natural affinity with the continent, and it was Indians who could teach them such aboriginal closeness. Yet, in order to control the landscape they had to destroy the original inhabitants …. Likewise, American social and political policy toward Indians has been a twohundred-year back-and-forth between assimilation and destruction.

(5)

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This tradition of the Indian as a vehicle for working through questions about national identity persists in the present moment. Yet where this tradition encounters the expanded possibilities of virtual space, might new modes of empathy and engagement be possible? Inviting students to write about Deloria’s ideas in the context of Assassin’s Creed III presents a prime opportunity to begin using the play journals to integrate outside sources or ideas.

Is the “Identification” of Assassin’s Creed III the “Identification” of Critical Ethnic Studies? Deloria’s work suggests a healthy skepticism is warranted when approaching Western depictions of Native identity. Yet, for all their flaws, video games have proved themselves uniquely adept at mobilizing empathy in surprising and creative ways. Media studies scholar Katherine Isbister attributes this capacity to that most distinctly ludic element of video games: interactivity. As she explains, “[a]t their heart, games differ from other media in one fundamental way: they offer players the chance to influence outcomes through their own efforts” (2). For Isbister, the ability for players to make a series of what she terms “meaningful choices” is essential for creating an emotional investment on the part of players: “Actions with consequences—interesting choices—unlock a new set of emotional possibilities for game designers” (2). One of the main sources for this distinction between video games and other forms of media comes in the form of the interactive protagonist, or avatar. Isbister offers a helpful explanation of the ways in which avatars shape the players’ emotional responses to games: Game developers have adopted and adapted this technique for grounding a player’s identification with in-game events … . As with protagonists in film, the player learns about avatars through how they look and how they react to other characters  … . However, the avatar’s personal qualities and capabilities are also reflected in what it is possible for the player to do on multiple psychological levels. The player moves through the game world taking actions as this person, adopting his or her concerns and struggling toward his or her goals. Players controlling avatars project themselves into the character on four levels: visceral, cognitive, social, and fantasy. (11) ­ ecause players feel that they have a meaningful role in the development and ultimate B success or failure of their avatar, the theory goes, they deeply identify with game characters. As Isbister explains: “Over the course of gameplay, players extend themselves further into the motivations and the visceral, cognitive, social, and fantasy possibilities of the avatar, forging an identification grounded in observation as well as action and experience” (13). 160

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Isbister’s vision of gaming as a symbiosis of player and character is certainly an appealing one. But it is also, perhaps not accidentally, devoid of much conversation about how the history of racial appropriation might challenge this vision of productive projection. Writing about representations of Blackness in the popular video games Grand Theft Auto 3 and NBA Street, David Leonard explores the connections between race in virtual space and the longer history of minstrelsy and race performativitiy: “Video games fulfill our desire not only to emulate … but allow the virtual occupation of black bodies. They provide the means to experience these supposedly unattainable skills while deriving pleasure through black male bodies” (6). For Leonard, the danger in these encounters is that they can uncritically reinforce the kinds of racial misinformation that subtends white supremacy. And it is a danger that extends to all forms of racial “play.” As he further explains, As with the history of minstrelsy, sampling the other is not liberating or transgressive: it does not unsettle dominant notions through breaking down barriers or increasing exposure. The ideas of blackness introduced through video games reflect dominant ideologies, thereby providing sanction for the status quo, legitimacy for white supremacy, and evidence for the common sense ideas of race, gender, sexuality, and nation.

(6)

Leonard raises important issues about the need to be thoughtful in choosing what kinds of images and ideas to circulate. His invocation of the limitations of “common sense” is a helpful reminder that images need not be negative to be harmful. Media theorists Anna Everett and S. Craig Watkins are similarly invested in unpacking the potential of interactivity to alter the terms of engagement for what they begrudgingly refer to as “new media.” They argue that video games “have a way of allowing players not only to watch the action, but to participate in and drive the action. Consequently, in the context of video games, players are not only watching race; they are also performing and, as a result, (re)producing socially prescribed and technologically mediated notions of race” (149). For Everett and Watkins, video games deploy a variety of elements, what they refer to as “racialized pedagogical zones” as a way to “teach not only entrenched ideologies of race and racism, but also how gameplay’s pleasure principles of mastery, winning, and skills development are often inextricably tied to and defined by familiar racial and ethnic stereotypes” (150). One useful in-class exercise might find students attempting to identify the different elements of the game that contribute to its sense of place and realism. For Assassin’s Creed III, the question of representation is particularly fraught. While all minorities remain underrepresented as protagonists in games, particularly outside of officially licensed sports titles, the situation for Native communities is particularly bleak. In that respect, Assassin’s Creed III is laudable for making any efforts toward inclusion at all, particularly one that does not shy away from addressing the history of genocidal policies at the core of relations between the Native peoples and the newly arrived settlers. 161

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At the same time, it participates in the trope of imagining Natives as “out of time,” both contained in the past and past the moment of survival. Isbister’s work suggests that one of the unique appeals of gaming is its ability to leverage interactivity to mobilize empathy in unexpected ways. Yet the pervasive persistence of racial (and typically racist) tropes in gaming suggests that the opposite is equally possible: as much as games can expose players to new ideas, they can also reinforce the status quo. The challenge in making sense of a game like Assassin’s Creed III in the context of a literature classroom comes in large part from deciding whether to contextualize it as a part of a conversation about Native representation beyond the simplicity of the white gaze or as an interactive artifact of ethnic studies scholars might call “settler colonialism.” Is the game a bold and innovative attempt to play with the accepted narratives of American exceptionalism or is it merely another opportunity for an audience made up predominantly of wealthy white men to play around with ethnic identity from the safety and comfort of their couches? Or does the truth lie somewhere in between? And if so, what are the implications for the study of identification in the context of games? The play journals give students a space to unpack these questions and allow them a chance to watch their own ideas and opinions evolve as they work toward a final analysis. In the papers that follow, students grapple with the key terms and questions from the unit that they find most engaging as they work toward an analysis of the game and its cultural context.

Coda: Toward Teaching Difference Differently In her magisterial essay Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison makes a forceful case for critically examining the unquestioned racial logics underpinning so much of American culture. In attempting to understand the persistence of racialized tropes and ideologies, she compellingly argues for reframing the terms through which race is considered: Race has become metaphorical—a way of referring to and disguising forces, events, classes, and expressions of social decay and economic division far more threatening to the body politic than biological “race” ever was. Expensively kept, economically unsound, a spurious and useless political asset in election campaigns, racism is as healthy today as it was during the Enlightenment. It seems it has a utility far beyond economy, beyond the sequestering of classes from one another, and has assumed a metaphorical life so completely embedded in daily discourse that it is perhaps more necessary and more on display than ever before. (63) Morrison’s invitation to understand race as a metaphor for, among other things, power relations makes particular sense in the context of video games. The strength of this assignment lies in its ability to challenge students to consider race in new ways, not 162

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merely as a question of avatar skin-color, but as a way of shaping game worlds and defining their horizons of possibility. The approach outlined in this essay models for students what it might mean to think of race “metaphorically” without essentializing or fetishizing difference. Instead, it invites students to rethink some of the key terms of literary ethnic studies and to reframe them in the context of digital media. The results leverage what is compelling about interactivity to pose new kinds of questions about the potentials of identification, the values and limits of diversity, and what is at stake in the question of “play.”

Works Cited Assassin’s Creed III. Ubisoft, 2012. Xbox 360. Deloria, Philip J. Playing Indian. Yale UP, 1998. Everett, Anna, and S. Craig Watkins. “The Power of Play: The Portrayal and Performance of Race in Video Games.” The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games and Learning, edited by Katie Salen, MIT P, 2008, 141–66. Isbister, Katherine. How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design. MIT P, 2016. Leonard, David. “Live in Your World, Play in Ours: Race, Video Games, and Consuming the Other.” Studies in Media & Information Literacy Education, vol. 3, no. 4, 2003, pp. 1–9. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark. Vintage, 2007.

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­C HAPTER 15 CONSTRUCTING SUBJECTIVITIES AND TEACHING OTHERNESS THROUGH THE SILENT HILL SERIES

Katsuya Izumi

How can we teach and learn to welcome otherness and foreignness into our own cultures without significantly changing the other’s and our own cultures? This is an important ethical question we should ask ourselves and our students in this globalized world. No matter how much we try to understand others, it is impossible to become them, but how should we respond to this impossibility? The challenge of addressing immigration in many developed countries, for example, has proved an enduring economic and political issue, which invariably contains ethical concerns. How can literary studies cope with this kind of issue and help students develop their sensitivities and abilities of reading and understanding others, immigrants, and foreigners? As a teaching strategy to approach these questions, I will introduce and scrutinize the Silent Hill series, one of the most popular Japanese horror video games, focusing on the protagonists’ perspectives in the games’ storylines. These games thematize the players’ awareness of the process of revising and rebuilding their subjectivities in relation to the Others whom they encounter. By using the concept of Otherness in this essay, I refer to moments when the protagonists/players perceive in themselves certain traits that supposedly belong to different, often antagonistic, entities. In other words, the concept of the Other signals an opportunity to transcend the difference between the self and the other. Many players acknowledge that Japanese video games such as Suikoden III and Shadow Warrior use stereotypical depictions to construct “Japaneseness” and thus entice the audience into a binary mindset contrasting the East to the West. Perhaps drawing on Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism, Thomas Lamarre, among others, points out the problem of imposing a monolithic and unitary image of Japan and Japaneseness on audiences of anime (89). Game studies focusing on Japanese games often experience the same problem. However, Martin Picard claims that Japanese horror games such as the Silent Hill series and Capcom’s Onimusha series “are increasingly transnational and intermedial, exemplifying a syncretism specific of our global times” (114). These recent horror games include cultural representations through pastiche and cultural borrowings. From a Japanese point of view, the setting of the Silent Hill series represents a blatant cultural borrowing because it is rendered as a small and typical American town. From the perspective of Western players, it is not easy to say that the game series has a cultural syncretism because Japanese cultural representations rarely appear, except for

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the fact that it was produced by a Japanese company, Konami. Despite these issues, some elements, especially in the first three episodes of the Silent Hill series, encourage players to perceive different subjectivities. I will first explain how the Other’s uncanniness or monstrosity in literary works such as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is revealed to be situated within the self. Like these great novels, the Silent Hill series breaks dichotomies between various categories, and I argue, exposes players to the process of constructing various subjectivities. The series offers them opportunities to transcend differences between the physical and the psychological in terms of race, gender, and culture. From a third-person perspective, players’ identifications with the series’ protagonists are not automatic. Inhabiting the role of the protagonists, who embody culturally different traits and undergo fracturing experiences of consciousness, players similarly have their subjectivities impacted and become more conscious of the process of their difficult, and perhaps impossible, identifications with the characters.

Breaking Binaries in Literary Works and the Silent Hill Series How to ethically encounter the Other has been discussed and investigated in literary studies since the late-twentieth century in tandem with poststructuralist theories breaking such binary oppositions as good/bad, Black/white, and man/woman, as evident in the critical history of Melville’s Moby-Dick and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The primary plot of Moby-Dick is simple: Captain Ahab and the sailors of a whaling boat, the Pequod, pursue the white whale Moby Dick only to be destroyed and annihilated. Having had one of his legs bitten off by the whale, Captain Ahab is driven into vengeful hatred and a monomaniacal state. As many have observed, Ahab and Moby Dick are often described with similar terms and images, such as “wrinkled brow,” a pyramid, whiteness (the whale’s skin color and Ahab’s white hair), and so forth (see Cameron; Mariani). In other words, this novel illustrates the transcendence between the pursuer and the pursued, the possessor and possessed, and by and large, the self and the Other. How do teachers encourage students to think about what Ahab is truly chasing if the chaser has similarities with the chased? How can teachers help students transfer their understanding of Ahab and Moby Dick’s similarities into constructing their own subjectivities? Conrad’s Heart of Darkness similarly deals with issues of Otherness, with its central argument that the “civilized” and the “savage” resemble each other. Based on his experience of commanding a steamer sailing the Congo River, Conrad depicts how colonialism erodes the contemporary state of the Congo. While some have seen Conrad’s racism in his depictions of de-humanized Africans (see Achebe), his narrator Charles Marlow finds “kinship” between the Western colonizers and the Africans. Albeit in a condescending tone, Marlow makes gestures to transcend the differences between the colonizer and the colonized and to reconstruct his subjectivity, which was largely defined by the binary of the civilized and the savage. 166

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To explain how the Silent Hill series mirrors the types of lessons evident in MobyDick and Heart of Darkness, I first analyze Silent Hill 2 (2001) because the plot breaks the dichotomy between the physical and the psychological. The game is set in a residential area called SouthVale, located south of Lake Toluca. Receiving a mysterious letter from his deceased wife Mary, who writes that she is waiting for him at a place of their memories, the protagonist James Sunderland visits the tourist site called Silent Hill, where they honeymooned. The town, engulfed by dense fog, has become a ghost town. There, James meets Maria, who resembles Mary. She sometimes accompanies James as he searches for his wife. Encountering various monsters in the town, he eventually realizes that he choked Mary to death with a pillow owing to her fatal illness. Upon this realization toward the game’s end, James must battle Maria, who transforms into a monster. James is able to fight against Maria only after facing his true past. Although her true self is an embodiment of the god that lives in Silent Hill, she is also created by James’s psyche because he desires his idealized version of Mary. The creature that James calls “Red Pyramid Thing” and that he kills near the end of the game is also created by James’s desire for someone or something that can punish him for murdering Mary. Those who play the game for the second time know from the beginning that James is fighting his own psychological creations, but even the first time through the game, some elements hint at the truth. First, players are told that Mary is dead at the game’s beginning. Second, a flashback in the middle of the game depicts James putting a pillow over Mary’s face. Third, and this is particularly important for my argument, the director Masashi Tsuboyama explains that the corpse James finds in front of the television set when he enters a building in Silent Hill “is James himself. The corpse is, in fact, James” (Beuglet). Tsuboyama emphasizes that what James encounters in Silent Hill comes from his own imagination. From these implications, the players gradually realize that James does not fight against an exterior but an interior force. Through a third-person viewpoint, players control James’s movements, and thus, try to see from his perspective. However, it is not easy or perhaps not possible for them to identify with James because his emotions and moral dilemmas are not completely contained in his body; they are dislocated in his environment and in what appears to be his opponents. Needless to say, playing video games is different from reading novels because it provides players a virtual world through their senses of sight. When the protagonist’s interiorities are placed outside of his body, the subjectivities of players are also impacted by this breakage, as if they sense the possibility of having the “Other” (the monstrosity of “Red Pyramid Thing,” for instance) in themselves. The identification that they experience with the protagonist may lessen, but the breakage of the physical and psychological makes players more conscious of the process of identifying with James. The narratives of Silent Hill 1 (1999) and Silent Hill 3 (2003) are closely linked and also provide players with multiple occasions to develop their sensitivities to the “Other” located within themselves. In Silent Hill 1 the protagonist Harry Mason drives to Silent Hill with his daughter Cheryl. Surprised by a girl crossing the street at midnight, Harry drives off the road and falls off a cliff. He wakes up from the impact and realizes that Cheryl is missing. Roaming around this foggy and nightmarish town of monsters to 167

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find her, he meets the mysterious priestess of a cult (The Order), Dahlia Gillespie, and learns that the cult has changed Silent Hill into a ghost town and kidnapped Cheryl. In fact, Cheryl is the materialized half soul of Dahlia’s daughter Alessa; seven years ago the Masons found and adopted her. Harry’s (and the game’s) purpose is to find Cheryl and rescue her from the cult. At the end of the game, Harry holds a baby and runs away from the town, but the baby’s identity is not revealed until Silent Hill 3, a sequel of Silent Hill 1. In Silent Hill 3, the baby has grown into a seventeen-year-old girl. Harry calls her Heather and she is regarded as Alessa reincarnated because Alessa gives the baby to Harry before she dies at the end of Silent Hill 1. This means that Heather inherits the divine lineage of the cult, and thus, that she carries the embryo deity in her womb. At the game’s beginning, Heather wakes up from a strange dream in a hamburger shop located in a shopping mall. After meeting Douglas Cartland, a middle-aged detective, she finds herself in an eerie situation and encounters various monsters. Dahlia’s successor and the cult’s priestess, Claudia Wolf, occasionally appears in front of Heather, who realizes that she must remember her forgotten past. After Harry is assassinated by Claudia’s missionary in the game’s middle, Heather chases her and goes to Silent Hill with Douglas. There, she begins retrieving memories of Alessa and Cheryl. When she confronts Claudia at the cult’s church and vomits the fetal deity, Claudia swallows it to give birth to the god of the cult and destroys herself. The game ends when Heather kills the newly born god and returns home with Douglas. From the perspective of Japanese players, who were the original target audience when the series began in 1999, the setting and the storyline provides cultural Others. The religious aspect of the game especially makes Judeo-Christian traditions conspicuous. Brenda S. Gardenour Walter claims that players in Japan, where “religious syncretism prevails”, experience the “Other” because Silent Hill’s religious cult only allows their followers one religious tradition (95). This analysis seems credible, but I doubt that Japanese players’ experiences of the game’s monotheism will notably unsettle their subjectivities. Instead, I argue that Japanese players experience the Other of the cult as the other or the exterior. The Order is closely linked with fanaticism in the series, and it appears as an antagonist against which Harry Mason (Silent Hill 1) and Heather (Silent Hill 3) must fight. In other words, the player’s sense of self is not in danger of destruction; rather, it will be corroborated through the process of fighting the Other. Japanese players experience destruction of their sense of self when they see the Other in themselves. In Silent Hill 2, it is gradually revealed that the monsters that James encounters are his own psychological embodiments, which stem from his guilt for killing his wife. Silent Hill 3 does not use this psychic structure as clearly as Silent Hill 2 does, but some elements encourage players to experience the Other in themselves. When Heather reaches the room in the church to confront Claudia, she describes the creatures she has encountered as “monsters.” To this label, Claudia retorts, “Do they look like monsters to you?” Vincent Smith, a mysterious man who also belongs to the Order, has said these words to Heather before she reaches the room in the church at the end. There is no way of knowing if Heather ponders on and digests Claudia’s and 168

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Vincent’s comments about the creatures, but players will be aware of the possibility that their monstrous appearances may only arise from Heather’s perspective. Furthermore, since players control Heather, they are aligned with her perspective, notwithstanding the third-person viewpoints. Once they realize that the monstrous appearances of the creatures that Heather encounters may reflect her psychological projections, and therefore, their own interpretations, they start taking objective views on themselves and worry if they could also appear to be monstrous from different points of views. Or, just like James who creates the “Red Pyramid Thing” out of his psyche in Silent Hill 2, players may consider these encounters in retrospect and regard the creatures’ monstrosities as the projections of their own interiorities. Silent Hill 3 also uses monsters as reflections of the characters’ psychologies.

Multiple Representations of Culture and Gender I have discussed transcendental relationships between the physical and the psychological, the exterior and the interior, and the Other and the Self to point out useful elements from this game series for students who want to visualize the experimental attempts of novels such as Moby-Dick to break binary oppositions. Are there any elements in the Silent Hill series, then, that help players cultivate their sensitivities to cultural Others, to cope with the type of kinship that Marlow finds between different races in Heart of Darkness, for instance? Video games are usually adapted to the environments in which they are played when they cross national and cultural borders. The distributors of video games eliminate localized characters as much as possible to make them appealing and perhaps assimilable for their particular audiences. However, Mia Consalvo explains, “Rather than shed the ‘cultural odor’ that [Koichi] Iwabuchi argues that Japanese products traditionally have tried to eliminate in their global travels, Japanese games often end up keeping many of those elements … , as Japanese popular culture continues to be popular outside its home region” (33).1 Games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, which are originally set in the United States, have obviously foreign atmospheres for Japanese players, but underneath the Western or Judeo-Christian surface, are there any “cultural odors” that the games maintain for players in Western countries? For Japanese players, rather than experiencing Judeo-Christian monotheism or a Western atmosphere, experiencing the world through Heather’s perspective in Silent Hill 3 is more thrilling. Especially, male Japanese players’ sense of self will be unsettled when they go through the Other World (the world of Silent Hill is sometimes so called) while controlling a blonde American girl with a different racial and gender identity. Yet there are cultural amalgamations that have the same impact on many kinds of players. The moments when Heather uses a Japanese sword further influence the ways the players— not only male Japanese but also female American players—experience the world. American girl players may identify with Heather more easily because she is an American woman, but her use of the Japanese sword displaces the sense of their selves. In her analysis of stereotypes in a Japanese game called Soul Calibur, Rachael Hutchinson, 169

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after writing about the persistence of stereotypes in video games because of financial restrictions and entertaining effects, states, “The entertainment value of stereotypes in such games has a flip side, however, in that stereotypes based on racial, gender, or national characteristics may be interpreted in sexist or racist terms. A stereotype that is interpreted as offensive or jarring can disrupt a player’s enjoyment of the game, or at the very least interfere with that player’s identification process” (287). The Silent Hill series is rife with such cultural stereotypes as Christian monotheism, a blonde girl, the witchlike appearance of Dahlia, and the Japanese sword, but the combinations of the multiple stereotypical representations attached to the protagonist give players, who come from either side of the represented cultures, a thrilling moment to revise their subjectivities. For the sake of entertaining players, gender stereotypes are difficult to avoid, perhaps more so than cultural stereotypes. One can be critical of gender depictions in the series, in which male protagonists battle with female characters, because the narratives rely on stereotypical depictions of women, including a witch (Dahlia in Silent Hill 1) and a seductress (Maria in Silent Hill 2). With the character of Claudia, Silent Hill 3 does not refrain from deploying stereotypical representations of women as witches, but because of the female protagonist Heather, it avoids the gendered framework of men versus women. Even in the simple method of using male and female protagonists in similar settings, the Silent Hill series attempts to unsettle players’ gender identities. Furthermore, players often encounter indeterminately gendered monsters. This genderless aspect is sometimes manifested through the form of headless creatures. In Silent Hill 2, some creatures are also faceless and the “Red Pyramid Thing” looks gender-neutral because of its garments. The series further disrupts the gender binary in the fact that many indeterminately gendered monsters are reflections of the protagonists’ psyches. Rachael Hutchinson emphasizes the importance of having many choices of characters to play in combat games: “The many versions of Soul Calibur, Mortal Kombat, Tekken, and Street Fighter offer a large number of characters across a wide range of ethnic, racial, national, and historical backgrounds” (294). The players’ ability to choose characters in these combat games before or in the middle of combat enables them to perform various kinds of selves even in structures based on binary oppositions. To “subvert the binary” in terms of constructing the self, the more characters that players can choose to perform, the better. Obviously, however, players of the Silent Hill series are not allowed to choose characters; the sense of self is constructed by the environment. When players take Heather’s perspective, the constructed self will be different depending on what kinds of opponents she encounters and what kinds of weapons she holds. Some distortions or disruptions during players’ identifications with her will happen when they have Heather hold the Japanese sword, for instance. Therefore, I agree with Hutchinson’s point that “It is this element of self-awareness (literally, awareness of the self) that makes the binary combat genre so rich in possibility for the player’s construction of the self and experimentation with identity” (295). This “awareness of the self ” will be higher when players cannot identify with the characters completely. There must be some slippage in the process of constructing the self when players control the characters who are different from themselves in many aspects such as culture, gender, and race. Thus, the example of 170

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a blonde American girl holding a Japanese sword is powerful because distinct cultural signifiers are attached to the character that players perform, which make it difficult for them to identify with her.

Constructing Subjectivities in Different Kinds of Realities I want to stress, however, that it is not really up to players whether Heather should use the Japanese sword on some occasions, although that may appear to be the case. During the battle with the god-monster in Silent Hill 3, players can choose for Heather to use the sword instead of the shot gun, but then it is impossible to kill it. They can have her use the hand gun to kill the monsters on her way to the last battle, but that would make it more difficult, if not impossible, to finish the game because of the limited amount of ammunition. In other words, the game’s structure and narrative affect the player’s decisions significantly. This is a useful reminder that decisions in our lives have been embedded in cultural and social codes. To connect playing Silent Hill to teaching literary works, it is important to remind students that readers do not enjoy full agency in their interpretations or understandings of works. They must build their interpretations on evidence and literary conventions as they construct arguments for their readers to follow. If a novel is set in Japan, for example, students need to consider Japanese cultural backgrounds. These restrictions, however, work as facilitators for readers to dive into the constructed areas of the story and to perform new selves consciously in the restricted spaces. As Akihiro Imamura, the producer of Silent Hill 2, explains, “The town of Silent Hill has a mysterious force. It exerts influence on people, and the town shows a world [in] which you cannot distinguish from nightmare or reality” (Davison 126). The fog surrounding the protagonist makes it difficult for players to see what lies ahead and to locate themselves on the map. Along with the darkness around them, this setting can be seen as a preparatory stage to enter a new kind of space, and especially in Silent Hill 2’s case, the actual space coincides with James’s psychological space. Once he enters a building, there are many downward movements such as jumping down a hole that is too dark to see inside and descending a ladder into the sewage system, and so forth. These movements signify that James is reaching to the depths of his mind in which his past memories are concealed. The structure of the video game is useful for scrutinizing the process through which players construct their subjectivities by using their imaginations and identifying themselves with the protagonist that they control, while conscious of the restrictions imposed on their agency. Both interpreting literary works through their imaginations and textual evidence and controlling a game’s characters within the narrative and technological restrictions entail that readers and players create new realities within the given areas. In general, by playing video games, players experience two perspectives simultaneously. When controlling main characters, such as Mario in the Super Mario Bros. series and James in Silent Hill 2, players become the characters by seeing what happens in the games from 171

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their perspectives. At the same time, they also watch them from a distance as if they are the third-person narrators of the games. Andrei Nae discusses Silent Hill 2 as a game that “is far more filmic than most previous games” (15), and develops her astute observations about the camera angle in relation to the degree of “immediacy”: it would be difficult to argue that, by remediating film, third-person video games have attained a higher degree of immediacy than previous first-person shooters. What can nevertheless be deduced is that these games make a shift from imitating natural eyesight, therefore a type of immediacy based on our natural technologically unmediated perception of the real world, to imitating a technological and cultural sight, namely the representational affordances of film, a medium with significant cultural prestige, whose technological capacities are culturally constructed as being realistic and transparent. (14) Nae has in mind the general understanding that “the degree of immediacy” becomes higher if players assume a first-person perspective by becoming the shooting protagonist, for instance, so that they perceive what they see on the screen more realistically. As a response to that, Nae suggests that the third-person perspective in Silent Hill 2 depicts a different kind of reality by enabling players to change the camera angle and to see James Sunderland “sometimes from an angle in which we, as humans, could never position ourselves” (17). Adhering to filmic and technological realism, as it were, Silent Hill 2 does not attempt to make players feel that they are in the real world. Rather, it gives them opportunities to construct new subjectivities in the technologically constructed world. The Silent Hill series is often compared to another Japanese horror game series, Resident Evil. The monsters in the latter game were humans and animals who mutated into monsters owing to a virus that leaked from a research institute. In contrast to the monstrosity in Resident Evil, which is scientifically explained, the monsters in the Silent Hill series are more psychological because they often represent the characters’ interiorities. Bernard Perron explains, “Assessed in comparison to Resident Evil, the horror of Silent Hill 1 (and of the other games in the series) is best described as being psychological. The entire game is governed more by its atmosphere than by its action, by what is felt rather than by what is done” (29). The “reality” on which the Silent Hill series focuses is a psychological one depicted through its filmic immediacy. Thus, the monstrosity constructed by the use of technology and the creators’ hand drawings fashions the characters’ feelings, such as anxiety and guilt, and not the reality of the outside world as it is. Once players notice this phenomenon, interiority and exteriority become mutually transcendental. At the same time, by killing monsters, they realize that they can change their interiorities, psychologies, and subjectivities. One can say that Conrad’s attempt to break the dichotomy between the colonizer and the colonized reveals a form of racism. Nonetheless, to see the Others against whom 172

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people opposed themselves within themselves is an effective approach to address vexing issues of binaries. Players of the Silent Hill series can visualize the interchangeable relationship between various binaries by transcending borders and boundaries. While they control the protagonist of the game and simultaneously recognize their limited agency because of its narrative and technological contexts, players should be aware of the impossibility to become the protagonist, thereby enhancing and developing their abilities to construct various subjectivities. Although the level of immersion in the game may be reduced, it is precisely because of that impossibility that they can pay attention to the process of building their subjectivities. Fighting against the faceless and genderless monsters and the monsters created by the protagonists’ self-projections, players need to prepare for responding to the comments from Claudia and Vincent in Silent Hill 3, “Do they look like monsters to you?” Monstrosity here by no means has negative connotations; it is one of the Other’s many forms. Discussing the visualized transcendence of the Self and the Other in video games prepares students to think about the same kinds of gestures made through writing even in esoteric literary texts such as Moby-Dick and Heart of Darkness, and by extension, to deal with the Others in real societies in terms of gender, race, and culture.

Note 1. Consalvo refers to Koichi Iwabuchi’s Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism.

Works Cited Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Heart of Darkness: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism. 4th edition, edited by Paul B. Armstrong, Norton, 2006, pp. 336–49. Beuglet, Nicolas. The Making of Silent Hill 2: Alchemists of Emotion. Fun TV, 33 minutes, 2001. Cameron, Sharon. The Corporeal Self: Allegories of the Body in Melville and Hawthorne. Columbia UP, 1981. Consalvo, Mia. Atari to Zelda: Japan’s Videogames in Global Contexts. MIT P, 2016. Davison, John. “Fear Factor.” Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine, Oct. 2001, pp. 120–30. Gardenour Walter, Brenda S. “Silent Hill and Fatal Frame: Finding Transcendent Horror in and beyond the Haunted Magic Circle.” Playing with Religion in Digital Games, edited by Heidi A. Campbell and Gregory Price Grieve, Indiana UP, 2014, pp. 88–105. Hutchinson, Rachael. “Performing the Self: Subverting the Binary in Combat Games.” Games and Culture, vol. 2, no. 4, 2007, pp. 283–99. Iwabuchi, Koichi. Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism. Duke UP, 2002. Lamarre, Thomas. The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation. U of Minnesota P, 2009. Mariani, Giorgio. “‘Chiefly Known by His Rod’: The Book of Jonah, Mapple’s Sermon, and Scapegoating.” “Ungraspable Phantom”: Essays on Moby-Dick, edited by John Bryant, Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, and Timothy Marr, Kent State UP, 2006, pp. 37–57. 173

Teaching Games and Game Studies Nae, Andrei. “Immersion at the Intersection of Technology, Subjectivity, and Culture: An Analysis of Silent Hill 2.” Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, vol. 13, 2016, pp. 7–19. Perron, Bernard. Silent Hill: The Terror Engine. U of Michigan P, 2002. Picard, Martin. “Haunting Backgrounds: Transnationality and Intermediality in Japanese Survival Horror Video Games.” Horror Video Games: Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play, edited by Bernard Perron, McFarland, 2009, pp. 95–120.

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­PART IV GAMIFYING THE LITERATURE CLASSROOM

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­C HAPTER 16 FILM AND LITERATURE INSTRUCTION THROUGH LIVE-ACTION ROLE-PLAY

Evan Torner

Cognition is embodied (Fincher-Kiefer). The same could be said for the acts of reading literature, watching a film, or playing a game (e.g., Sobchack, Glenberg, Anable, Keogh). No matter how seamless our connection feels with a piece of media, our bodies and their physical processes respond to it in real-time as well. Our hearts race when a fictional character’s life stands on the line. Our muscles stretch and contract as we wind down from a film. Our bladders remind us of their contents right before we reach the next video-game boss. One might say that there is no reality, except that which our bodies and physical senses confirm (Hoffman). Why, then, might we not make full use of our bodies to respond to film and literature, since they are already in play anyway? This chapter focuses on the use of embodied fiction, or live-action role-play (larp), to adapt and teach film and literature. Given that literature and film are not quite as central to society as they once were during times dominated by white Western-educated bourgeois figures, the act of physically enacting characters in a classroom grants students access to unique perspectives on characters’ motivations and decision trees, as well as what might be described as the “system” of a particular narrative work. It is pedagogically powerful to ask students to embody and feel the emotions of characters in the media being taught, before they might even read or watch them. Let us entertain another question: During your formal education, how were you taught about the prisoner’s dilemma? The prisoner’s dilemma is the Cold War-era mathematical model of human behavior that stipulates how two rational subjects with everything to gain by collaborating will choose not to collaborate, producing what is known as a Nash Equilibrium: a stable system created from every participant acting out of self-interest. In the classroom, high-school and college faculty tend to introduce it with a thought experiment or short game among the students. But what if students’ standard introduction to the prisoner’s dilemma came from in-class play of J. Tuomas Harviainen’s The Tribunal? “A participatory scenario about the mechanics of oppression, for five to twelve players” is the game’s subtitle; it is further described as “Inspired by Orwell, Krylov, Büchner, Linna and the classic dilemma exercises.” Running under two hours of game play, The Tribunal nonetheless grants an impression of the prisoner’s dilemma unlikely to be forgotten. The premise: in a dystopian anthropomorphic-animal society, Corporals Magpie and Badger are accused of stealing food, a crime for which they will be executed. The problem: Major Pig likely stole the food, but he is unimpugnable in both the military hierarchy and in the game rules. What do the soldiers from Magpie and Badger’s unit do? Players take on these soldiers’ roles,

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and the entire runtime is spent waiting to give testimony at the trial. Resultant play not only allegorizes how authoritarian societies break their subjects, but also creates a genuine prisoner’s dilemma fraught with understandable, embodied emotion. Players of this larp tend to agree on a solution to the scenario in the first five minutes, but that solution erodes as they have to physically wait together for another eighty or so minutes. Hijinks ensue, because waiting is not as fun as hijinks. Given the different characters’ personalities and motivations, they will probably not have the necessary united front of alibis and testimony when each character is brought out of the room one by one to testify at the game’s end. Magpie and Badger will probably die, and the people in charge will face no consequences. However, the players of The Tribunal will have not only experienced a scientific “example” of how self-interest destroys collective action by design, but also a work of interactive literature, of playable theater, that refigures allegorical fictions of George Orwell and others into stark, behavioral reality. Our bodies and conduct do not lie. Since the Cold War, embodied live-action simulations have been used to model situations from classroom discrimination (Bloom) to nuclear warfare (Ghamari-Tabrizi; Trammell). Language and literature scenarios in the classroom date back to the 1950s (Frisby). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, communities around the world transformed such simulation and adult pretend-play into the recreational medium of larp (Fatland). This took different forms, depending on the country one lived in (Harviainen et  al.). The United States saw larp emerge from fantasy combat games in the 1970s, mystery dinners, and “interactive literature” when “between 1979 and 1983 … some tabletop role-players [at Harvard and MIT] stood up and embodied their characters in a style other than live fantasy combat” (Harviainen et  al. 94). In the United Kingdom, “live role-play” emerged from the castle larps of Peter Carey, Rob Donaldson, and Conor Kostock’s Treasure Trap (1982), whereas in Canberra, Australia, larps emerged parallel (in 1981) from mass freeform role-play. Russian larp came from a multi-decade tradition of educational role-play and simulation meeting J.R.R. Tolkien’s Russian translation in the early 1980s, whereas Nordic larp came from a heterogeneous set of non-commercial values and arts-based children’s education a bit later. By the 2010s, as Jon Back argues, larp became the cutting edge of modern interaction design, affording new levels of inter-player communication and experience. The pedagogical and simulation uses of the larp medium predate their use for entertainment. But revolutionary design in the entertainment space came full circle back to the classroom, in the form of “edu-larp” (Hammer et al. 288; Chen). Larp, as defined by Markus Montola, is role-playing in which the game is “superimposed on [the] physical world, which is used as a foundation in defining the game world” (24). It is an activity in which the player takes on a character that is not simply reducible to a social role, and who is played in a fictional reality shared by others. Edu-larp constitutes a narrower range of games: those whose parameters and objectives align with those of a classroom teacher or college instructor. Aaron Vanek and Andrew Peterson define educational larp as “a pedagogical activity where students take on character roles in pre-written scenarios designed to facilitate self-motivated 178

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learning, as well as teach pre-determined knowledge in a contextual framework” (221). Edu-larp builds off the premise that pretend play is a natural part of childhood as well as reflecting our innate capacity to learn, and that this pretend play usefully translates the ambiguity of social situations and psychological intention into legible symbols and actionable tasks in a “quarantined” fictional world (Pinkham and Smith). It is critical that one does not brand larpers as delusional or infantilized because they temporarily inhabit these imaginary worlds, when the opposite is more likely the case. Skilled larpers are, compared to non-larpers, more cognizant of the hard boundaries between reality and fiction, between character and player, thanks to the rapid frame-shifting required to maintain character and shared fictional reality (Montola 25). If we consider larp’s utility to the literature and film classroom, edu-larps allow students to comprehend not only core plot details of a text, but also the internal struggles of specific characters and social dynamics that sometimes get lost in an initial reading. Subject-specific freeform larps for the classroom permit students access to the emotional space of a work of fiction, so that it is easier for them to interpret. In the past few decades, an established form of edu-larp has become fashionable in North American humanities higher education, namely Reacting to the Past. Mark C.  Carnes developed Reacting to the Past as a way to “overcome the silence of the students” (124), a reigning culture of non-engagement and risk-aversion that keeps students at emotional arms’ length from the material. Carnes is a history professor at Barnard College, and his Reacting to the Past curriculum is designed to enshrine the thorny debates of historical actors in their context. He calls such scenarios “roleimmersion” games or “reacting” games, and recognizes that they participate in a multi-decade, or even multi-century educational tradition of structured, role-based simulation (Vanek and Peterson). For example, the popular Trial of Galileo (Petterson; Carnes; Purnell) scenario allows students to inhabit roles of seventeenth-century figures debating both whether Galileo’s revolutionary scientific work should be published and whether Galileo should be punished. The logic is that students will scarcely care about, say, Ptolemaic and Copernican cosmologies, or debates about science and religion germane to the seventeenth-century Italian city-states, unless they are asked to roleplay as a character within these debates. The Reacting to the Past framework boasts a whole line of publications, seminars, and rubrics dedicated to high-quality historical simulation in the classroom. Nevertheless, we might seek alternatives, especially given that such games demand much from both teachers and students in terms of cognitive load and willingness to compete. Reacting games require extensive student reading, adopt an agonistic model akin to high-school debate teams (in which there will be a “winner”), and do not readily yield their own design framework to students so that it might be understood and hacked. My own proposal for teaching film and literature through larp revolves around hardwon knowledge from the larp scene (Torner, “Teaching German Literature through Larp”). Take, for example, the attempt to teach serious subject matter with ongoing effects, ethical conundrums, and present ramifications for students: the Holocaust, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the processes of colonialism. Jessica Hammer and Moyra 179

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Turkington (2021) lay out their own historical role-play framework that responds to the cumbersome Reacting to the Past model. Hammer and Turkington developed their Holocaust game Rosenstrasse (2017) first as an arty festival entry for Fastaval, a gaming convention in Denmark that distinguishes itself through bespoke-designed scenarios each year, and then for commercial release through Kickstarter in 2019. Their framework stems from a commitment to game design as a means of deepening connections to difficult materials, rather than trivializing them. History presents a challenge for Holocaust role-play because students “might learn incorrect information about history … take the wrong lessons away from the game … or fail to situate the experiences of the characters in the larger context of German society, including the roles of bystanders and perpetrators” (Hammer and Turkington, “Designing Role-Playing Games That Address the Holocaust” 44). Character presents a challenge for Holocaust role-play due to the possible stereotyping of, or even over-identifying with, the figures involved in a way disrespectful to Holocaust survivors. Agency presents a challenge for Holocaust role-play when players might victim-blame by making “better” decisions than the real survivors or transcending the sensible horizon of decisions available to these historical subjects at the time. Experience presents a challenge for Holocaust role-play if players make light of the subject matter or, conversely, are deeply upset by it. For film and literature scenarios, the challenge is similar: text and context should be properly attended to, characters and their horizon of agency should not radically depart from the source material, and the experience of a scenario should neither trivialize the work in question nor traumatize the players. We can furthermore take a number of lessons from J. Li and Jason Morningstar’s Pattern Language for Larp Design, a larp community document that allows one to feel out the strengths and weaknesses of a particular design, also for classroom edu-larps. Adapting a film or work of literature requires attention to time (How much time does each element of the design occupy?), space (Where will it be run and how does it affect light, movement, sound, and social cues?), player energy (How exhausted are the players?), memory (What are the different ongoing facts and decisions a player must keep track of?), conversation dyads and triads (How do we ensure more productive player groupings of two or three, rather than the natural tendency to gather and talk in a big circle?), and so forth. In short, there are best practices in design within the larp and edu-larp communities, and enterprising film and literature instructors should attend to them if they want to make a good game, which is itself the gateway to a high-quality educational experience. The rest of this chapter is devoted to a cursory overview of example games from our larp design community, warts and all. Although simulation in classrooms is nothing new, our training often occludes productive discussions of a particular design for a particular lesson. Faculty over time have to continuously assert the efficacy of games as learning instruments (Gee) and, as a result, rarely get into the finer details of specific games. The hope here is to build a critical capacity to look at live-action games with their potentials and pitfalls in mind, rather than simply to buy into a particular school of design. Metropolis is a larp based on the eponymous 1927 Fritz Lang silent film, which tells the story of the industrialist Joh Fredersen, who sows chaos in his city by creating a malicious 180

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robot double of the inspirational religious figure Maria. I wrote the larp scenario on the train back from my own first Fastaval in 2010. At Fastaval, I had played in two literary adaptation games: Frederik Axelzon’s The Journey, based on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and Anna Westerling’s Growing Up, based on Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. Both games had been designed not only with their books’ plotlines in mind, but also with their themes and moods. Axelzon deprives his players almost entirely of agency, moving them scene by scene into the inevitable while also surprising them at their own moral decay in the face of apocalypse. Westerling also marches her players through a specific scene order with specific characters but permitted more agency over the outcomes of the scenes. One thing that impressed me when playing Growing Up—I took on the role of Colonel Brandon—was that there were strong character-level incentives to follow the plotline of Sense and Sensibility, even though the game never tells you what your character will decide. In Growing Up, Colonel Brandon was described as a wealthy character who sought someone intelligent as a partner and could not abide fools. This led me as a player to court Marianne and to shun the fool Willoughby, as in the book, without any foreknowledge of its plotline. As a scholar of German genre film, I wanted the same design for Metropolis: a game that bodily enacted the characters and plotline of the film, but with ample room for player agency to deviate from Thea von Harbou’s script. I hate the ending, you see. The larp version of Metropolis adopts the three-act structure of Lang and Harbou’s film: Act I Overture introduces the characters, Act II Intermezzo enmeshes them in a complex narrative that spans all levels of the city, and Act III Furioso unleashes the city’s partial destruction and endangers these characters. These acts in the larp come with requirements to end them, such as “Four or more scenes will have elapsed” or “Freder meets Maria, travels to the Factory, replaces Worker 11811 on the assembly line, and discovers the Catacombs through him.” The milestone requirements ensure that some play will happen, but most of its content is up to the players. I wrote that “Your game might resemble the movie, but it will not play out like the movie. The game is your own, and will resolve in the way that play leads it to resolve” (Torner, Metropolis 10). These principles usually lead to a dramatically different ending than the film’s, in which the industrialists and workers shake hands and reconcile their differences after Rotwang is defeated. In most runs of the game I have seen, players usually wind up murdering the industrialist in a Marxist revolution, itself still genre-appropriate material. Another guiding principle of my interpretation is the German expressionist trope of emotions being imposed on the characters from outside, rather than from their own internal reflection. To mimic this effect in game, I made the irritating design choice of giving all characters in the game a “Passion List.” The way it works is that any player whose character is not participating in the scene will then play as part of the City. They can play as benches, lamp posts, monitors, or any other such inanimate object. When one of these background players noticeably shifts or makes a noise, the player-characters in the scene may optionally move to the next emotion on their Passion List. In theory, this means that characters will suddenly and violently shift from, say, feeling “Awe” to feeling “Despair,” or from feeling “Confusion” to feeling “Vengeance.” In practice, obviously, the Passion List is a burden 181

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on the player’s cognitive load and players often lose track of which emotion they ought to be on anyway. Either way, however, my interpretation of the material is made clear: German expressionism to me is the feeling of being assaulted by emotions, produced in part by one’s anxiety-producing environment, and that characters are otherwise largely determined by their social class and the spaces they inhabit. As with The Tribunal and the prisoner’s dilemma, so do players in Metropolis internalize these lessons with their very bodies as they move through the narrative toward the destruction of the city. Another game that is particularly effective at teaching literature is the Romeo & Juliet Larp, written by Bjarke Pedersen and Lizzie Stark for ArtsEdge at the Kennedy Center. Intended as a tool for students to learn the salient characters, plotline, and social power relations from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the edu-larp works its magic by having players replay versions of Act I, Scene V—the masquerade ball scene at the Capulet mansion when Romeo meets Juliet in person—over and over again. The game’s relationship to time differs markedly from that of The Tribunal: whereas Harviainen’s scenario stretches out time so that it kills any hope at collectivity, Pedersen and Stark’s scenario compresses time so that not only the scene’s action, but all the interpersonal dynamics of the play itself play out in less than five minutes per run. The edu-larp creates a microcosm of the play, and then teaches students by way of variations on a theme. What would happen, for example, if Romeo never met Juliet in that scene? What would happen if all men characters would have to meekly obey the women characters? What would happen if the whole scene were played out in slow motion? The edu-larp introduces Li and Morningstar’s patterns of larp design to its intended high-school-student audience: larp is modulation of character motivations and activities, of power relations, of time, space, light, and sound. Not only do the players become intimately familiar with the main characters and tensions of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, but also they become at least passingly familiar with how to play a larp and how to configure a set of player incentives to generate certain story outcomes. “By physically embodying characters from Romeo & Juliet,” Pedersen and Stark write, “students will explore the choices of several characters and learn what drives each one. They will also learn that no element in Shakespeare’s drama is accidental. The plot of Romeo and Juliet is like a beautifullyconstructed Jenga tower: remove the wrong piece and the action of the play collapses” (3). In this way, edu-larp enables students to look at media and mediation as systems and processes, as a series of decisions that then produce emergent effects. In his recent book Board Games as Media, Paul Booth argues that, while not on screens themselves, board games help us further understand the act of mediation itself, of adapting one medium to another with significant artistic intervention (9). This argument applies well to larp, which draws attention to human embodiment as the ultimate locus of narrative itself. Playing characters explicitly inspired by specific fictions allow our students to differently experience the workings of that fiction. Beyond simply reading character parts aloud, role-play that uses situational improvisation, a shared fictional space, and in-character activities aids students in understanding character motivations and how they fit into their social context (Hammer and Turkington, “Designing Role-Playing Games That Address the Holocaust”). Textuality 182

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in edu-larp meets the body, the limitations of our bounded first-person perspectives, and the limitlessness of interpersonal networks. Indeed, Eleanor Saitta casts larp as fiction for network society in which “sociotechnical infrastructural systems” reign. “Larp,” she writes, “may be a key to understanding these systems, as it provides us with a toolkit for diagnosing their unpredictable social implications” (73). “Cool” media such as radio, podcasts, or television may be able to convey some sense of these systems scale and breadth (McLuhan), but deep emotional investment requires “hot” media such as film, books, or—yes—live-action role-play. Embodied role-play lets those “social implications” wash through the players as they weigh their characters’ decisions or feel the burden of the inevitable as they encounter it. In The Tribunal, players find themselves in a mini-Orwellian scenario with no right answers and little hope of salvation. Their understanding of the larger systems at work is premised on their powerlessness to change them within the scenario. In Rosenstrasse, players must make impossible decisions during the Third Reich’s oppressive regime and weigh the outcomes against what history has told them about the Holocaust. In Metropolis, players enact their own piece of expressionist theater resembling the silent film, ever-conscious of the relationship between their characters’ emotions and the outcomes of the fiction. In the Romeo and Juliet Larp, we understand Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet itself as a system and can test different configurations of characters and power within that system. Students ideally will play these larps, then read or watch the media from which is adapted, and then perhaps write their own live-action games in response to both play and viewing experience. As I’ve stated elsewhere (Torner, “Teaching German Literature through Larp”), students responding to a game with another game are engaging in the kinds of interpretation we hope to see in our classrooms. Students who are developing games based on best practices in the larp community and their own experiences have suddenly become game designers and are entering into larger cultural dialogues with their work. The world needs more games about Metropolis, Romeo and Juliet, prisoner’s dilemmas, or any myriad number of other topics in any case.

Works Cited Anable, Aubrey. Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect. U of Minnesota P, 2018. Axelzon, Frederik. The Journey (Resan). Fastaval, 2010. Back, Jon, editor. The Cutting Edge of Nordic Larp. Knutpunkt, 2014. Bloom, Stephen G. “Lesson of a Lifetime.” Smithsonian Magazine, Sept. 2005, https://www. smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/lesson-of-a-lifetime-72754306/. Accessed Nov. 10, 2020. Booth, Paul. Board Games as Media. Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Carey, Peter, Rob Donaldson, and Conor Kostick. Treasure Trap. 1982. Carnes, Mark C. Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Transform College. Harvard UP, 2014. Chen, Sande. “The World According to Edu-Larp.” Games + Learning, 2016. https://www. gamesandlearning.org/2016/02/18/the-world-according-to-edu-larps-the-analog-learninggames/. Accessed Nov. 11, 2020. Fatland, Eirik. “A History of (Live) Roleplaying.” Larpwriter Summer School, Jul. 13, 2016, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNY_qT_1xpQ. Accessed Nov. 12, 2020. 183

Teaching Games and Game Studies ­Fincher-Kiefer, Rebecca. How the Body Shapes Knowledge: Empirical Support for Embodied Cognition. American Psychological Association, 2019. Frisby, Alfred William. Teaching English Notes and Comments on Teaching English Overseas. Longman, 1957. Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Ghamari-Tabrizi, Sharon. “Simulating the Unthinkable: Gaming Future War in the 1950s and 1960s.” Social Studies of Science, vol. 30, no. 2, 2000, pp. 163–223. Glenberg, Arthur M. “How Reading Comprehension Is Embodied and Why It Matters.” International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education, vol. 4, no. 1, 2011, pp. 5–18. Hammer, Jessica, Alexandra To, Karen Schrier, Sarah Lynne Bowman, and Geoff Kaufman. “Learning and Role-Playing Games.” Role-Playing Game Studies: A Transmedia Approach, edited by José P. Zagal and Sebastian Deterding, Routledge, 2018, pp. 283–99. Hammer, Jessica, and Moyra Turkington. “Designing Role-Playing Games That Address the Holocaust.” International Journal of Designs for Learning, vol. 12, no. 1, 2021, pp. 42–53. Hammer, Jessica, and Moyra Turkington. Rosenstrasse. Fastaval, 2017. Harviainen, J. Tuomas. The Tribunal, 2010. https://nordiclarp.org/w/images/8/8f/The_Tribunal_ US.pdf. Harviainen, J. Tuomas, Rafael Bienia, Simon Brind, Michael Hitchens, Yaraslau I. Kot, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, David W. Simkins, Jaakko Stenros, and Ian Sturrock. “Live-Action RolePlaying Games.” Role-Playing Game Studies: A Transmedia Approach, edited by José P. Zagal and Sebastian Deterding, Routledge, 2018, pp. 87–106. Hoffman, Donald. The Case against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes. Norton, 2019. Keogh, Brendan. A Play of Bodies. MIT P, 2018. Li, J., and Jason Morningstar. Pattern Language for Larp Design, 2016, https://bit.ly/3u66qjj. Accessed Feb. 2, 2021. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. McGraw Hill, 1964. Metropolis. Directed by Fritz Lang, UFA, 1927. Montola, Markus. “The Invisible Rules of Role-Playing.” International Journal of Role-Playing, vol. 1, 2008, pp. 22–36. Pedersen, Bjarke, and Lizzie Stark. Romeo and Juliet Larp. ArtsEdge at the Kennedy Center, 2016. Petterson, Michael S., Mark C. Carnes, and Frederick Purnell. The Trial of Galileo: Aristotelism, the “New Cosmology,” and the Catholic Church, 1616–33. Norton, 2016. Pinkham, Ashley M., and Eric Smith. “Pretend Play and Cognitive Development.” The WileyBlackwell Handbook of Childhood Cognitive Development, edited by Angeline Lillard, WileyBlackwell, 2011, pp. 285–311. Saitta, Eleanor. “Infrastructural Games and Societal Play.” Larp Politics: Systems, Theory, and Gender in Action, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Mika Loponen, and Jukka Särkijärvi, Ropeconry, 2016, pp. 73–81. Sobchack, Vivian. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. U of California P, 2004. Torner, Evan. “Teaching German Literature through Larp: A Proposition.” International Journal of Role-Playing, vol. 6, 2016, pp. 55–9. Torner, Evan. Metropolis. Fastaval, 2012. Trammell, Aaron. “From Where Do Dungeons Come?” Analog Game Studies, vol. 1, 2014. https://analoggamestudies.org/2014/08/from-where-do-dungeons-come/. Vanek, Aaron, and Andrew Peterson. “Live Action Role-Playing (Larp): Insight into an Underutilized Educational Tool.” Learning Education Games, vol. 2, 2016, pp. 219–40. Westerling, Anna. Growing Up. Fastaval, 2010.

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­C HAPTER 17 HOW TO DEVELOP GAMIFIED PEDAGOGICAL STRATEGIES: A CASE STUDY OF CLASSICAL JAPANESE POETRY IN THE UNDERGRADUATE CLASSROOM

Catherine Ryu

Poetry is intrinsically a meaning-making game.1 Broadly speaking, each reader must grasp the significance of a given verse not only by detecting clues implicitly and explicitly conveyed through the poet’s highly wrought language but also by negotiating its ultimate meaning from a readerly perspective. It is indeed the case for classical Japanese poetry known as tanka (literally “short poem”), which are works comprised of a mere thirtyone morae; morae serve as the foundation of the Japanese sound system (e.g., “hana” [flowers] is a bimoraic syllable with two morae [ha+na]). Arranged in accordance with an internal structure of five measures of 5-7-5-7-7 morae, each mora in this constricted verbal space is intimately connected with the poet’s meaning-making strategies, which include stretching Japanese linguistic grammaticality to its very limit of intelligibility, as well as creatively expanding its poetic space through such rhetorical devices as allusion, word play, and ellipsis, to mention just a few. Each tanka is in a sense an invitation to a poetic puzzle, the complete picture of which emerges only after the reader determines how all aspects of the verse under consideration fit together, coalescing into a singularly compelling poetic composition of imagery, meaning, and tone. Viewed in that light, learning how to read classical Japanese tanka is akin to learning how to play a discrete game with its own set of complex rules structured to generate a pleasurable experience distinctive to that specific game. The brevity of this poetic form also renders it effective as teaching material because each verse presents a fresh puzzle to be solved and enjoyed. Even as a delightful puzzle, tanka can be simultaneously frustrating and rewarding, especially in the context of an undergraduate classroom at a university in the United States, where students’ own lived experiences—poetic and otherwise—do not necessarily intersect with the worldviews and emotions captured in classical Japanese poetry. Moreover, classical Japanese grammar is challenging even to native Japanese speakers because its complexity entails, for example, six inflected forms of various conjugation types for adjectives, verbs, and auxiliary verbs. Even after mastering the conjugation tables, learners still cannot fully comprehend the realm of classical poetry, if not also equipped with a firm understanding of cultural codes that undergird its poetic visions

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and idioms. That is why transforming the process of learning tanka into that of gaming can potentially facilitate the entry of novice tanka readers, including native Japanese speakers and L2 speakers, into an otherwise unfamiliar and disorienting literary space. The challenges presented by classical Japanese poetry, however, may not be unique to Japanese studies. This gamified approach to a fifteen-week undergraduate course on classical Japanese poetry, which the author designed and taught three times in 2015–16, can serve as an example for other literature classes from varying cultural and historical contexts. This course, JPN471 Classical Japanese, was taught at Michigan State University; it is an upper-division elective, with a prerequisite of third-year Japanese, and it typically enrolls two to six students. It is taught in English. This chapter, comprised of five parts, elucidates as a whole the process of conceptualizing and executing a gamified course design with a focus on student-centered learning: (1) selecting course materials; (2) gamifying pedagogical strategies; (3) learning/gaming in action; (4) assessing gamified learning; and (5) the lessons learned. As such, this chapter demonstrates the outcomes of the author’s research question that guided the course design: how to translate the process of learning classical Japanese literature via tanka into that of gaming.

Selecting Course Materials While tanka can be approached as a form of poetic puzzle, the length and the type of poetic texts can potentially impact the degree to which fifteen-week instruction can be translated into a satisfying and meaningful learning/gaming experience both for the instructor and students. For the course under consideration, Ogura Hyakunin Isshu (百人一首, literally Ogura One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each) was chosen as the primary text for several key reasons. To begin with, this anthology of 100 poems can be covered in a semester course, which in turn gives students the satisfaction of having learned the work in its entirety. Furthermore, Ogura Hyakunin Isshu offers a rich sampling of tanka. Compiled in the thirteenth century by Fujiwara Teika (藤原定家, 1162–1241), a renowned scholar-official-poet, this anthology contains 100 tanka selected from ten imperial anthologies of Japanese court poetry compiled from the eighth century to the thirteenth (i.e., centuries before the advent of haiku, arguably the most widely known form of Japanese poetry outside Japan). As such, Ogura Hyakunin Isshu—a meta-tanka anthology as it were—forms a discrete unit of its own, while exposing students to a wide range of superior poetic expressions in classical Japanese. Moreover, the chosen anthology is already part of Japan’s well-known gaming culture. Ogura Hyakunin Isshu inspired a traditional card game known as utagaruta, which remains popular in contemporary Japan.2 The objective of the game is for the player to grab (or to prevent the opponent from grabbing), within a nanosecond, the card that contains the second half of a poem upon hearing its first half recited by the reader.3 In other words, utagaruta is a poetry memory game combined with kinesthetic alacrity in the format of a matching game, which has long historical roots in Japanese game 186

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culture.4 In fact, most Japanese elementary students memorize Ogura Hyakunin Isshu by heart and learn to play the game at a young age, even though they may not necessarily understand the significance of the poems. As will be seen, the main goal of the gamified approach adapted for this course is to enhance students’ ability for pattern recognition, linguistically and culturally, as well as aurally. Pattern recognition is in essence a matching game because it requires the learners to acquire and internalize conceptual templates pertaining to classical linguistic and cultural grammars against which they can assess freshly encountered information, in this case, a new poem. Furthermore, because of this game’s popularity and its prominent presence in the contemporary Japanese media scape (i.e., manga, film, anime, and others), many students are already familiar with the game even if they have not played it.5 Such visibility of the game within popular contemporary Japanese culture gives students an added incentive to learn the 100 poems. In short, Ogura Hyakunin Isshu’s historical roots in Japan’s game culture make this anthology an ideal poetic text for a gamified introductory classical Japanese literature course, thereby ushering students into Japanese game culture while enhancing their cultural fluency and familiarity with this enduring form of Japanese poetry.6

Gamifying Pedagogical Strategies While there are multiple factors to consider when gamifying a pedagogical approach, I developed mine based on three considerations: (1) fostering a shared understanding between the instructor and students about the gamified approach to the course; (2) streamlining the course materials to approximate game-level design; and (3) identifying a single key aspect of the course materials to be gamified. More specifically, to foster a shared understanding with students that the process of learning is similar to that of gaming, all conventional learning activities were presented as gaming activities. Within the course context, for example, each verse was treated as a self-contained game. Daily assignments were reconceptualized as “grinding,” that is to say, performing repetitive tasks that are indispensable to acquiring the skill set needed to play the game of a poetic puzzle in a meaningful way. Quizzes were transformed into pre-games played at the beginning of each game session (i.e., each class). As the player/ learners moved through the gaming system that was the course itself, they received immediate oral feedback both from peers and the game consultant (i.e., the instructor) during game sessions, as well as written feedback on game rounds (equivalent to minitests). Through multiple rounds of playing the game (literally 100 times), students learned how to read, gather, and interpret facts while synthesizing them into poetic meaning. Throughout the term, students kept game logs to document their learning progress, and as will be discussed later, each student designed a game for the final course project (i.e., the finale, the last round of the game) to teach one aspect of tanka to other students new to tanka. This was a summative activity for them to articulate their meta-cognition of the learning process in the form of a creative project. 187

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Once the overall conceit of the course is fully articulated as gamified learning, the next step is to determine how to scaffold the course materials to resemble the process of playing a game. For this course, 100 poems in Hyakunin Isshu were presented to the students based on the frequency of themes and topics. Within the same theme/topic, verses were introduced in the order of difficulty, both linguistically (e.g., compound verbal phrases) and rhetorically (e.g., different types of conditionals in classical Japanese). In this sense, the overall structure of the course itself was designed akin to that of game level design in light of the characteristics both of tanka and Ogura Hyakunin Isshu. The 100 poems in the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu anthology are arranged loosely in chronological order. For the course, they were purposefully rearranged into categories— that is to say, patterns of themes and imagery—mirroring how imperial anthologies of classical Japanese poetry themselves are arranged. Classical tanka constitutes an exclusive aesthetic realm governed by highly codified diction and emotions. The seasons and love, for example, represent the two major themes of traditional Japanese poetry. Of the four seasons, autumn and spring are more predominant than the other two seasons, while each season is associated with a specific set of natural imagery and emotions. Similarly, the general emotional tenor of love poems focuses on sadness, regrets, or disappointment, each of these emotions being intimately connected with the passage of time as marked by the four seasons. As such, classical Japanese poetry lends itself well to a game of pattern recognition. The fifteen-week course was thus arranged to reflect a subset of standard themes in the Japanese poetic tradition. This way, students could be exposed to, and deepen their familiarity with, a set of poetic idioms, themes, and rhetorical devices associated with a particular topic. As the semester progressed, the student/players advanced to higher levels of proficiency in solving poetic puzzles in concert with their growing familiarity with linguistic and cultural grammar, as well as with their enhanced deductive reasoning based on internalized prominent patterns and their increased understanding of the rules behind those patterns. The third and most critical step of gamifying pedagogical strategies is determining which particular element of learning should be gamified. In my assessment, identifying this element is as important as, if not more than, articulating the conceptual framework of the course based on robust principles discussed in game studies, serious gaming, and other fields. A gamified approach is effective when applied to the most basic or critical aspect of learning a particular subject, while it is conceivable that any aspect of the course work could be gamified for the sake of utilizing game elements. In the case of learning tanka in classical Japanese, the greatest obstacle appears to be differentiating parts of speech. This difficulty is three-fold: (1) Japanese is an agglutinative language, which means that parts of speech can be identified based not on their locations in a sentence but on the relationship between the words connected by particles; (2) Japanese is conventionally written without any space between words. When tanka is written as a string of thirty-one morae, it is hard to decipher where one word ends and another begins without already possessing some degree of familiarity with classical Japanese; (3) even the same word or particle used in modern Japanese can function differently in classical Japanese. These conditions render classical Japanese challenging 188

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both to native Japanese speakers and L2 Japanese learners, and this is why this course utilizes a gamified approach to differentiating parts of speech that make up the thirtyone morae of a verse. Without possessing this fundamental skill set, students simply cannot advance to a higher level of synthesizing the linguistic and cultural grammars to parse the verse and to generate an informed and nuanced poetic meaning.

Learning/Gaming in Action When implementing a gamified pedagogical approach as delineated above, the importance of the first session is paramount. In the first session, students were introduced to a blank grid with five rows, which spatially represents the internal structure of a tanka, though they were not initially given this information (see Figure  17.1). Each row contains a gray square to mark the boundaries of squares together forming thirtyone morae arranged in 5-7-5-7-7. Extra squares were included to accommodate a potential hypermeter, when the poet intentionally broke the meter by adding extra morae. The students were then shown three grids, this time filled with colored squares, which are also numbered and marked with the asterisk symbol (see Figure 17.2). They were tasked to theorize any underlying rules behind the common patterns shown on the grids. Only after were they able to come up with at least three rules (e.g., “the red squares with the asterisk symbol tend to appear at the end of a line”; “there are more of beige, or number 1 squares, than any other colors or numbers on the grid”; “a square with an asterisk can also appear between the beige, or number 1, squares”), were they then informed that the squares with colors, numbers, and asterisks represent parts of

Figure 17.1  Blank Tanka Metric Grid Given to Students 189

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Figure 17.2  Tanka Metric Grid Samples

Figure 17.3  Basic Parts of Speech in Japanese Visualized with Double-Coding speech (see Figure 17.3). The students were then asked to revise their initially observed rules and to rearticulate them as the rules for patterns of parts of speech in tanka (e.g., particles tend to appear at the end of a line; verses are mainly noun driven; nouns are connected by a particle, etc.). The students were then informed about the rationale behind this visualization system. Since Japanese is an agglutinative language, each time a different part of speech is added to or combined with an existing one, the two parts must fit like two pieces of a puzzle. What allows them to be linked is the six forms of conjugation for the inflected portion of the language (verbs, adjectives, auxiliary verbs), while uninflected portions such as nouns and particles have predetermined places in relation to the inflected. The place where the two colors or numbers come together on the grid visually represents the edges of two distinct parts of speech.7 This means that each time a color or number shift occurs on the grid, the learner/player should be able to explain their linking rules, that is to say, how the boundaries of discrete parts of speech are grammatically negotiated through correct combinations of parts of speech and their conjugations, when applicable. Through multiple game sessions, the students eventually learned 190

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Figure 17.4  Prefilled Grid with Verse 5

particular linguistic patterns of occurrence (i.e., certain combinations are not possible in classical Japanese). To facilitate students’ acquisition of the patterned use of parts of speech in Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, we played a game called “The Moment of Truth,” which the author created and which the learners played for each verse throughout the term. This gamified learning process includes the following steps. To indicate the parts of speech, each member physically colors, or adds numbers and an asterisk mark to, a prefilled grid with a verse (see Figure 17.4). If students are unable to differentiate an adjective from a verb, for example, neither can they look up the words by using their dictionary forms, which differ from how they appear (i.e., their conjugated form) in a given poem. This game is played as a timed exercise, with its duration varying depending on when it is played in the term, to improve students’ recognition of parts of speech. In pairs, students then compare their colored or numbered squares to discuss the rationales for their choices. Even if the students do not recognize a particular word, they can still deductively identify its part of speech in relation to the words they recognize and in light of their familiarity with the basic syntactic structure of the Japanese language. This activity ends with “The Moment of Truth,” with the correctly identified squares displayed on the projector screen (see Figure 17.5). “The Moment of Truth” is generally one of the most exciting moments of learning tanka. Students often immediately verbalize their delight or disappointment with exclamations, but whatever the results, they embrace the occasion as an enjoyable learning experience. After “The Moment of Truth,” the pairs analyze their identification errors, if any, and this is where the most meaningful student-focused learning took place. If their identification 191

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Figure 17.5  Correctly Identified Parts of Speech in Verse 5 does not match the one included on the answer sheet, the student pairs analyze their errors and learn how to identify the correct parts of speech. As students learn deeper levels of classical Japanese grammar, they are better able to identify and articulate the linking rules between parts of speech, as well as to apply their nuanced understanding of the grammatical dimension of classical Japanese to their thematic interpretation of tanka. Another equally important gamified aspect of tanka learning pertains to recognizing patterns in poetic codes, that is to say, how to internalize a set of cultural associations surrounding an image, an idea, a place, and so on. Similar to learning to recognize parts of speech, students learn to visualize poetic codes by creating an image for each verse. By looking at the image, they would recite the verse, not from memorization but by recognizing a conceptual linkage between the elements included in the image. Reciting poems based on other members’ pictorialization of them deepens students’ ability to recognize the patterns of poetic codes. As demonstrated thus far, learning tanka in classical Japanese is a multi-level and multi-layered process, which students learn through repetition over the course of the term. That process includes absorbing the internal tanka structure comprised of 5-7-5-7-7 moraic meter; parsing the parts of speech based on their enhanced ability to recognize grammatical boundaries and the morphological shape of the conjugated forms; and integrating their grammatical grasp of the parts of speech into an overall thematic understanding of a verse under consideration. Ultimately, an integration as such should be based on the students’ increased familiarity with rhetorical devices such as word play with meaning and sound, allusions, idiomatic expressions, epithets, and so on.

Assessing Gamified Learning To promote gamified learning in the undergraduate curriculum, it is imperative to demonstrate what students gain from this non-traditional approach. One concrete way of indicating student learning is by aligning course learning objectives with institutional goals. 192

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The learning objectives of the course under consideration are purposefully aligned with Michigan State University’s undergraduate learning goals, which include analytical thinking, integrated reasoning, effective communication, intercultural understanding, and effective citizenship. Analytical thinking, for example, is linked to the students’ ability to analyze tanka in terms of linguistic and cultural grammar by learning to recognize frequently used patterns of thought and expression. Integrated reasoning is connected to the students’ ability to integrate grammatical analysis of tanka to yield a meaningful thematic interpretation relevant to the poems’ original historical and cultural contexts. It is also important to keep in mind that all instructional learning goals do not need to be reflected in the course objectives. While the learning objectives of the course under consideration are explicitly aligned with all five institutional learning goals, students are encouraged to select two learning goals only at the end of the term to self-reflect on their own learning in the course. The course as a whole utilizes two methods of assessment using formative and summative tools. The former includes pre-game activities, peer scoring, game logs, and game rounds, whereas the latter involves a final course project as the finale to their learning/gaming experience. Each game session (i.e., scheduled class) starts with a pregame based on the grinding (daily assignment), which is graded by a student member. Students keep their own game logs, which are periodically reviewed by the instructor. Game rounds are designed to check student learning at the end of two or three weeks (usually per theme). As for the finale, each student starts to develop a clearer sense of how to approach their own final project, as they became familiar with the subject matter and the patterns underlying the thoughts, rules, and aesthetics unique to classical Japanese poetry. While developing a game is a creative project, students need to adhere to game design rules provided by the instructor. The game design rules consist of a set of instructions to assist students in developing a micro-game that can be completed within a term. The design rules explicitly state that the object is not to create a new game, but to repurpose an existing, well-known, or popular game to gamify one particular aspect of tanka in classical Japanese. The format of the game can be a card game, board game, guessing game, and/or other type of game. Once a particular game and its format are chosen, students translate the existing game rules into grammatical rules as related to classical Japanese poetry. Most importantly, students are tasked to create a game that has only one specific pedagogical objective because a single game cannot teach everything about Japanese poetry. In relation to the objective identified, the students then determine how to play the game (game rules) for the target audience (novice tanka readers) and how to set the difficulty level of the game to match a player’s Japanese proficiency. The culmination of the game project is a public event, “Classical Japanese Game Night” during which each student introduces their own games, including such games as “Pivot Word Concentration Game,” “Classical Bingo,” “Mystery Verb,” “Kagura Hyakunin Isshu: Name that Nami!,” and “Pin the Particle on the Poem.”8 At this event, students are game designers, not students playing a given game. This is how we celebrate all our students’ achievements, while having a lot of fun with  event 193

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participants. It is also important to create a public record of the event. For us, it was in the form of a course spotlight article in the e-newsletter published by the Asian Studies Center at Michigan State University. The article also featured one of the students’ comments on the course experience: “Patrick Mercer, a JPN  471 student, feels that using games is an immersive way to learn Japanese. Games are an entertaining and enjoyable way to learn.”9 As the instructor, I received anonymous feedback on the course from the students through the university’s student course evaluation system at the end of the term. One of the comments sums up the benefits of a gamified pedagogical approach while also providing a suggestion on how to improve it: “For being an experimental class, it was a lot of fun! I believe that the course was helpful, well-presented, and the workload was reasonable. Sometimes I wish further explanation regarding format was provided (specifically over the game logs), but otherwise it was great!”

The Lessons Learned: Caveats and Reflections While the initial run of this literature course turned out better than anticipated, it would have been more effective if the class met twice a week instead of once a week. A threehour session once a week meant that students were required to prepare a lot of materials and did not always digest the poems fully each week. For the second and third iterations, the course was scheduled for two sessions per week. Moreover, the goal of covering all 100 poems in fifteen weeks turned out to be overambitious. After about seventy-five poems, the students clearly exhibited fatigue. For the second and third iterations of the course, the number of poems covered in the course was reduced to seventy-five. In retrospect, enrollment size also mattered for a gamified learning environment. The first iteration of the course enrolled six students (five undergraduates, including one native Japanese speaker, and one graduate student, also a native Japanese speaker). Throughout the term, this group developed a sense of comradery and friendly rivalry among them, and their differing levels of Japanese language proficiency also had a positive impact, leading them to seek help from and assist one another. The second iteration consisted of four members, all undergraduate students who were non-native Japanese speakers, and there was a wider range of modern Japanese proficiency among members. This group did not develop a learning community to the same degree as the first group. The third group, comprised of just two members, formed an even less cohesive sense of community, but because of their superior proficiency, they were able to attain a higher level of learning by focusing discussions on thematic and poetic matters. Throughout the three iterations of this course, “The Moment of Truth” game served well as an entry point into learning classical Japanese grammar and its manifestations in tanka. In the future, an ideal way to teach Ogura Hyakunin Isshu would be to use “The Moment of Truth” game as an app that students can play on their own.10 This would allow them to focus on higher levels of engagement with tanka during in-person sessions with an emphasis on meaning-making based on their nuanced understanding of the 194

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integration between linguistic and cultural grammars. Regardless of the instruction modality, when designing a gamified pedagogical approach, it is important to strive toward a subtle balance between the seriousness of learning and fun, while keeping in mind the unique attributes of target students both individually and collectively.

Notes 1. My basic approach to poetry as a form of game strongly resonates with Johan Huizinga’s understanding of play and poetry as articulated in Homo Luden: A Study of the Play-Element of Culture, in which he discusses various game functions of poetry in differing cultural contexts, including the Japanese poetic tradition (esp. pp. 119–35). 2. The historical origin of traditional Japanese card games lies in the mid-1500s, when European playing cards were introduced by Portuguese merchants. Hence, “karuta” is a Japanized term for “carta” in Portuguese. During the Edo Period (1603–1868), karuta evolved to various card games, including utagaruta (or uta-karuta). 3. A plethora of online materials teaching how to play utagaruta are available, including this one: https://itsjapantime.com/karuta-%E3%81%8B%E3%82%8B%E3%81%9F-thesurprising-features-of-japanese-card-games/. 4. Kai awase (shell matching) is one of the traditional matching games from the Heian era (794–1185) and referenced in The Tale of Genji (ca. early eleventh century), which in turn served as materials for later kai awase games. 5. The exhaustive Chihayafuru wiki paints a clear picture of the extent to which Hakunin Isshu has become part of contemporary Japanese popular culture and the magnitude of the fandom that sustains this phenomenon. See https://chihayafuru.fandom.com/wiki/ Hyakunin_Isshu_Karuta. 6. Modern tanka has retained the 5-7-5-7-7 mora structure while transforming the diction, themes, and imagery of classical tanka to render them more suitable to modern sensibilities. Tawara Machi’s 1987 Sarada Kinenbi (Salad Anniversary) is generally recognized as the publication that brought about a modern tanka revolution. 7. My approach to teaching parts of speech through pattern recognition via color coding (i.e., visually differentiating one element from its surrounding elements) is conceptually similar to the relationship between pattern recognition and machine learning (i.e., differentiating an object from its background; differentiating one item from another) as articulated by Yuichiro Anzai in Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning. 8. For an example of “Classical Japanese Game Night,” see “Classical Japanese Game Night” (https://us3.campaign-archive.com/?u=575b2ce7c4e7676e15735f3c8&id=3e38ea6daa). 9. See https://us3.campaign-archive.com/?u=575b2ce7c4e7676e15735f3c8&id=9315297989. 10. With a game designer, I developed an alpha prototype app of “The Moment of Truth,” which I plan to further develop as a teaching tool. Significantly, Ogura Hyakunin Isshu has been a focus of game development with new digital technologies, pointing to the intimate linkage among poetry, gaming, and technology in learning and teaching literature in the digital ages. See, for example, the two games, “Tabletop Hyakunin Isshu” and “Auditory Uta-Karuta” described in the articles, respectively, by Yamamoto et al., “Hyakunin-eyesshu” and by Miyakawa et al., “Auditory Uta-Karuta: Development and Evaluation of an Accessible Card Game System Using Audible Cards for the Visually Impaired.”

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Works Cited Anzai, Yuichiro. Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning. Academic Press, 1992. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Routledge & K. Paul, 1949. Miyakawa, H., Noko Kuratomo, H.E.B. Salih, and K. Zenpo. “Auditory Uta-Karuta: Development and Evaluation of an Accessible Card Game System Using Audible Cards for the Visually Impaired.” Electronics, vol. 10, no. 750, 2021, https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10060750. Yamamoto, M. M. Komeda, T. Nagamatsu, and T. Watanabe. “Hyakunin-eyesshu: A Tabletop Hyakunin-Isshu Game with Computer Opponent by the Action Prediction Based on Gaze Detection.” Proceedings of the First Conference on Novel Gaze-Controlled Applications, 2021, pp. 1–4.

Recommended Reading List and Online Resources Galt, Tom, translator. The Little Treasury of One Hundred People, One Poem Each. Princeton UP, 1982. Hyakunin Isshu—One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets—Original Poems with Romanization and Translations, https://www.jlit.net/premodern/hyakunin-isshu/ poems_01-10.html. Accessed Aug. 17, 2021. “Hyakunin Isshu Karuta.” Chihayafuru Wiki—The Origin of the Game’s Name and Its Rules, https://chihayafuru.fandom.com/wiki/Hyakunin_Isshu_Karuta. Accessed Aug. 17, 2021. Machotka, Ewa. Visual Genesis of Japanese National Identity: Hokusai’s Hyakunin Isshu. Peter Lang, 2009. Mathieu. “Karuta かるた : The Surprising Features of Japanese Card Games.” It’s Japan Time, Jul. 29, 2018, https://itsjapantime.com/karuta-かるた-the-surprising-features-of-japanese-cardgames/. McCullough, Helen Craig, translator. Classical Japanese Prose: An Anthology. Stanford UP, 1990. ­McMillan, Peter, translator. One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each: A Translation of the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu. Columbia UP, 2008. Mostow, Joshua S., translator. Pictures of the Heart: The Hyakunin Isshu in Word and Image. Hawai’i UP, 1996. Porter, William, translator. A Hundred Verses from Old Japan: Being a Translation of the Hyakunin Isshu. Tuttle, 1979. Ogura Hyakunin Isshu—Introduction to the Collection with Original Poems in Japanese, Romanization, and Translation. http://jti.lib.virginia.edu/japanese/hyakunin/index.html. Accessed Aug. 17, 2021. “ちょっと差がつく『百人一首講座』– Linguistic and Cultural Grammar References for 100 Poems.” 小倉山荘(ブランドサイト) | 京都せんべい おかき専門店 長岡京 小倉 山荘, https://ogurasansou.jp.net/columns_category/hyakunin/. Accessed Aug. 17, 2021. 小倉百人一首 藤原清輔朝臣 - 学ぶ 教える.– Linguistic and Cultural Grammar References for 100 Poems. COM. http://www.manabu-oshieru.com/hyakunin/084.html. Accessed Aug. 17, 2021. ■

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CHAPTER 18 DESIGNING AND IMPLEMENTING A ROLEPLAYING-GAME-BASED COURSE IN ADVANCED CLASSICAL LITERATURE: CHALLENGES, BENEFITS, AND ITERATIONS

Roger Travis

In the fall semester of 2009, possessed by a drive to see whether the powerful learning affordances almost self-evidently inherent in games of many kinds could be brought into the classics classroom, I created a game-course titled Operation KTEMA, also known as CAMS 3212, Greek Historical Writings. (See Travis and Young for an introduction to the course’s original construction in the context of educational psychology.) CAMS 3212, as I had previously offered it, was a straightforward advanced reading course in the works of Herodotus and Thucydides in cultural context, with lectures, discussions, and readings to match. I have offered the course five times in total, now, over the course of the intervening years, and I have created several other courses that employ the same method of instructional design, wherein students play as fictional characters in a textually rendered possibility-space. In this chapter, due to constraints of space, I outline a crucial element of the “learning mechanics” of Operation KTEMA—its dual existence as a roleplaying game and an alternate-reality game—and describe its iterations and its student outcomes, as a contribution to the ongoing conversation about the techniques and benefits of playful learning. Since 2004 I had been shifting my research focus from one directed strictly at the culture of ancient Athens to one comparing key works of archaic and classical Greek literature to the contemporary play practices found most visibly in the increasingly influential culture of video games. Both inspired and cautioned by efforts like the MacArthurfunded Shakespeare game Arden: The World of Shakespeare (see Castranova), which attempted to bring playful learning to the literary canon, and encouraged by the ferment around terms like game-based learning and gamification, I began to see Plato’s cave as the first educational video game, and to wonder whether I could harness the pedagogical power to be found both there and in the very different style of playful learning he called philosophy (see Travis, “Bioshock”). Early video-game-inspired efforts in game-based learning, many of them shaped by the seminal work of James Paul Gee, eschewed approaches characterized as “chocolatecovered broccoli,” in which learning objectives were grafted onto unrelated game mechanics (see Slota and Young). Instead, designers sought to align play objectives and learning objectives. Operation KTEMA and its successors began from the

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attempt to make this alignment as exact as possible: to achieve a successful outcome in the game and to reach the learning goals of the course would represent the same end-state. In the specific terms of Operation KTEMA, my course in ancient Greek historical writings, that meant that students would learn for example to “describe the achievement of Herodotus and Thucydides” by developing such a description in the game world, as a report the game asked its characters to deliver. They would learn to “analyze the writings of Herodotus and Thucydides in their cultural context” by playing those characters, young Athenians immersed in a fictional representation of that cultural context, wherein the game’s narrative required that they perform such an analysis. In this chapter I introduce the crucial roleplaying/alternate-reality mechanics of the game-course, then discuss the student outcomes and the challenges it posed, and finally detail the iterations I have made in response over the twelve years since first offering Operation KTEMA.

Mainspring Mechanic: A Roleplaying Game inside an Augmented Reality Game The idea at the center of Operation KTEMA is that a roleplaying game set in ancient Athens allows players to take the perspectives of ancient characters and to engage with classical culture in an authentic way (Hammer et al.). The heart of the game course is what I call, from an in-game perspective, a “text-based simulation of the ancient world,” or, in certain situations, the TSTT—that is, the Temporo-Spatial Textual Transmitter. That simulation takes the form of an unfolding story about young men in ancient Athens. The original version of the TSTT for Operation KTEMA began like this: It is near dawn. You are standing in an open space covered by smoothed earth and formed by the coming together of several impressive-looking columned buildings. Indeed, as far as you can make out in the near-dark, at least three of them seem to be nothing but columns, roofs, and back walls—porches without buildings. The lightening of the sky seems to be occurring to the right. The scene shimmers around you for a moment, in a way you’ll come to know very well as you gain experience in the TSTT, and you find that you’re holding a papyrus scroll. You unroll the scroll a bit and find to your surprise that it’s written on vertically rather than horizontally. It’s not a scroll—it’s a roll. On the roll, it says: Ἡροδότου Ἁλικαρνησσέος ἱστορίης ἀπόδεξις ἥδε, ὡς μήτε τὰ γενόμενα ἐξ ἀνθρώπων τῷ χρόνῳ ἐξίτηλα γένηται, μήτε ἔργα μεγάλα τε καὶ θωμαστά, τὰ μὲν Ἕλλησι τὰ δὲ βαρβάροισι ἀποδεχθέντα, ἀκλεᾶ γένηται, τά τε ἄλλα καὶ δι᾽ ἣν αἰτίην ἐπολέμησαν ἀλλήλοισι.

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There’s a crackle in your ear, and a metallic voice says, “Operative, mission control here. We’re going to run through a few sessions quickly right now so we can test our systems and your input capacities.” ­ ventually, through some perseverance involving a bit of instruction on written roleplay E as well as a “briefing” on the historical context wherein they find themselves, the student players guided their Athenian counterparts to reach the following prompt: In the Northwest corner of the agora, a crowd seems to be gathered, apparently listening to someone who is speaking in one of the stoas. At the urging of Nomocles, you head towards the crowd. You catch a glimpse of a man of about thirty years, making strangely evocative hand gestures. Someone to your right says “It’s that Ionian, isn’t it? The one they’ve been talking about.” Someone on the other side of the speaker says, “Even Pericles was saying that he seemed to have some wisdom about why the Lacedaemonians are so riled up.” You can make out almost nothing of what the Ionian is saying, but you are nonetheless very struck by his manner, which seems simultaneously firm and humble, as if the speaker is confident in his very diffidence. He speaks with assurance, but wears the look of a man who is used to being contradicted, and used to disarming those who would contradict with the charm of a well-told tale. A man to your left, with a strange accent, is not as taken with the Ionian. Why does he keep talking about the Persian logioi that way?! The great king knows no Persian ever heard these stories! Prompt: Answer, in such a way as to gather information about what’s going on. The students learned over the next few episodes that the Ionian is in fact Herodotus. Over the course of their adventure they were asked by those around them to develop the analytic skills necessary to describe Herodotus’s achievement and to discuss his writings in their cultural context—the same context in which their characters find themselves. Thucydides turns up as well soon enough, incidentally making one rather easy-to-miss but extraordinarily important element of the historians’ work extremely memorable to the student players: the relative dates of their activities in Athens and in particular the lateness of Herodotus in relation to the events he describes. The roleplaying component of Operation KTEMA constituted an almost entirely linear narrative, and, as I will discuss concerning the iterations made over the intervening years, in its current version the narrative has become entirely linear. In the original version, however, the students took turns writing out the actions of the characters, and I in the guise of the Temporo-Spatial Textual Transmitter edited the beginning of the next episode accordingly. Other game mechanics, like a progression system and an inventory system, built to resemble well-known roleplaying video games like World of Warcraft, provided an opportunity for students to become familiar with hoplite armor, for example, and such vital concepts as guest-friendship in a more immersive way than they might derive from a lecture or a handbook of Greek literature like the Oxford Companion to 199

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Classical Literature, the standard ways in which such necessary cultural background is delivered in classical civilization courses. One essential element of the course’s framework, present from the beginning and even more prominent in the course’s current version, is a second layer of play. The roleplaying element was wrapped in another sort of game, as a way to foster progress toward some crucial learning objectives. The original syllabus of CAMS 3212, Greek Historical Writings, in its guise as Operation KTEMA, began like this: DEMIURGE ONLINE BEGIN TRANSMISSION 020 SIGNAL “Syllabus” START Greetings from the Demiurge. You have been chosen to fulfill a mission to save Western Civilization from oblivion. Once you complete your training, you will have the capability to be projected through my Textospatiotemporal Transportation System and to take control of the body of a resident of Athens in 431 BCE. In order that this mission remain secret, I have disguised myself as a professor, and disguised this course as CAMS 3212 Greek Historical Writings and CAMS 3101 Topics in Advanced Greek. Read this syllabus for the details of this disguise, including course requirements and policies. ((Out-of-game information will be enclosed in double-parentheses; if at any time you wish to communicate with me outside of the game-based framework of the course, simply enclose your communication like this one.)) ((Welcome to CAMS 3212/3101, a course about what it means to be the kind of human being who takes a course about Greek Historians at the University of Connecticut. What you’ll find in this syllabus is a summary of the goals of the course, a list of course materials, an overview of course policies, and a schedule of modules, each one with a precis of each unit’s activities. You’ll find the modules elsewhere here on the course website, and the links in the modules will guide you through the required activities, along with assignments you will be completing as the course requirements.)) Thus, the outermost framework of the course was an Alternate Reality Game: the student players would engage with the game’s possibility space as a version of their everyday real world, altered by the game mechanics. This framework accomplished two essential goals, informing students of the structure both of the game and of the course. Most importantly, it made the learning occurring inside the roleplaying game authentic and potentially transferable to the students’ lived experience. By asking students to engage with the ongoing narrative about their player characters’ lives in ancient Athens explicitly as an exercise in saving civilization, course activities like group discussions and papers could be anchored both in the ancient world and in the students’ present context. Rather than bracketing the question, for example, of why Herodotus’s writings might matter in the twenty-first century, or even addressing 200

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it as a pro forma comparative discussion, activities at the alternate-reality layer—that is, traditional course activities—could be rendered vivid and meaningful through the students’ experience inside the roleplaying game. At the same time, through one particular facet of this alternate-reality layer, the division of the class into teams assigned to control the player characters collaboratively, this outer framework provided a crucial opportunity to foster progress toward higherlevel metacognitive learning objectives like critical analysis of the ancient text in its cultural context and with reference to secondary scholarship. In their team forums, students deliberated the course of action for their Athenian characters, and took turns writing out the character’s response to the roleplaying prompt, for example the one I cited above: “Prompt: answer, in such a way as to gather information about what’s going on.” In these deliberations, the alternate-reality layer communicated to them by the Demiurge required that for successful completion of their mission they follow a rubric— that is, of course, the same rubric that might apply to an ordinary course activity. They were to adduce the primary text and the secondary reading and to apply those “briefings” (as the alternate-reality layer termed them) to the situation at hand in ancient Athens— that is, inside the roleplaying game. When the time came at the end of each mission to “file a report” with Mission Control (i.e., to write an essay), students deliberated in their team forums on more general and more metacognitive questions like, “How did Herodotus’s inquiry respond to the challenges facing Athenians at the start of the Peloponnesian War?” The first version of Operation KTEMA featured a number of other game mechanics that lie outside the scope of this chapter. I hope the overview laid out above conveys, even without a description of such things as the inventory system and the level progression system, the two elements of the original design that proved most important both to the learning challenges to which it gave rise and to the iterations I have since made: first, the attempt I made at a true one-to-one mapping of learning objective with play objective; second, the complexity of the resulting system.

Promises and Challenges One of the most eye-opening and paradoxically inspiring essays I have ever read on game-based and playful learning makes clear that any game-based intervention faces a steep challenge from the beginning. In “The Inevitability of Epic Fail” Slota and Young spell out a recipe for Operation KTEMA’s doom—but more importantly for its successful iterations as well. Each of Slota and Young’s “counter-forces” to the success of game-based interventions—fatal mutation due to assimilation (the game loses its learning mechanics as it is integrated into the curriculum), loss of fidelity (failure of participants to focus on core content), and failure to thrive (lack of adequate oversight causing a gradual shift away from the game’s mechanics)—applies to how Operation KTEMA functioned in the classroom, despite the insulation one might think the project had owing to its designer also implementing and delivering the curriculum. 201

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Rather than cataloging the ways in which I created a course game that drew students in while confusing them and worrying them so much as to outweigh the benefits of their engagement, I will sum up the basic problems: the course game was too complex, and the methodology too unfamiliar to the students. The results of the first few offerings of the course nevertheless reflected both the promise of the approach and its challenges— certain activities worked very well, most important among them the team discussions of what the player characters should do in the roleplaying game. In this section, I will detail both the promise and the challenge of team discussions to capture a microcosm of the course game as a whole. In the first offering of Operation KTEMA, team discussions took the form of a smallgroup activity in the classroom, with the students reporting out of their discussions what their characters would attempt in the “simulated” world of the roleplaying game. This reporting-out process involved rolling dice and narrating the action according to the success-level reflected in the dice, a mechanic that the reader may find familiar from the dice-based system of Dungeons & Dragons, as well as similar tabletop roleplaying games. I guided that discussion by anchoring it to a particular passage of primary text, which I put on a slide to which the students could refer throughout the activity. In this form, the discussion and resulting roleplay thoroughly engaged certain students. Even at this early stage, however, I noted that other students, some of them in general highly skilled, were not, not to put too fine a point on it, having fun. Other students had simply not done the reading, and so could not contribute to the discussion in a meaningful way, creating resentment in their peers. In conversation with the skilled students, a few of whom were classics majors, I found that the frustration of their expectations as to classroom learning, a setting in which they were accustomed generally to listening to others talk, as well as their unfamiliarity and discomfort with the format of roleplaying games, made the course material more difficult to access, even though in several cases they found the story itself engaging. As I moved my courses online in the following year, persuaded by the affordances of well-designed online learning environments, these live discussions changed to asynchronous forums on the course website. The discussion activity became, for those students who did the work, much more accessible. The reporting out into roleplay, however, never worked as intended, an example of Slota and Young’s “fatal mutation.” Such failure is perhaps best emblematized by the students’ confusion about how to write a roleplaying response, although I did everything I could to scaffold the activity, providing multiple examples and granular feedback. The discussion itself, however, in which students quickly grasped the formula I provided of quoting and analyzing the primary text with reference to the secondary reading to argue for their suggested course of action, provided a remarkable level of continuous formative assessment. Fueled by the annotation activity I had developed for the course (see Travis, “Using Annotations” for details of this activity), students had the opportunity to demonstrate that they had completed the reading, and at precisely what level they had engaged with it. Discussions of how to respond to the prompt I gave above (“answer, in such a way as to gather information about what’s going on”) became, 202

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with guidance from what I called the “Mission Assist,” nuanced conversations on several levels of Bloom’s taxonomy simultaneously: students new to the material would show that they had learned, for example, the relative dates of the Persian Wars and Herodotus’s authorial activity, while classics majors would both help their non-major peers with those dates and at the same time demonstrate analysis, evaluation, and creativity as they deliberated what their character should say and do. The alternate-reality layer and the roleplaying narrative also synergized in the discussion activity: students engaged with the notional civilization-saving mission of the course to discuss their characters’ actions in light both of their own experience— both with classics and outside it—and in light of the course materials. I reinforced the meshing of the layers with essay assignments that asked for comparison of the ancient text with today’s culture, an activity that allowed me to assess student’s progress in culturally contextualized analysis of historiographic discourse. After several years of offering Operation KTEMA as an online course, in light of the positive learning outcomes I could see in the discussion and the frustrations present in the roleplay itself, I decided to make a fairly large though still incremental change. In the current version of the course, the roleplaying element has become theoretical, and the course might therefore be said not to be a game, although I will argue in my final section that it remains fundamentally playful.

Iterations The current version of the syllabus begins as follows: Welcome to CAMS 3212, a course about what it means to be the kind of human being who takes a course about Greek Historical Writings at the University of Connecticut. What you’ll find in this syllabus is a summary of the goals of the course, a list of course materials, an overview of course policies, and a schedule of chapters (modules), each one with a precis of the unit’s activities. This course is taught in a narrative-based format. Please note carefully that while I can honestly say that I do consider you to be in danger of having “fun” while you take CAMS 3212, that’s not the point of the format at all. Game- and play-based learning (of which this narrative-based format is a type) allows you, as the student, to work towards the course’s learning objectives not because I tell you that you should but because you have a reason of your own to get there. In the case of CAMS 3212, or, as you’ll come to call it if you decide to continue in it, Operation ΚΤEΜΑ, you’ll be learning about the culture of ancient Greek historical writings because you need to explain to the modern world the vital necessity of performing and analyzing the practice of writing history as a way of dealing with our cultures’ problems. If the course has a single purpose, it’s helping you understand both that need and how to respond to it.

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Please work through the course orientation slowly and carefully, and ask any question you have about how the course works in the HELP forum (on the main Discussion Board). Comparison of this beginning to the first version shows perhaps one most important change: although I note the narrative-based format of the course, this new syllabus begins in a much more conventional fashion. That conventional approach corresponds to two other important iterations: the movement of the course from my own forum website to my university’s learning management system and the refocusing of the team discussion on the relationship between the course narrative and the students’ own lived experience. The difference between the original online Mission Assist for our example episode and the current one will illustrate the change. From 2011: Operative, your first real immersion of Operation KTHMA seems designed to get you thinking about some of the Ionian’s basic gambits.1 The Demiurge thinks there’s a 99.99% chance that the Ionian is Herodotus, but it’s also worth wondering why the Temporo-Spatial Textual Transmitter has him called “the Ionian”—is there something special about where he comes from? At any rate, we recommend taking your first look (we’re thinking it won’t be your last) at what we know of the sources of Herodotus in order to respond to this immersion. From 2020: What can you (your Athenian character and you the undergraduate) learn, from the readings thus far, about where Herodotus got his information? This iteration is less than a year old at this point, but it has shown promising results. Above all, it has allowed the discussion to shine, as students’ existing skill sets in analytic writing have come more into play. Given a similar rubric to the one employed in the old alternate-reality/roleplaying format—to perform culturally contextualized, detailed analysis in support of a position they take on the relationship between the course narrative and the primary text—the removal of the explicit roleplaying element has freed a wider range of students to engage in the activity, leading both to better outcomes and more complete assessment opportunities for me. To conclude, I have only had space in this essay to scratch the surface both of the old game-based approach and the newer playful one, and to point at the direction of the iterations I have made over the ten years since first offering Operation KTEMA. Space has in particular not permitted any sort of look at the course’s actual results, but although this data-point is anecdotal in the extreme, I can say that the proportion of A’s among student grades was a good deal higher in this last offering than in the previous

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one. My aim in this essay has above all been to suggest to the reader possibilities for the introduction of playful elements into their courses, and I hope at least to have accomplished that end.

Note 1. Note that the “H” in the original is actually the Greek letter eta, a confusing element I removed in subsequent iterations of the game.

Works Cited Castranova, E. “Two Releases: Arden I and Exodus,” https://terranova.blogs.com/terra_ nova/2007/11/two-releases-ar.html. Accessed Jun. 3, 2021. 2007. Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Hammer, Jessica, Alexandra To, Karen Schrier, Sarah Lynne Bowman, and Geoff Kaufman. “Learning and Role-Playing Games.” Role-Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations, edited by José P. Zagal and S. Deterding, Routledge, 2018, pp. 283–99. Slota, Stephen T., and Michael F. Young, editors. Exploding the Castle: Rethinking How Video Games and Game Mechanics Can Shape the Future of Education. Information Age, 2017. Travis, Roger. “Bioshock in the Cave: Ethical Education in Plato and in Video Games.” Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values through Play, edited by Karen Schrier and David Gibson, Information Science Reference, 2010, pp. 86–101. Travis, Roger. “Using Annotations in Google Docs to Foster Authentic Classics Learning.” Teaching Classics with Technology, edited by Bartolo Natoli and Steven Hunt, Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 207–16. Travis, Roger, and Michael Young. “Operation KTHMA: Reign of the Demiurge.” Learning to Play: Exploring the Future of Education with Video Games, edited by Myint Swe Khine, Peter Lang, 2011, pp. 153–65.

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­C HAPTER 19 GAMES WE PLAY ON PAPER: UNDERSTANDING THE PROCESS OF DISCOVERY THROUGH DETECTIVE FICTION AND BEHAVIORAL NEUROSCIENCE

Michelle Robinson and Marsha Penner

Both literary critics and behavioral neuroscientists have developed sophisticated theories about the way detection—the accumulation and logical assembly of clues and evidence to solve mysteries—takes place. Our co-taught course, Methods of Detection: Understanding the Process of Discovery through Detective Fiction and Behavioral Neuroscience, fused critical analysis of the genre of detective fiction with lessons on the human brain, how it perceives and constructs concepts and ideas, and how it stores information and experiences for future use. In this small interdisciplinary class taken exclusively by first-year students, we created a space for undergraduates to engage in conscious play and to become game masters who built portable versions of an escape room, a popular immersive and collaborative game whose literary forebearer is the locked-room mystery. Joining our expertise as scholars in two distinct disciplines— behavioral neuroscience (Marsha Penner) and literary studies (Michelle Robinson)—we created opportunities for students to play, design, and build games in order to discover connections between narrative design, structures of play, and moments of insight. We also guided students toward a deeper understanding of the relationship between literary detection and laboratory research. On the first day of class, we set out an array of junk and scraps Dr. Penner had scavenged from a supply closet: a medicine bottle, a yellow feather, a photo with an edge ripped off, an ordinary key, and a nametag. We sorted students into groups, instructed them to look closely at the objects, and asked them to write a mystery. Single-file, they ambled along our “exhibit,” inspected each object, and returned to their seats. They were restrained in their exploratory habits and did not think to take advantage of senses other than sight. Only a few laid their hands on the items, although there was no prohibition. No one opened the pill bottle—if they had, they would have discovered it smelled strongly of vinegar. No one lingered on the texture of the feather. And yet each group cobbled a story together in no time at all. They clung to the name “Susan” scrawled on the nametag and, in search of a protagonist, attached “Susan” to a torn photo of an elderly woman. Each object came with its usual set of associations: if a nametag implied a person, a feather implied a hat or a boa, and a key required a keyhole. Bundling these clues in a parcel labelled “mystery,” however, allowed for an imaginative free-for-all that

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gave rise to all manner of grisly and sensational plots: ransom, theft, extortion, murder staged as suicide! Stringing together a handful of objects on a tight line of plot is among the simplest of games, but nonetheless a satisfying one. A mystery untangles itself and lies flat; each piece of the puzzle clicks into place. But there were a few mysteries without resolutions. Having examined an empty pill bottle and an image of an elderly woman, two groups sketched stories about patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Their plots hinged on memory and forgetting. In these accounts, nametags mattered because “older people can be forgetful.” In one story, Susan wandered the halls of the Oakhill Nursing Home and “could not remember what she was trying to find.” Although her friend Betty discovered the “bright yellow feather” from Susan’s hat in the street, the mystery ended on an unsettling note: “Susan was missing.” This and future games of detection were conceived with the goal of helping first-year students think differently about the human proclivity for research, discovery, and problem solving. Research is a form of detection, but undergraduates often have preconceived notions about what constitutes “research,” including the idea that this mode of inquiry only takes place in a laboratory. We wanted to break through this narrow definition of research to reveal similarities between “research” in the laboratory and in a literary text. If we define “research” as “to investigate systematically,” we can see a direct relationship between the work of a laboratory scientist and the work of the detective in fiction. During the first half of the semester, we would compare and contrast the processes and systematic methods used by detectives, readers, authors, and scientists to create imaginative and inventive solutions to problems. We encouraged methodologically selfconscious engagement with literary detection as well as scientific research, embedding their understanding of each within a framework of “conscious play”: an appreciation of how our brains are “wired” to solve problems. Rather than developing two discrete sets of disciplinary muscles through “crosstraining,” we aligned and fused competencies in different fields of study by guiding students through the process of educational game design. Educational games are designed to advance learning objectives but, as Henry Lowood and Raiford Guins have observed, these games typically “act as delivery systems without any meaningful integration of content and mechanism” (120). They are often of a “plug and play” variety, inserting course materials into existing game frameworks and awarding “badges” to students when they demonstrate mastery of those materials. By contrast, escape rooms (that instruct a group of players to solve a series of interlocked puzzles in a fixed amount of time) are typically plot- and goal-driven. They reward inductive reasoning as well as applied knowledge and invite participation from players with different learning and puzzle-solving styles. Consequently, escape rooms are a more sophisticated mode of “gamification,” a term which game studies scholars have defined as “the use of game design elements in non-game contexts” (Deterding et al. 10). In fact, escape rooms may be distinguished from most other forms of “gamification” employed in the classroom by the extent to which they value participants’ “‘problemsolving skills,’ such as through encouraging alternate paths, providing stories or 208

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analogies, or encouraging the sharing and deliberation of different perspectives” (Karen Schrier, qtd. in Waggoner et  al.). For this reason, it is useful to adopt game theorist Jane McGonigal’s vocabulary of “gamefulness” and “gameful training” to emphasize the centrality of the game concept to the escape room, even in an educational context (Waggoner et al.). Additionally, given the importance of the storytelling element, escape rooms support elegant game design, inviting players to achieve their objectives “in a way that is both pleasing and amenable to artistic formulation” through a lesson that attempts to “shape a person’s experience so that it is enjoyable, invigorating, and whole” (Laurel 146). In The Shape of Difficulty: A Fan Letter to Unruly Objects, Bret Rothstein maintains it is the sense of difficulty in games that “propels us” to wrestle with what we do and do not understand (3). Although Rothstein writes of the world of mechanical puzzles, their architects, and their acolytes, an affinity for this sense of difficulty often characterizes authors and disciples of detective fiction. The “locked room” mysteries popularized during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction in the first half of the twentieth century fit this bill: they confront their audience with extraordinary situations in which a corpse, presumably murdered, lies in an entirely inaccessible room. Theorist Roger Caillois notes that in tackling the locked-room puzzle, “each enigma is subject to as many solutions as the imagination can invent for it” (3). As the reader wrestles with the “affront to reason” and strives to “account for the inconceivable,” they invent multiple solutions, slowly eliminating them as new clues are revealed. Caillois notes, “the pleasure comes from toying with the difficulties, from enumerating the obstacles which one sets out to overcome” (3). Like many games that rely on the strategic communication of information, successful puzzle mysteries consist of “varying efforts to exaggerate, veil, obfuscate, or even withhold information” (Rothstein 6). When readers immerse themselves in a puzzle mystery, their efforts to retain important clues, eliminate red herrings, identify a culprit, and generate a plausible account of the crime allow them to inhabit the role of the detective, or even pit their wits against the literary sleuth. For the reader to compete against a fictional detective, however, the author must “play fair.” As Caillois explains, a work of detective fiction must “provide all the facts that helped create the mystery and that the reader must know in order to solve it” (9–10). By the mid-twentieth century, lists like “Father Knox’s Decalogue: The Ten Rules of Detective Fiction” (1928) by Ronald Knox, as well as “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories” (1928) by S.S. Van Dine, established detailed parameters for the puzzle mystery. For instance, Van Dine insisted that in detective fiction, “The method of murder, and the means of detecting it, must be rational and scientific,” rather than veering into “the realm of fantasy” (191). Not all authors of detective fiction adhered to these guidelines and, indeed, some who did not created the most notorious works in the history of the genre—take the case of Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, for example—but these basic principles informed the production of literary mysteries, fostered readers’ expectations that a set of literary conventions would hold true from one detective fiction to the next, and cultivated puzzle-solving habits best suited to the rules of the game. 209

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In other words, detective fictions and mysteries are interactive games that invite readers to solve a puzzle while capturing their attention with creative storylines, intriguing characters, and complex narratives. But does the cognitive work associated with solving literary mysteries carry over to games that require students to adopt the role of protagonist and engage in collaborative play? Obviously, board, card, and video games are distinct media from written works of detective fiction, but are there basic puzzle-solving techniques and experiences that detective fiction readers and game players share? We provided students with several interactive table and role-playing games to investigate their commonalities with and differences from detective fictions in “laboratory” sessions. We finetuned our perceptions of the differences between literary puzzles and table or role-playing games by analyzing games like Mastermind and Ultimate Werewolf. Mastermind is an uncomplicated code breaking game in which one player, the codemaker, selects and conceals a simple sequence of four colored pegs. A second player, the codebreaker, attempts to ascertain that pattern in as few turns as possible by trying out four-peg sequences of their own on a decoding board. After each turn, the codebreaker learns how many pegs are in their proper place in the sequence and how many are the correct color. Then, they use this information to formulate a new sequence. Mastermind replicates the cognitive work of detective fiction insofar as it requires the codebreaker to use new data to logically identify a single, unimpeachable solution from a massive set of possible answers. It also demands the codebreaker retrieve and apply the clues they received in previous turns. But it lacks many of the more engaging elements of detective fiction. By contrast, games like Ultimate Werewolf are multi-player, include a storyline, build heightened tensions, and incorporate participants’ skills at social deduction. Players are assigned identities as “Villagers,” and “Werewolves.” Werewolves masquerade as Villagers and attempt to deceive their opponents. During each “day” of the game, both the actual Villagers and those who are secretly Werewolves attempt to hash out who among them is a Werewolf. Then, they collectively expel an alleged Werewolf from the game. At “night,” the Werewolves get to pluck off a Villager. The game ends when the Villagers eliminate all the Werewolves or when the Werewolves succeed at dispatching all the Villagers. Whatever team remains is the winner. When compared to Mastermind, Ultimate Werewolf introduces greater interpretive difficulty and promotes greater intellectual investment, in part because of the suspense its storyline generates. And in contrast to detective fictions, which pit the reader against the detective, Ultimate Werewolf allows for collaborative problem solving, meaningful shared goals, and collective enjoyment. Considering these varied experiences of play, we asked each student to formulate an appealing definition of “play” and type it in an anonymous google doc. Their responses included: Play is the opportunity to learn through actions … to gain new experiences and grasp new perspectives. 210

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Play intellectually stimulates. … We play when we take clues and piece them together—the anticipation and excitement we get from solving a puzzle makes it feel like play rather than work. Play is becoming part of a narrative so you end up shaping it. Behavioral neuroscience provided the vocabulary to explore play as a complex matrix of brain activity. For instance, understanding that deductive reasoning activates the middle temporal cortex and the ventral and the prefrontal cortex in the left hemisphere of the brain, while the temporo-parietal junction and parts of the cingulate cortex are activated by judgments about other’s deceitful behavior, made it possible for students to identify the complex cognitive tasks a game might demand of its participants. Students appreciated how processing information and active problem solving in play could produce high-frequency gamma waves, stimulate “Aha!” moments, and initiate gratifying experiences of insight. Students defined the power and the pleasure of “insight” in the following ways: Insight is a specific moment when you come to understand. Insight is a realization … a “falling into place” … it simply “clicks.” Insight is a deep grasp. Insight is a sudden clear and complete understanding. Their new awareness of the cognitive activity that literary puzzles and table games inspire prepared students to rethink what they knew about scientists engaged in laboratory research. Having unpacked the construction of detection texts, students were able to draw on elements of detective fiction to communicate neuroscientists’ puzzle-solving processes in accessible narratives. Moreover, they could incorporate concepts from and discoveries in behavioral neuroscience to further demonstrate their grasp of course materials. Their next assignment was to develop short works of fiction featuring detective-figures whose process of investigation paralleled the principles of scientific inquiry of the neuroscientist in the laboratory. They were to take current research in the field of neuroscience and adapt it for a lay audience, a process informed by aligning the components of a scientific article with the structure of certain detective novels. To clarify this cross-disciplinary (and cross-genre) translation, we suggested that each segment of a scientific article had an equivalent in the puzzle-mystery. An introduction corresponds to the exposition of the fictional text and some criminal act that takes place near its outset. The scientist’s method and experimental design find their analogy in the tactics of the detective and the reader. These might combine elements of the ratiocinative, governed by the systematic collection and ordering of evidence and painstaking inductive work, or the intuitive, whereby ineffable bursts of insight transport the sleuth more closely to a solution, or even, in the instance of Miss Marple, surreptitious solicitations of new information through casual gossiping. Acquiring and making sense of data to establish a culprit is akin to announcing the results of a scientific experiment, 211

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but insofar as these simply announce the identity of the culprit, a discussion must follow. The elucidation of the events informs the reader and the characters in the text what to make of the detective’s solution, explaining, bit by bit, how the crime unfolded and the motives that set it in motion. Then, the conclusion is the dénouement to the fictional affair, while notes for further research anticipate the detective’s future exploits. Finally, the article’s abstract is like a dust jacket, with its brief synopsis of the plot—although in the case of detective fiction, the solution to the mystery is obviously withheld. Students animated what might have initially seemed like the driest of scientific articles. In Erin Kendall Braun and colleagues’ “Retroactive and Graded Prioritization of Memory by Reward,” scientists determined that the brain prioritizes memories of objects encountered nearest to the time when humans receive a reward; these findings were refashioned as a light-hearted mystery about retrieving a stolen biscuit recipe. In “False Memories in Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory Individuals,” Lawrence Patihis and colleagues reported that participants with excellent autobiographical memories were no less susceptible to memory distortions than other participants. In one student’s story, this experiment metamorphosed into a dark dramatization of the Mandela Effect, a phenomenon that occurs when individuals or groups are confident that a false or distorted memory is an accurate one. In another story, a suspect in a murder investigation took advantage of these findings to undermine witness testimony during his trial. Our sustained engagement with literary detection during the first weeks of the semester prepared students to become game makers who could create the kind of elegant narrative puzzles that game studies scholar Brenda Laurel describes as “organic wholes”: the “beauty of their form and structure can approach natural organisms in the way the parts fit perfectly together” (76). By drawing on elements of the puzzle-mystery, students could ensure that their audience would engage in the puzzle-solving activities that detection fiction is designed to provide. Our emphasis on the primacy of storytelling steered students away from presenting “pure” brainteasers and toward developing compelling scenarios, unusual settings, and attention-grabbing characters. Additionally, this exercise would educate; we insisted that someone unfamiliar with neuroscience, or with little knowledge about how memory works, should be able to summarize the major findings of the assigned scientific article in a few sentences after reading the story. But translating scientific research into a literary puzzle-mystery was only a steppingstone to brainstorming plans for an immersive and collaborative escape room. If the topic of a scientific article provided students with the scaffold for a mystery, the experimental design detailed in the article could inspire a live reenactment of its scientific discoveries. That discovery might be clothed in a more enthralling narrative and materialize as a set of smaller, intertwined puzzles that required players to use multiple sensory capacities—a mix of visual, computational, and tactile puzzles, for example—but the conclusions would be the same. Creative thinking could be the engine for a leap across disciplinary boundaries. What was merely trans-generic could take trans-medial and trans-sensorial form. By drawing up plans for an escape room, students showed how readers might “enter” into the mystery text and act out the part of the scientist-detective. 212

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And while they did not fabricate these particular escape rooms, the activity prepared them for their next task: to design and build complex escape rooms to teach players about the deterioration of cognitive functions and of memory in persons diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia. By developing games that communicate how memory is impacted by Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, and aging, students were devoting their energy to educating the public on a culturally resonant topic. This practical application of their training in behavioral neuroscience motivated them to develop novel puzzles, puzzles compatible with the unique struggles that individuals with deteriorating cognitive functions face. Moreover, students faced a critical challenge: to design with a sensitive and compassionate eye to the suffering and anxieties of very real people. Their finished escape rooms were portable, stashed in locked boxes and, in one instance, a suitcase. Their preparation was a collaborative enterprise that relied on backward design, peer feedback, beta testing, and detailed schematics that explicated the interconnectedness of science, puzzles, and plots. Original detective fictions provided the connective tissue for puzzles that explored the symptoms and struggles faced by individuals with impaired memory or experiencing the cognitive changes associated with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. One storyline involved time travel, another was a murder mystery, but several imagined the caretaker-as-detective: a family member, companion, or nursing attendant in search of an elderly man or woman who had disappeared. The puzzles students invented incorporated the standard materials of escape rooms— directional and combination locks, blacklights, and so on—but the plots they devised also required unique materials. How, for instance, to capture visual impairments? With goggles or glasses smeared with a substance that would diminish perceptual acuity, or with overexposed images that would approximate sensitivity to light? Muffled audio and ambient sound on a pre-recorded voice message could illustrate damage to the operations of the auditory cortex. Requiring players to move objects with a pair of chopsticks could communicate diminished dexterity, and more complex puzzles that drew attention to the difficulty of accomplishing daily tasks like coordinating multiple multicolored medications would establish the corrosion of the occipital lobe, parietal lobe, and inferior temporal lobe, as well as the brain’s mismanagement of visual input. Altogether, the sounds and scents, trailing statements, and ill-fitting puzzles were tailored to the sensory impairments the game designers wanted participants to understand. Following the escape room experience, participant “debriefings” explicitly connected their experiences to the vocabulary of behavioral neuroscience and provided detailed explanations of cognitive processes. However, the task the game designers faced was not merely to communicate the loss of episodic memory and decreased effectiveness in speaking but also to convey the agitation and anxiety that accompanies the onset and acceleration of cognitive dysfunctions. As the neurologist Oliver Sacks once observed, in the case of dramatic shifts in the brain’s operations, “there is always a reaction, on the part of the affected organism or individual, to restore, to replace, to compensate for and to preserve its identity, however strange the means may be” (6). To identify the frustrations 213

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caused by the changes to cognitive functions is also to identify human strategies for coping with those changes. Inevitably, the puzzles, clues, and narrative details of students’ escape rooms included objects to which those with impaired cognitive functions might attach meaning and find comfort. In our class Methods of Detection: Understanding the Process of Discovery through Detective Fiction and Behavioral Neuroscience, our first-year students learned to interpret the cognitive work of fictional detectives, and to take stock of their own behavioral habits as active readers of puzzle mysteries. Reading detective fiction, playing table games, and participating in escape rooms provided an unprecedented opportunity for students to identify cognitive behaviors cultivated by gameful behavior in literary studies as well as laboratory research. As a result, they were able to use detective fiction to write about the process of scientific discovery and to transform their fictions into designs for original games that rely on players’ strategic interaction with clues and evidence. Intelligent escape room design fully united their competencies in literary studies and behavioral neuroscience as they took stock of the ways that narrative structures, strategies of sensemaking, and the satisfaction we experience when we solve puzzles are intertwined.

Works Cited Braun, Erin Kendall, et al. “Retroactive and Graded Prioritization of Memory by Reward.” Nature Communications, vol. 9, no. 1, 2018, pp. 4886–98. Caillois, Roger. “The Detective Novel as Game.” The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory, edited by Glenn Most and William Stowe, Harcourt Brace, 1983, pp. 1–12. Deterding, Sebastian, et al. “From Game Design Elements to Gamefulness: Defining ‘Gamification’.” Proceedings of the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference: Envisioning Future Media Environments, Sept. 2011, pp. 9–15. Research Gate, doi: 10.1145/2181037.2181040. Knox, Ronald A. “A Detective Story Decalogue.” 1929. The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Howard Haycraft, Simon & Schuster, 1946, pp. 194–6. Laurel, Brenda. Computers as Theatre. Addison Wesley, 2014. Lowood, Henry, and Raiford Guins. Debugging Game History: A Critical Lexicon. MIT P, 2016. Mastermind. Designed by Mordecai Meirowitz. 1970. Pressman Toy Corporation, 2018, www. pressmantoy.com/product/mastermind-2/. Accessed May 21, 2021. Patihis, Lawrence, et al. “False Memories in Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory Individuals.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A, vol. 110, no. 52, 2013, pp. 20947–52. Rothstein, Bret L. The Shape of Difficulty: A Fan Letter to Unruly Objects. Pennsylvania State UP, 2019. Sacks, Oliver. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Simon & Schuster, 1998. Ultimate Werewolf. Designed by Ted Alspach. Bézier Games, 2008, https://beziergames.com/ products/ultimate-werewolf-deluxe-edition. Accessed Jul. 7, 2021. ­Van Dine, S.S. “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories.” 1928. The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Howard Haycraft, Simon & Schuster, 1946, pp. 189–93. Waggoner, Dillon R., et al. “Using an Escape Room as Gameful Training with Students.” National Association of Colleges and Employers, Feb. 1, 2019, www.naceweb.org/career-readiness/ competencies/using-an-escape-room-as-gameful-training-with-students/. Accessed May 22, 2021. 214

­C HAPTER 20 MAKING FEMINIST GAMES IN THE GENDER STUDIES AND LITERATURE CLASSROOM

Gabi Kirilloff

As a far-reaching form of popular media, games both reflect and perpetuate cultural attitudes about gender. Most well-known franchises, such as Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda, revolve around active male heroes and “damseled” female characters (Sarkeesian). Popular games, such as Grand Theft Auto V, have received mainstream media attention for encouraging violence against female characters (Saar). Representation is not the only issue; gender discrimination and harassment are prevalent within the gaming industry, as reflected by the industry’s reckoning with the #MeToo movement and 2014’s Gamergate, an online harassment campaign waged against female developers (Warzel). The treatment and representation of women suggest an important pedagogical imperative for our classrooms: game studies classrooms need to address gender and representation. But do gender studies and literature classrooms also need to address games? Most scholarship on the intersection of pedagogy, gender, and games focuses on incorporating gender studies concepts into STEM/game design courses (Rouse and Corron). This is a much-needed intervention. Additionally, playing games in the gender studies and literature classroom offers a powerful opportunity for implementing feminist pedagogy (Allen). Playing games in the classroom creates an opportunity for students to critically engage with a form of media that many of them consume outside of class. The Entertainment Software Association estimates that approximately 65 percent of American adults play video games. Because popular culture is perhaps the “single greatest influence” on how we learn to perform gender, games are integral to discussions of contemporary gender roles (Weber 129). While playing and analyzing games in the classroom offers substantial benefits, making games in gender studies and literature classrooms provides additional ways to engage feminist praxis so that students can undertake “reflection and action upon the world in order to change it” (Freire 51). Open-source game design platforms like Twine allow students to make interactive games in minutes, with no prior programming knowledge. However, game creation presents unique challenges, particularly because many students enter the classroom with misconceptions about video games and low technical confidence levels. Careful scaffolding can mitigate these challenges and empower students to enact the types of change they would like to see in the media they consume. By analyzing games, students become critical consumers. By creating games, students become critical makers.

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­Game Creation as Feminist Pedagogy Little scholarship exists on analyzing, let alone creating, games in the gender studies and women’s literature classroom. Notwithstanding this gap in the field, feminist scholarship on the pedagogical application of other forms of new media creation can be applied to games. The pedagogical use of game creation should be considered a form of critical making, or a hands-on creative practice that constitutes an act of thinking and learning (Endres). Sarah Laiola describes digital critical making as a feminist practice because it disrupts the status of writing as the primary scholarly form of communication. This is true of game creation, which challenges the hierarchical relationship between writing and other mediums by introducing mechanics, sound, and visual design as rhetorical elements. Game creation as critical making further blurs this hierarchy by challenging the overall distinction between popular and scholarly media, primarily because games are typically associated with entertainment. Digital forms of critical making shed light on the invisible labor behind digital products (Laiola). Through the process of making games, students carefully dissect the choices that inform the games they play. This process disrupts the notion that games are ideologically neutral, and by becoming game designers, students realize that games are shaped not only by technical constraints but also by the positionality of their creators. When students design the plot, mechanics, and characters of their own games, they quickly recognize that these design elements are the product of choices: the choice to refer to the protagonist of the game with gendered versus non-gendered pronouns, the choice to only include playable male characters, and so on. Critical making fosters empowerment, agency, and an active application of learning. Typical goals of feminist pedagogy include “empowerment (understood as passion rather than domination), community, and agency” (Weber 128). According to Carolyn Shrewsbury, when a “community of learners is empowered to act responsibly toward one another and the subject matter and to apply that learning to social action,” feminist pedagogy has accomplished its mission (8). Digital forms of critical making start with an understanding of the many shortcomings of digital culture. In the case of video games, this means beginning with an analysis of the systemic inequality embedded within the gaming industry. Once students perceive this inequality, game creation provides an opportunity to imagine a more equitable future. Placing students in the role of creators fosters personal investment. In discussing digital video production in a feminist theory course, Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst argues that digital making can increase engagement. Hurst notes that conventional coursework often prevents students from “taking ownership of their educated perspectives and developing a personal voice.” Students often imagine their work as “the task of accurately representing and describing the voices of other theorists in a manner that would be pleasing to their professors.” While students often struggle to understand how response papers, essays, and discussion board posts serve a purpose beyond a grade, they more readily recognize that games are meant to be played by an audience. Students are eager to playtest their games with classmates, family, friends, and roommates. 216

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The benefits of game creation in the classroom are not inherent. Students can learn how to make a functional game without becoming personally invested or considering issues of representation. Enabling students to create games that challenge the status quo is dependent on scaffolding and contextualization. This scaffolding must address common misconceptions about video games (e.g., that games are purely for entertainment), encourage students to consider their audience, and build confidence levels.

Scaffolding Game Creation I teach game creation in Introduction to Women’s Writing, a lower division, literature survey course. Most of the students are in their first or second year and are already interested in gender and literature. They are prepared to discuss these topics but not necessarily to play or make games. I organize the course chronologically. We begin with texts including Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” before moving to early twentieth-century texts such as Zitkala-Ša’s American Indian Stories; we then proceed into the second half of the twentieth-century, reading texts such as Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Recurring themes include the relationship between gender and mental health issues, intersectional approaches to identity, and the pressure to balance career and family. The final two-week unit covers video games. This game unit moves gradually from concepts students are familiar with to new concepts in order to build confidence. We start the game unit by watching Anita Sarkeesian’s Damsel in Distress video series, in which she points out gendered tropes common in popular video games. Sarkeesian’s analysis offers a touchstone; her close readings focus on agency and objectification, concepts that students have practiced applying to literature. Sarkeesian’s videos establish trends among mainstream games without requiring students to play these games, which increases accessibility. Mainstream titles are often expensive, require a console, and involve upwards of ten hours of playtime. In addition, these titles can create barriers between students who have and have not grown up playing video games, particularly because these games often draw on developed skills such as accuracy and timing. Students are quick to point out continuities between the historical concepts we have discussed and the games Sarkeesian analyzes. For example, Sarkeesian explores the “euthanized damsel” trope, in which a female character who has been transformed into a monster must be killed in order to be “saved.” The demonization of “corrupted” female characters harkens back to our discussion of the Victorian angel of the house trope. For many students, this recalls Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s discussion of the way nineteenth-century women were perceived as angels or monsters, depending on their willingness to adhere to rigid gender roles. Many students are surprised to realize that nineteenth-century attitudes about gender have a direct corollary in the modern era. In this sense, discussing games encourages students to make connections between the past and present, combating notions that we live in a “post-feminist” society. Juxtaposing games with canonical pieces of women’s literature underscores not only how little progress 217

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has been made on social issues, but also the relevancy of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury texts to contemporary conversations. After discussing Sarkeesian’s videos, students play Quinn’s Depression Quest and read Sarah Jeong, Charlie Warzel, Brianna Wu, and Joan Donovan’s essay “Everything Is Gamergate.” Quinn was the original target of Gamergate; her harassers claimed that Depression Quest received unmerited positive reviews from game journalism outlets. Students often note the similarities between the doxing of female game developers and the twentieth-century backlash over women entering the workforce. Depression Quest describes the life of a young adult experiencing depression. The player makes choices throughout the game (such as whether to open up to his partner or to pretend nothing is wrong) that impact the player-character’s mental health. Choices are either opened or closed (such as “shake off your funk”) depending on previous choices the player has made (such as seeing a therapist). Options not available to the player are displayed with a strikethrough. While Depression Quest can be played in the classroom, because of the subject matter I ask students to complete the game before class. Playing Depression Quest can be an emotional experience for students who have encountered depression or its effects. For this reason, it is important for students to understand the plot and purpose of the game before playing. I provide a content warning and let students know that if they have experienced depression, they should not play the game. I also provide the option of reading a summary or watching a video playthrough of the game; these options allow students to maintain a greater degree of emotional distance from the subject matter presented in the game.1 This option enables students to participate in class discussion without playing the game. In my experience, students who disclosed that they did not play the game for personal reasons (and instead opted to read a summary) still expressed an interest in discussing the game with classmates. Depression Quest is particularly suited to Introduction to Women’s Writing because the majority of texts we read focus on mental health. However, many other independent games could be used depending on the focus of the course: Anna Anthropy’s Dys4ia examines the societal stigma around transitioning, while her poetic and abstract queers in love at the end of the world facilitates productive conversations about love and sexuality. These games are free and can be played in a browser in under ten minutes. Similar to Depression Quest, they are text based and do not require a familiarity with gaming conventions. I structure our conversation of Depression Quest around a series of questions intended to help students think about games as rhetorical objects. These questions can be adapted to other games: ●●

How is Depression Quest different or similar to other games you have played (or, how does it compare to your expectations about video games)?

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What emotions does Depression Quest evoke?

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­How does it evoke these emotions?

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Does Depression Quest fully convey the experience of living with depression?

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In response to the first question, students note that Depression Quest is different because it is text-based, lacks violence, and focuses on a “serious” topic. These answers highlight the problematic homogeneity in the mainstream game industry. While most students note that Depression Quest differs from games they are familiar with, they are quick to note thematic similarities with the texts we have read in class. For example, multiple students have noted that “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Depression Quest both argue that individuals suffering from mental illness cannot simply choose to “feel better.” Students have responded to the second question using words such as anxious, sad, stressed, and trapped. When we discuss how the game produces these emotions, students typically start by focusing on the plot and characters, with responses such as,  “It made me sad when the player-character’s girlfriend broke up with him.” However, students realize that the game’s mechanics emphasize these emotions. Students note feeling frustrated and trapped when they cannot choose a certain option in the game. This is an important moment in the conversation and introduces the concept of procedural rhetoric, or the notion that the actions allowed by a game’s systems are rhetorical (Bogost). When discussing Depression Quest’s argument, students focus on empathy—the game is supposed to help players relate to those suffering from depression. Students typically note that the game is intended for those who have not experienced depression firsthand. Discussing audience can draw students’ attention to the limits of empathy. As feminist critics have argued, empathy should not always be regarded as a positive rhetorical tool. We can view moments of textual empathy as “fantasies of mutuality” that ultimately produce self-congratulation rather than social change (Lather 19). Asking students whether the game fully conveys the experience of living with depression underscores the difference between empathy and experience. While Depression Quest might cause players to feel emotion for the player-character, this does not mean that players can fully understand another positionality. In my experience, students sometimes share their own experiences with depression as part of this conversation. While connecting course material to personal experience is a key aspect of feminist pedagogy, instructors should never put students on the spot. Discussing the game’s rhetorical effects among hypothetical user groups (e.g., what different types of users can we imagine playing this game? How are their needs different? How might they respond differently?) allows students to engage with the material without “outing” those who have experienced depression firsthand. After analyzing Depression Quest, students learn to make their own games using Twine, the same platform Quinn used for creating Depression Quest. My motivation for including game creation is largely to “resist passive contemplation of change” in the classroom space (Hurst). The move from analysis to creation provides students with agency, an important value in feminist pedagogy. However, students often express anxiety about game creation because of low confidence levels in programming and technology. I structure our class session on Twine to ensure that students have sufficient time to create their first game in class, which allows for communal learning and bolsters confidence levels. Twine is remarkably accessible; it was designed for storytellers rather than for 219

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programmers. Twine allows writers to create stories in which players can click on different choices, or links, to pursue different paths. It requires no programming experience, and most students can produce their first game after ten minutes of instruction.

Sample Assignments After learning the basics of Twine, students are given a week to create games that construct an argument about gender. This is a “mini-assignment,” equivalent to the short response papers written earlier in the semester. We continue to practice working with Twine in class and spend time playtesting and workshopping student games. The open-ended nature of the assignment encourages a wide variety of approaches. Jaq Hernandez’s game concerns “a damsel in distress where her hero doesn’t save her.” The player-character begins the game imprisoned in a dungeon, remembering her capture and contemplating whether her hero will save her: You remember the seizing, the burn of rope, the spit dribbling down your throat and neck. The memory doesn’t hurt you. You remember your lines. Single word, repeated again and again. Help! Help! You could grin from the memory. You said your part of the script and now you follow the stage direction. (You wait.) You begin to wonder how long this will take. He wouldn’t forget you.2 Hernandez’s emphasis on “lines” and “script” underscores the way gendered media tropes reflect real-world prescriptive gender roles. Instead of being rescued by the “hero,” the player-character is rescued by a female adventurer, who reveals that she was initially hired by the “hero” to kidnap the player-character so that he could later “rescue” her. This twist encourages the player to reflect on the harmful power inequalities underlying “damsel” narratives. Over the course of the game, the playercharacter realizes that her passivity has created a never-ending cycle of victimhood: “The damsel is what you are. You had no other role than that. What is a hero without a damsel? What is a damsel without distress?” The game includes choices leading to multiple endings, one of which offers an empowering alternative to the damsel narrative: the player-character can learn how to rescue herself by forming a positive relationship with the female adventurer. Not all of the students’ games include such optimistic endings. In another game, “The Double Date,” the player-character goes on a double date with her best friend Delaney and realizes the next morning that her friend was sexually assaulted: 220

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Delaney begins to cry again, and all you can do is hold her and comfort her. You begin thinking of ways to help Delaney get through this traumatic experience. You call yours and Delaney’s boss at work, and briefly explain to her the situation, asking if Delaney could take a couple of weeks off at work. She tells you that Delaney can take all of the time she needs. You find a counselor for Delaney to help her cope with what happened to her. You block Will’s and Jack’s numbers on both of yall’s phones, doing your best to remove all ties from that night. Go back to The Beginning to play again through different scenarios. The beginning of the game features a myriad of choices: saying yes to going on a date or contriving a flimsy excuse not to go, going out for dessert or going out to a bar. Interestingly, the outcome remains the same. The player-character, and by extension the player, cannot prevent the sexual assault. As the student notes in her description of the game, “The purpose of this game is to demonstrate that regardless of whether you are drunk, not drunk, on a fancy or casual date, sexual assault can, and does happen, regardless of what happens leading up to the point of it.” In this case, curtailing choices produces a rhetorical effect, a feeling of powerlessness. This emotional effect in turn creates an argument that assault is never the victim’s fault. Both students make complex arguments about power, agency, and gender in their games. They approach their arguments differently. In Hernandez’s game the player chooses different paths that affect the narrative’s outcome. This corresponds with the player-character’s realization that she must learn to make active choices that impact her fate. The second student’s game relies on the illusion of choice. Although the game does not end with a “positive outcome,” it works toward the possibility of changing players’ perceptions about victimhood. These games fulfill goals of feminist pedagogy, including the desire to make transparent “assumptions about power” and to “acknowledge  the existence of oppression as well as the possibility of ending it” (Crabtree, Sapp, and Licona  3). In both cases, making Twine games encouraged students to imagine alternatives to oppressive attitudes and systems.

Conclusions Game creation can successfully embody core tenets of feminist pedagogy. It can connect feminist literature and theory to popular media. It can encourage a sense of historical continuity that challenges narratives of progress. It can empower students to create change. However, these outcomes depend on the way games are introduced into a course. In my experience, it is crucial to foreground “conventional” content such as literature, theory, and historical context before introducing games. This encourages students to make connections between the past and present. It also focuses game creation on rhetorical meaning. A common pitfall of game creation, or any form of critical making, 221

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is that students (and instructors) can get wrapped up in the process of design and lose sight of the pedagogical, theoretical, and rhetorical goals informing the project. In other words, the focus becomes creating a game for the sake of creating a game. Often, this involves falling down a technical rabbit hole. Once students gain confidence from building their first Twine game, many are eager to learn how to incorporate technically challenging elements of game design. It is important to consistently focus on the rhetorical significance of design choices. When a student asks, can I change the font color, the answer should be: how will it contribute to your argument? In addition, I find it helpful to begin our discussion of games with game analysis. By the end of the semester, students are familiar with close reading and literary analysis. Beginning the game unit with Sarkeesian’s feminist analysis of popular games provides an approachable entry point into game studies that builds from students’ preexisting skills. It also makes the connection between gender issues and the gaming industry clear to students. Transitioning to playing and analyzing an interactive fiction game offers an opportunity to expand our understanding of close-reading to include sound, visuals, and mechanics. Depression Quest and other text-based games also provide a model for students. Because the game is built using Twine, students get a sense of what they will be able to make and how Twine games can craft compelling arguments about serious topics. Building confidence during game creation is key. According to the Computer Science Teachers’ Association, women and students of color are less likely to have received computer science training in middle school or high school. When combined with harmful stereotypes, this lack of technical background can result in low confidence levels for learning new digital tools. This is particularly pertinent to a discussion of integrating game creation into gender studies and literature courses given student demographics.3 Choosing an accessible platform like Twine is an important first step. Student engagement and confidence can also be bolstered by stressing the nontechnical aspects of game design, such as the sophistication of the students’ arguments, the quality and creativity of their writing, and their thoughtfulness about audience. As Janet Davis notes, instructors can encourage women and minority students to engage with technical skills by portraying computing as “a tool for solving problems that matter.” At its core, game creation in the gender studies and literature classroom should encourage students to use technical skills to craft stories and arguments that they find meaningful.

Note­ 1. Video playthroughs, or “let’s plays” of games are a popular form of entertainment in their own right. They often include commentary on the game being played. 2. A double carriage return separates passages. Hyperlinks to subsequent passages are styled in bold. Hernandez and her fellow student have given their written permission to have their games reproduced; the second student requested to remain anonymous. The games were created in the fall of 2019.

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Making Feminist Games 3. In my experiences, the vast majority of students taking Introduction to Women’s Writing are women. Research suggests that the majority of English majors are also women. For more information, see “Gender Distribution of Degrees in English Language and Literature.”

Works Cited Allen, Samantha. “Video Games as Feminist Pedagogy.” Loading … The Journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association, vol. 8, no. 13, 2014, pp. 61–80. Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. MIT P, 2010. Crabtree, Robbin D., David Alan Sapp, and Adela C. Licona. “Introduction: The Passion and the Praxis of Feminist Pedagogy.” Feminist Pedagogy: Looking Back to Move Forward, edited by Robbin D. Crabtree, David Alan Sapp, and Adela C. Licona, Johns Hopkins UP, 2009, pp. 1–22. Davis, Janet. “Five Ways to Welcome Women to Computer Science.” Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 18, 2019, https://www.chronicle.com/article/5-ways-to-welcome-women-tocomputer-science/. Accessed Jun. 1, 2021. Depression Quest. The Quinnspiracy, 2013. PC. Dys4ia. Anna Anthropy, 2012. PC. Endres, Bill. “A Literacy of Building: Making in the Digital Humanities.” Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities, edited by Jentery Sayers, U of Minnesota P, 2017, pp. 44–54. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Herder & Herder, 1970. “Gender Distribution of Degrees in English Language and Literature.” Humanities Indicators, https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/higher-education/gender-distributiondegrees-english-language-and-literature. Accessed Jun. 1, 2021. Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic. Yale UP, 1979. Hurst, Rachel Alpha Johnston. “How to ‘Do’ Feminist Theory through Digital Video: Embodying Praxis in the Undergraduate Feminist Theory Classroom.” Ada, no. 5, 2017, https:// adanewmedia.org/2014/07/issue5-hurst/. Accessed Jun. 1, 2021. Jeong, Sarah, Charlie Warzel, Brianna Wu, and Joan Donovan. “Everything Is Gamergate.” New York Times. Aug. 15, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/15/opinion/whatis-gamergate.html. Accessed Jun. 1, 2021. Laiola, Sarah. “Back in a Flash: Critical Making Pedagogies to Counter Technological Obsolescence.” The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, vol. 18, 2020, https://jitp. commons.gc.cuny.edu/back-in-a-flash-critical-making-pedagogies-to-counter-technologicalobsolescence. Accessed Jun. 1, 2021. Lather, Patti. “Against Empathy, Voice, and Authenticity.” Voice in Qualitative Inquiry: Challenging Conventional, Interpretive, and Critical Conceptions in Qualitative Research, edited by Lisa A. Mazzei and Alecia Youngblood Jackson, Routledge, 2009, pp. 17–27. queers in love at the end of the world. Anna Anthropy, 2013. PC. Rouse, Rebecca, and Amy Corron. “Leveling up: A Critical Feminist Pedagogy for Game Design.” MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture, 2020, https://maifeminism.com/leveling-up-a-criticalfeminist-pedagogy-for-game-design. Accessed Jun. 1, 2021. Saar, Malika Saada. “Grand Theft Auto V and the Culture of Violence against Women.” Huffpost, Feb. 8, 2015, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/grand-theft-auto-v-and-the-culture-ofviolence-against-women_b_6288528. Accessed Jun. 1, 2021. Sarkeesian, Anita. “Damsel in Distress (Part 1): Tropes vs. Women in Video Games.” Feminist Frequency, Mar. 7, 2013, https://feministfrequency.com/video/damsel-in-distress-part-1/.

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Teaching Games and Game Studies Sarkeesian, Anita. “Damsel in Distress (Part 2): Tropes vs. Women in Video Games.” Feminist Frequency, May 28, 2013, https://feministfrequency.com/video/damsel-in-distress-part-2tropes-vs-women/. ­Sarkeesian, Anita. “Damsel in Distress (Part 3): Tropes vs. Women in Video Games.” Feminist Frequency, Aug. 1, 2013, https://feministfrequency.com/video/damsel-in-distress-part-3tropes-vs-women/. Shrewsbury, Carolyn. “What Is Feminist Pedagogy?” Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 3/4, 1993, pp. 6–14. Warzel, Charlie. “How an Online Mob Created a Playbook for a Culture War.” New York Times, Aug. 15, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/15/opinion/what-is-gamergate. html. Accessed Jun. 1, 2021. Weber, Brenda R. “Teaching Popular Culture through Gender Studies: Feminist Pedagogy in a Postfeminist and Neoliberal Academy?” Feminist Teacher, vol. 20, no. 2, 2010, pp. 124–38.

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AFTERWORD: CONFESSIONS OF A GAME SCHOLAR IN AN ENGLISH DEPARTMENT

Anastasia Salter

In March of 2020, academia was upended in every possible way. Faculty (and pseudoadministrators like myself) found ourselves wrestling with continually changing predictions and the challenges of online conversions of everything from the classroom and the department reading to our fields’ annual conferences. In the midst of this spring and summer of change, I was also navigating another transition: the sudden move by my university to reclassify my program, Digital Media (Game Design and Web Design), to a new position outside of the humanities and in the College of Sciences. This was the second such threatened displacement in my time since joining the University of Central Florida: the first reorganization saw our program moved from the School of Visual Arts and Design to a newly formed School of Communication and Media. Even in this lessdramatic shift I’d noticed significant changes in everything from the structuring of our governance to the disciplinary backgrounds of faculty applicants. Labels and disciplines matter, as I continually remind my students as they meander down non-traditional paths: as Julie Thompson Klein’s Interdisciplining Digital Humanities reminds us, “boundary work”—“the claims, activities, and structures by which individuals and groups work directly and through institutions to create, maintain, break down, and reformulate between knowledge units”—is both slow and contentious (5). Those of us working at the boundary are used to continually negotiating divides of language and priorities, a labor that seemingly never ends: explaining the value of a digital project to a book-focused humanities colleague; the value of a book to a journal-driven social sciences colleague; the value of a conference proceeding to a researcher used to abstract-only conferences. With this new pending move, I found myself staring down an even more dramatic re-imagining of my field: a fundamental break between the study of games and what I saw as our aligned colleagues in programs focused on rhetoric, literature, and graphic design. In this type of shift, a scholar on the boundary risks finding themselves fundamentally relabeled. For game studies broadly, an alignment with STEM is an obvious advantage: the addition of arts for the less-popular acronym “STEAM” is no less fundable, and students working in those programs will likely benefit from future funding initiatives focused on those needs. For scholars, however, such a shift also demands a move away from humanities values, bringing with it a reinforcement of the hierarchies and toxicity associated with those same labels. Instead of participating in this realignment, I (and several colleagues) pushed back, arguing that our work belonged in the digital humanities: after some discussion, the English department ultimately

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concurred, allowing several of us to remain as part of the humanities while the majority of our colleagues (and their affiliated programs) moved to the sciences. This, like many things, sounds simpler on paper than in reality: the act of recasting one’s tenure under a fundamentally different name and set of guidelines is no small task. It also brings with it plenty of navel-gazing and reflection: if I am no longer aligned with a “games” program, what opportunities might that bring to rethink what I bring to the classroom and my work? What obligations, like more than passing familiarity with the latest iteration of Call of Duty, does that change erase, and potential for recentering games at the margins? At the risk of going even more meta, the title of this essay, “Confessions of a Game Scholar in an English Department,” was suggested to me by the same new colleague editing this volume. It struck me immediately as structurally parallel to a talk I gave at the Modern Language Association Conference in 2019, when I was interim chair of Games and Interactive Media—titled, appropriately, “Reflections of an Impostor Teaching the Digital Humanities.” That piece was inspired by my duality of faculty roles at the time: teaching theory to Ph.D. students in transdisciplinary humanities while teaching aspiring programmers on alternate days, a dizzying shift in mindset from prep to prep. The juxtaposition captures what I see as the heart of the challenge of aligning oneself with the examination of interactive media: an ongoing tension in which someone like myself is likely to simultaneously occupy the position of being the most “digital” in a room of English faculty and the most “literary” in a room of Digital Media faculty. This tension can be exhausting, but I argue that it can also be useful, and necessary, to rethinking both academic siloing and the role of transdisciplinary thinking in humanities education broadly. What follows is, methodologically, aligned more with autoethnographic approaches and self-reflection than it is with the approaches of any of the primary disciplinary spaces I’ve found myself a part of. I worry even as I write it that it is fundamentally self-indulgent, as the act of redefining one’s work within the context of new colleagues is both personal and common. As more emergent areas of study coalesce between the disciplines, I anticipate even more faculty will find themselves in these transient positions. Yet this particular reflection arises from the provocation of a colleague: in the shift from teaching games as digital media to games as literature, what is changed? Can a transdisciplinary field be characterized as belonging to any department, and what impact does the continual motion have on our teaching and research?

­Games Classroom as Contested Space Like many who study games, I have spent the majority of my teaching not on games as an object of study but on their making. While the two are intertwined, the realities of pragmatic needs often govern student enthusiasm and curricular planning, with programming occupying much of my time as an instructor. There is to some extent more parallelism in the typical curriculum of a creative writing program and a games program than there is between games and literature: indeed, the game development classroom 226

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can be outright hostile to attempts to redefine or challenge the dominate paradigms of gaming, and, like computational fields more broadly, have not been renowned for their inclusivity. (I recall one day, early in my teaching, trying to decide whether to confront a student wearing a “Tell your boobs to stop staring at me” shirt to my class—a class at the time populated entirely by cisgender men and myself.) In Gaming at the Edge, Adrienne Shaw wrestles with the challenges this hostility brings to pedagogy interrogating games: “Teaching classes on minority representation in games, I heard this refrain repeated yet again by my students. Video games are a niche medium; they are fantasy environments; and they are designed for a narrow market. Of course games are not diverse—so what” (Shaw). Frequently, I struggled with connecting to students who centered AAA games by studios notorious for labor abuses and narratives featuring hypermasculine conquest: while recent attention has brought some of that to the forefront of games industry discourse, games by now-infamous studios such as Blizzard remain effectively canonical in student aspirations. Resistance to industry norms and the alignment of games with what has been aptly termed the “military-entertainment complex” is certainly possible within these classrooms, and a subject of continual reflection within game studies as a field (Robinson). The work of communities such as the Queerness and Games Conference points to the importance of connections with other disciplines with shared pedagogical struggles, including film, in developing approaches to activist game design pedagogy (Pozo et al.). My collaborator and former game design colleague Bridget Blodgett and I have described our approach to game design as training “Designer Two,” a term informed by Shira Chess’s concept of “Player Two”: “Designer two comes into the classroom marked as an outsider and might include the experimental, casual, social, or narrative game player; the student who comes from a background of enthusiasm but no encouragement in STEM fields; the returning student or the outsider; and women who are typically a minority in the classroom” (Salter and Blodgett, “Training Designer Two” 274). As Chess has noted, “the games made for Player Two appear to be limiting and limited … they represent small stories with small outcomes. And yet these games are important” (Chess). Typically, such games are an afterthought in the curriculum, resisted by students as “not-games.” As Mia Consalvo and Christopher Paul’s important examination of “real games” notes, anything categorized as casual, social, or “free-to-play” is suspect in the “Discourse of the real” (Consalvo and Paul). Notably such discourse also reflects the gatekeeping around who gets to be a gamer, an identity that remains contested and associated with the positioning of a straight white cisgender man (Salter and Blodgett, Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media). Hostility toward instructors outside of that embodiment thus increases when those same instructors bring narrative, queer, feminist, and activist games to the classroom. Rouse and Corron note the impact of this hostility in their examination of the challenges of feminist game design: “this hostility is designed to silence the instructor and preserve the status quo in games pedagogy as a handmaiden to the industry. This status quo education is skills-focused, instrumentalist, and, like much of Computer Science education, purportedly apolitical” (Rouse and Corron). The approach Rouse and Corron crafted in response to these challenges places an emphasis on dialogue and reflection 227

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that is familiar to the creative writing classroom, but still unusual in the context of the computational: like Chess’s work, it points to a reimagining of which games belong in the classroom. An emphasis on narrative threads through these examples, reflecting a continual debate over how games are positioned in both mainstream and academic discourse. In Gamer Trouble, Amanda Phillips captures the challenges of a “ludic century,” noting that games occupy a significant portion of our contemporary media landscape. Whether they are central to our understanding of the twenty-first-century condition or merely an ancillary component of a much larger political economy, games are increasingly important to the ways we make meaning: as integral parts of the economy, as activities that put us in intimate relationships with machines and others that force us to reverseengineer complicated systems for the purpose of mastery; and as influential storytelling platforms that can help us imagine new ways of living (7). The inclusion of games as “storytelling platforms” is crucial here, as that connection at once points to the very purpose of this collection while holding within it shades of disciplinary divide. The uneasy history of narratology and ludology is fraught with misunderstandings and (at times inflated) conflict over whether games are valuably positioned alongside other narrative media, or apart as procedurally driven systems. Eric Zimmerman centers the “games” and “story” terminology as part of the problem, noting: “Honestly, have you ever seen such a suspicious set of slippery and ambiguous, overused, and ill-defined terms?” as he centers the need for greater disciplinary refinement in how we address the apparent divide: “it’s not a question of whether or not games are narrative, but instead how they are narrative” (Zimmerman). Janet Murray attempted to bring closure with a talk titled the “Last Word on Ludology v Narratology” at the Digital Games Research Association Conference in 2005, observing that it is not contradictory to acknowledge that “games are not a subset of stories; [yet] objects exist that have qualities of both games and stories” (Murray). It is this line of thinking that makes the transition from “game scholar” to “literature professor” even feasible.

­Impostor in a Strange Department In 2011, Ian Bogost offered his commentary on the challenge of defining the digital humanities, suggesting that “despite constant critical theoretical incantations about futurity and deferral and uncertainty and politics, the humanities are finally discovering that they ought to care about the present and the future” (Bogost). As a scholar of games, social media, and similar current disruptions of humanity, working primarily on the outskirts of the big tent of the digital humanities, his definition resonated for me. Matthew Kirschenbaum notes that critiques of the digital humanities frequently focus on the ecosystem rather than what the digital humanities has produced: Digital humanities doesn’t do theory. Digital humanities never historicizes. Digital humanities doesn’t do race, class, gender, or, for that matter, culture. Digital 228

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humanities is complicit. Digital humanities is a neoliberalist contrivance for dismantling the professoriate. Digital humanities is the academic import of Silicon Valley solutionism. Perhaps most damning of all: digital humanities is something separate from the rest of the humanities, and—this is the real secret—digital humanities wants it that way. Yet the zero-sum agon of the construct seems itself complicit in a worldview that is neoliberal, ahistorical, and unconcerned with the materialities of contemporary scholarly production. (Kirschenbaum) The parallels to game studies (particularly in the concerns of “Silicon Valley solutionism”) are valuable here. To turn to my favorite quotation from Elizabeth Losh, “Articulating a need for a feminist corrective in the digital humanities has come at a much slower pace [than in game studies], perhaps because the instrumentalism of a ‘tool’ seems much less blatantly anti-feminist than the instrumentalism of a gun” (Losh). The violent instrumentalism and continual challenges of the game design classroom shaped not only my pedagogy, but also the relationship of games scholars with the assumptions and discourse of our aligned humanities fields. My own disciplinary contradictions follow familiar patterns for game studies as a field more broadly: the question of where to do a game studies Ph.D. is complicated enough that Bo Ruberg built a guide that includes programs in fields ranging from Communication and Digital Media to English, Literature, and Visual Studies (Ruberg). Information Studies programs are listed alongside Anthropology departments, and only a few programs (such as UCSC’s Ph.D. in Computational Media) suggest a specialization particularly close to “games.” Ruberg captures this “dilemma” in their introduction to the guide: However, for those who aspire to become game studies professionals, figuring out which educational path to take can be difficult. Though it is becoming more and more common for universities to offer courses on video games, and though institutions like USC and NYU (among others) have excellent programs dedicated to games, currently the only available graduate degrees specifically dedicated to games focus on game making—that is, game design and development—not on the academic study of games. While there are doctoral programs that allow students to tailor their education toward games, there are no institutions yet that offer a dedicated, games-focused Ph.D. This challenge is a familiar one for those of us in game studies: reflecting back on the MLA conference, I was drawn to that particular panel by a question in the call that resonated with my own deeply felt impostor syndrome: “who, exactly, has the bona fides to teach digital humanities?” And in deference to that question, I always start by noting that I don’t have a Ph.D., and I’m thus probably not a digital humanist. Other scholars frequently assumed I had one—that I possessed the credential with the appropriate letters to have entered the door, or I wouldn’t be there—but my academic background is more scattered than that, and thus less transparent under scrutiny. Behind my name 229

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I could add the letters D.C.D., which stand for “Doctorate in Communications Design,” whatever that means. It refers to a degree established by Stuart Moulthrop and Nancy Kaplan, reflecting an innovative approach to patterning a degree that would allow for the serious study of complex computational objects such as games—but in the absence of similarly named credentials, it offers the continuing challenge of legibility embedded in that same field. When queried about my humanities-bent, I’ll often lean on my other credential, a Master of Fine Arts in Children’s Literature. This, of course, confuses rather than clarifies the issue, and it was part of the strange path I took to where I am: tenured in an English Department. Director, of sorts, of a Ph.D. program in Texts & Technology. That same program is what drew me to my current home at the University of Central Florida: it is, like me, a program without a discipline, though some of the faculty would argue otherwise. For three years running I was fortunate to teach a course called the “Theory of Texts & Technology,” a course that most students dread because of its simultaneous breadth and depth. I admit to being similarly daunted when I first stepped into the classroom. We might as well call it the theory of everything—a course I’d feel equally qualified to teach. The question of what Texts & Technology—and, correspondingly, the “theory” thereof—includes is even broader than that of what the digital humanities includes: it is similarly a disputed, transdisciplinary territory reflecting our multiple areas of emphasis: Digital Humanities, Digital Media, Public History, Rhetoric and Composition, Scientific and Technical Communication. And yet we unify these disciplines in a course, and one that a single person must teach—a juxtaposition that might seem more unusual if not viewed from the position of a Game Scholar. Our objects of study link into conversations across those fields, from games as electronic literature, providing space for resistant and experimental interactive narratives, all the way to games as simulation, providing space for training and failure. Through this lens, the placement of games in the literature classroom offers a means to push back at disciplinary dividing lines: at its best, the literary positioning of games offers us another lens into the computational. Electronic literature has historically crafted a bridge enabling a back and forth, uneasy though the relationship between the two might be. Through this lens, there is no “strange” department for the work of games: however, there is the potential for games scholars to make a department stranger. There is value to be had in the perpetual state of impostor-dom, and some of that value is in recognizing that the spaces where our texts now reside require transdisciplinary mastery that is individually unreachable. I would argue that the work of the digital humanities demands some of this perspective of the outsider: that, indeed, if we are fully comfortable with what and where we teach, it is a sign we need to become less comfortable.

Gaming the Literature Classroom The distinction between teaching a game to a computationally focused student and a literature student is not entirely one of a cultural divide, but it does draw attention to

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this surrounding system of values. For the literature student, the case need not be made of why a game that is not a commercial success is of value: however, attention shifts to making the computational legible and visible, and navigating the assumptions that the very label of “games” brings with it—the cultural baggage that infused the classroom follows with the object itself. The work throughout this collection points to the value of making legible these very different types of play, and importantly to the tools (such as Twine and Ink) that make it more feasible for game-making to enter the literature classroom. In concluding this essay, I am cognizant of the many challenges looming for literature departments broadly and for my new department, located in Florida, in particular. I  find myself pausing to scroll the recommended syllabus statements introduced in response to legislation introduced at the state level to defend “intellectual freedom and ideological diversity” on campus (Flaherty). To return for a moment to Phillips’s warnings of a ludic century, the ideological battlegrounds of gamer culture are hardly limited to those classrooms. The digital humanities not only faces the same challenges, but also offers means for resistant pedagogy. In their provocative work on #transformdh, Alexis Lothian and Amanda Phillips offer a challenge that goes to the core of theory and pedagogical structures that replicate within digital humanities the systemic values of the traditional humanities: We are interested in digital scholarship that takes aim at the more deeply rooted traditions of the academy: its commitment to the works of white men, living and dead; its overvaluation of Western and colonial perspectives on (and in) culture; its reproduction of heteropatriarchal generational structures. Perhaps we should inhabit, rather than eradicate, the status of bugs—even of viruses—in the system. Perhaps there are different systems and anti-systems to be found: DIY projects, projects that don’t only belong to the academy, projects that still matter even if they aren’t funded, even if they fail. (Lothian and Phillips) The metaphor of bugs and “viruses” in the system has a different ring in 2021: certainly, we know at a wide scale what disruption can look like, and the harm it can bring. But we’ve also experienced, collectively, the consequences of ignoring disruption—of pushing for returns to “normal” rather than embracing opportunities for change that might center inclusion and care. Bringing games into the traditional (and indeed, the digital) humanities classroom is one opportunity for such disruption: however, we must continually be cognizant of the risks of instead further replicating and perpetuating systems of exclusion through that play. And there is similar value for bringing the literary—and the literature professor—to the games classroom, in spite of the inherent challenges of such a shift. In an increasingly transient (and contingent) academy, such movement might offer one avenue for breaking down our disciplinary borders.

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Works Cited Bogost, Ian. “Getting Real.” Bogost.Com, Mar. 9, 2011, http://bogost.com/writing/blog/getting_ real/. Chess, Shira. Ready Player Two: Women Gamers and Designed Identity. U of Minnesota P, 2017. Consalvo, Mia, and Christopher A. Paul. Real Games: What’s Legitimate and What’s Not in Contemporary Videogames. MIT P, 2019. Flaherty, Colleen. “Florida Poised to Pass Bill Allowing Students to Record Classes.” Inside Higher Ed, Apr. 16, 2021, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/04/16/florida-poised-passbill-allowing-students-record-classes. Kirschenbaum, Matthew. “What Is ‘Digital Humanities,’ and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things about It?” Differences, vol. 25, no. 1, May 2014, pp. 46–63. Klein, Julie Thompson. Interdisciplining Digital Humanities: Boundary Work in an Emerging Field. Illustrated edition, UMDCB, 2015. Losh, Elizabeth. “What Can the Digital Humanities Learn from Feminist Game Studies?” Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 2, Sept. 2015. Lothian, Alexis, and Amanda Phillips. “Can Digital Humanities Mean Transformative Critique?” Journal of E-Media Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, 2013, pp. 1–25. Murray, Janet. “The Last Word on Ludology v Narratology (2005).” Inventing the Medium, Jun. 28, 2013, https://inventingthemedium.com/2013/06/28/the-last-word-on-ludology-vnarratology-2005/. Phillips, Amanda. Gamer Trouble: Feminist Confrontations in Digital Culture. NYU P, 2020. Pozo, Diana, et al. “In Practice: Queerness and Games.” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, vol. 32, no. 2 (95), Sept. 2017, pp. 153–63. Robinson, Nick. “Videogames, Persuasion and the War on Terror: Escaping or Embedding the Military—Entertainment Complex?” Political Studies, vol. 60, no. 3, Oct. 2012, pp. 504–22. Rouse, Rebecca, and Amy Corron. “Levelling Up: A Critical Feminist Pedagogy for Game Design.” MAI: Journal of Feminism and Visual Culture, no. 5, MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture, 2020. www.diva-portal.org, http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:his:diva-18177. Ruberg, Bo. “Getting a Game Studies Ph.D.: A Guide for Aspiring Video Game Scholars/Our Glass Lake.” Our Glass Lake, Apr. 2019, http://ourglasslake.com/getting-into-game-studies/. Salter, Anastasia, and Bridget Blodgett. Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media: Sexism, Trolling, and Identity Policing. Springer, 2017. ­Salter, Anastasia, and Bridget Blodgett. “Training Designer Two: Ideological Conflicts in Feminist Games + Digital Humanities.” Alternative Historiographies of the Digital Humanities, edited by Dorothy Kim and Adeline Koh, Punctum Books, 2021, pp. 271–94. Shaw, Adrienne. Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture. U of Minnesota P, 2014. Zimmerman, Eric. “Narrative, Interactivity, Play, and Games › Electronic Book Review.” Electronic Book Review, Jan. 31, 2012, http://electronicbookreview.com/essay/narrativeinteractivity-play-and-games/.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Nolan Bazinet earned his Ph.D. in Education at the Université de Sherbrooke, Canada. His research focuses on language, literacy, and literature teaching, including the integration of digital games and digital literature in learning environments. He currently teaches at the Université de Sherbrooke, Canada; Bishop’s University, Canada; and Champlain Regional College, Canada. Harry Brown is Professor of English at DePauw University, USA, specializing in American and environmental literature. He has taught courses in digital narrative, ludology, and game design. His book Video Games and Education explores the theoretical and pedagogical significance of games in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Craig Carey is Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi, USA, where he also serves as Faculty Advisor of the USM Game Studies Group. His research and teaching focus on nineteenth-century American literature, media theory, digital humanities, and game studies. His recent scholarship has appeared in journals such as American Literature, American Literary History, Arizona Quarterly, and Pedagogy. Jay Clayton is William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University, USA. He is the author of numerous books and articles on Victorian literature, science fiction, film, new media, and gaming. Eric Detweiler is Associate Professor at the Department of English at Middle Tennessee State University, USA, where he teaches courses on video games, podcasting, rhetoric, and writing. He runs the Rhetoricity podcast, and his book Responsible Teaching is forthcoming from Pennsylvania State University Press. Mitchell Gunn is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto, Canada, specializing in forms of interactivity in contemporary literature and digital media. He is particularly interested in the evolving role of video games both in literary studies and in the broader lives of contemporary students and cultural citizens. James K. Harris (Ph.D. 2017, The Ohio State University, USA) is Assistant Professor of English at Bronx Community College, part of the City University of New York, USA. His research explores the intersection between game studies and cultural theory. He is also working on a book project about Black Young Adult Literature. His work appears in the edited collection Future Humans in Fiction and Film and The Journal of Popular Culture. ­ atsuya Izumi received his Ph.D. in English from the University at Albany, USA. He is currently K the Head of the Japanese section in Language and Culture Studies at Trinity College, USA, after teaching Japanese and Japanese literature and film at Colgate University, USA, as a Visiting Assistant Professor from 2016 to 2018. He has published essays on Japanese American literature and nineteenth-century American literature. Gabi Kirilloff is Assistant Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, USA, where she specializes in digital humanities. She teaches classes including Women’s Writing, Writing Games, and Introduction to Digital Humanities. Her work on gender and action has been published in the Journal of Cultural Analytics and Digital Scholarship in the Humanities.

Notes on Contributors Nicole Lobdell is Assistant Professor of English at DePauw University, USA, specializing in British literature, the Gothic, and science fiction. She has taught courses on labor fiction, digital narrative, and video game narratives. Cody Mejeur is Assistant Professor of Game Studies at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, USA. They have published on games pedagogy, visualization, and gendered narratives in games. They are director of Amatryx Gaming Lab + Studio, a community storytelling and games lab, and work with the LGBTQ+ Video Game Archive, One Shot: A Journal of Critical Games & Play, and the Digital Games Research Association. Chloe Anna Milligan is Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the Writing and Digital Media program at Pennsylvania State University, Berks, USA, where she specializes in embodied rhetorics, game studies, and media archaeology. Her work has been published in a number of journals including Hyperrhiz, Computers and Composition, and ROMchip. She is currently working on her first book, Novel Media: Post-digital Literature Beyond the Book, for Cambridge University Press’ Elements in Digital Fictions series. Regina Marie Mills is Assistant Professor of Latinx and Multi-Ethnic Literature in the Department of English at Texas A&M University, USA, and previously taught English at Agua Fria High School in Avondale, Arizona, USA. Her research interests include Latinx and African Diaspora literature, game studies, and human rights and literary studies. Her work has appeared in Latino Studies, The Black Scholar, Chiricú Journal, Latinx Talk, and Black Perspectives. John Misak is Assistant Professor of English and director of Technical Communication at New York Institute of Technology, USA. His research focuses on technology’s impact in literature courses. He has designed a mobile game for teaching Hamlet and worked as a video games journalist for over ten years. Natalie Neill (Ph.D., English, York, Canada; M.A., Film Studies, Carleton, Canada) is Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, in the Department of English at York University, Canada, where she specializes in undergraduate teaching and learning (especially the first-year experience) and nineteenth-century literature. Her pedagogical interests include transition pedagogy and philosophies of collaborative learning. Marsha Penner is a behavioral neuroscientist who specializes in the neurobiology of learning and memory. In her work as an educator, she explores the use of fictional narratives and escape room puzzles to teach scientific reasoning skills in undergraduate and middle school student populations. Tison Pugh is Pegasus Professor of English at the University of Central Florida, USA. He wrote his dissertation on play and game in medieval literature; his recent monograph in Game Studies is titled Chaucer’s Losers, Nintendo’s Children, and Other Forays in Queer Ludonarratology. Lynn Ramey is Professor of French and Faculty Director of the Center for Digital Humanities at Vanderbilt University, USA. Her lab creates immersive environments using a video game engine to allow users to play through moments of cultural interacting in the medieval Mediterranean. Michelle Robinson is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, USA, and an aspiring enigmatologist. She is the author of Places for Dead Bodies: Blackness, Labor, and the Corpus of American Detective Fiction. Don Rodrigues is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Memphis, USA. His research focuses on early modern literature and culture, digital humanities, queer theory, and philosophical approaches to understanding literature. Rodrigues has held fellowships at the Folger Institute, the

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Notes on Contributors Vanderbilt Center for Digital Humanities, the metaLAB at Harvard University, and Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change. He is currently finishing his first book, Shakespeare’s Queer Analytics. Catherine Ryu is Associate Professor and Director of the Japanese Studies Program at Michigan State University, USA. Her teaching and research interests include classical Japanese literature, translation studies, graphic narratives, and game studies. She is the original inventor of “Language Study System and Method Employing Multifaceted Block Device Representation System” (U.S. Patent #9,208,695). Anastasia Salter is Director of Graduate Programs and Associate Professor of English for the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Central Florida, USA. They have authored seven books, including most recently Twining: Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narratives (with Stuart Moulthrop) and Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy (with Mel Stanfill). Jillian Sayre is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University-Camden, USA, where she teaches American literature and literary theory. Her recent and forthcoming publications include essays in Early American Literature, Networked Humanities, and Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. Her book Mourning the Nation to Come was published by LSU Press in 2020. Evan Torner (Ph.D., UMass Amherst, USA) is Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of Cincinnati, USA, where he also serves as undergraduate director of German Studies and the director of the UC Game Lab. He is co-founder and an editor of the journal Analog Game Studies. Roger Travis is Associate Professor at the Departments of Literature, Cultures, and Languages and Digital Media and Design at the University of Connecticut, USA. His principal research concerns the analogy between Homeric epic and digital games, and the ramifications of that analogy for modern digital culture and education. ­ en Whaley is Associate Professor of Japanese at the School of Languages, Linguistics, Literatures B and Cultures at the University of Calgary, Canada. His research engages discourses of ethno-racial identity and national trauma in Japanese video games. His published work on the subject can be found in The Journal of Asian Studies and Games and Culture.

235

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

This Selected Bibliography compiles major works on games, literature, and pedagogy as cited in this volume and as relevant to these overlapping fields. See each chapter for articles, reviews, and additional sources specific to the intervention in ludic and literary pedagogy that it addresses. Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Johns Hopkins UP, 1997. Alexander, Jonathan. “Gaming, Student Literacies, and the Composition Classroom: Some Possibilities for Transformation.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 61, no. 1, 2009, pp. 35–63. Anable, Aubrey. Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect. U of Minnesota P, 2018. Anthropy, Anna. Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Dropouts, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form. Seven Stories P, 2012. Anthropy, Anna, and Naomi Clark. A Game Design Vocabulary. Addison-Wesley, 2014. Azuma, Hiroki. Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals. Translated by Jonathan E. Abel, and Shion Kono. U of Minnesota P, 2009. Beavis, Catherine, Joanne O’Mara, and Lisa McNeice, editors. Digital Games: Literacy in Action. Wakefield, 2012. Blumberg, Fran C., editor. Learning by Playing: Video Gaming in Education. Oxford UP, 2014. Bogost, Ian. How to Do Things with Videogames. U of Minnesota P, 2011. Bogost, Ian. How to Talk about Videogames. U of Minnesota P, 2015. Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games. MIT P, 2007. Bogost, Ian. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism. MIT P, 2006. Bogost, Ian. “Video Games Are Better Without Stories.” The Atlantic, Apr. 25, 2017. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT P, 1999. ­Boluk, Stephanie, and Patrick LeMieux. Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames. U of Minnesota P, 2017. Booth, Paul. Board Games as Media. Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Brown, Harry J. Videogames and Education. Routledge, 2015. Bruss, Elizabeth W. “The Game of Literature and Some Literary Games.” New Literary History, vol. 9, no. 1, 1977, pp. 153–72. Caillois, Roger. Man, Play, and Games. Translated by Meyer Barash, Thames and Hudson, 1962. Carnes, Mark C. Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Transform College. Harvard UP, 2014. Cartmell, Deborah, and Imelda Whelehan. Teaching Adaptations. Palgrave, 2014. Consalvo, Mia. Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames. MIT P, 2007. Cote, Amanda C. Gaming Sexism: Gender and Identity in the Era of Casual Video Games. NYU P, 2020. Dial-Driver, Emily, Sally L. A. Emmons, and Jim Ford, editors. Fantasy Media in the Classroom: Essays on Teaching with Film, Television, Literature, Graphic Novels, and Video Games. McFarland, 2012. Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Simon, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susana Pajares Tosca. Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction. 4th edition, Routledge, 2020. Ensslin, Astrid. The Language of Gaming. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Selected Bibliography Ensslin, Astrid. Literary Gaming. MIT P, 2014. Eskelinen, Markku. Cybertext Poetics: The Critical Landscape of New Media Literary Theory. Continuum, 2012. Farber, Matthew. Game-Based Learning in Action: How an Expert Affinity Group Teaches with Games. Peter Lang, 2018. Flanagan, Mary. Critical Play: Radical Game Design. MIT P, 2013. Flanagan, Mary, and Helen Nissenbaum. Values at Play in Digital Games. MIT P, 2014. Galloway, Alexander R. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. U of Minnesota P, 2006. Gee, James Paul. Unified Discourse Analysis: Language, Reality, Virtual Worlds and Video Games. Routledge, 2014. Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Gray, Kishonna L. Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming. LSU P, 2020. Gray, Kishonna L. Race, Gender, and Deviance in Xbox Live. Routledge, 2014. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Routledge & K. Paul, 1949. Hutchinson, Peter. Games Authors Play. Methuen, 1983. Isbister, Katherine. How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design. MIT P, 2016. Jones, Steven E. The Meaning of Video Games: Gaming and Textual Strategies. Routledge, 2008. Juul, Jesper. Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. MIT P, 2005. Keen, Suzanne. Narrative Form. 1st edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Kocurek, Carly A. Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade. U of Minnesota P, 2015. Kopas, Merritt. Videogames for Humans. In Star Books, 2015. Lanham, Richard. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. U of Chicago P, 1993. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. MIT P, 2002. Mukherjee, Souvik. Video Games and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books. Palgrave, 2015. Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Free Press, 1997. ­Parker, Felan. “Roger Ebert and the Games-as-Art Debate.” Cinema Journal, vol. 57, no. 3, 2018, pp. 77–100. Patterson, Christopher B. Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games. NYU P, 2020. Payne, Matthew Thomas, and Nina B. Huntemann, editors. How To Play Video Games. NYU P, 2019. Pugh, Tison. Chaucer’s Losers, Nintendo’s Children, and Other Forays in Queer Ludonarratology. U of Nebraska P, 2019. Ruberg, Bo. The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games. Duke UP, 2020. Ruberg, Bo. Video Games Have Always Been Queer. NYU P, 2019. Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. MIT P, 2004. Salen Tekinbas, Katie, editor. The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning. MIT P, 2007. Salter, Anastasia. What Is Your Quest? From Adventure Games to Interactive Books. U of Iowa P, 2014. Shaw, Adrienne. Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture. U of Minnesota P, 2014. Sicart, Miguel. Play Matters. MIT P, 2014. Squire, Kurt, and Henry Jenkins. Video Games and Learning: Teaching and Participatory Culture in the Digital Age. Teachers College P, 2011.

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Selected Bibliography Suits, Bernard. The Grasshopper. 3rd edition, Broadview, 2014. Taylor, T. L. Play between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture. MIT P, 2006. Upton, Brian. The Aesthetic of Play. MIT P, 2015. Wardrip-Fruin, Noah. How Pac-Man Eats. MIT P, 2020. Wark, McKenzie. Gamer Theory. Harvard UP, 2009. Welsh, Timothy J. Mixed Realism: Videogames and the Violence of Fiction. U of Minnesota P, 2016. Whaley, Ben. “Virtual Earthquakes and Real-World Survival in Japan’s Disaster Report Video Game.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 78, no. 1, 2019, pp. 95–114. Wolf, Mark J. P. Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation. Routledge, 2012. Wolf, Mark J. P., and Bernard Perron, editors. The Video Game Theory Reader. Routledge, 2003. Wolfe, Joanna, and Laura Wilder. Digging into Literature: Strategies for Reading, Analysis, and Writing. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2015. Zagal, José P., and Sebastian Deterding, editors. Role-Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations. Routledge, 2018. Zagal, José P., and Amy Bruckman. “Novices, Gamers, and Scholars: Exploring the Challenges of Teaching about Games.” Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research, vol. 8, no. 2, Dec. 2008, http://gamestudies.org/0802/articles/zagal_bruckman.

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SELECTED LUDOGRAPHY

This Selected Ludography compiles games that contributors have found particularly appropriate for their classrooms. Anthropy, Anna. Dys4ia. 2012, https://freegames.org/dys4ia/. Anthropy, Anna. queers in love at the end of the world. 2013, https://w.itch.io/end-of-the-world. Barlow, Sam. Her Story: A Video Game about a Woman Talking to the Police. Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, 2015, http://www.herstorygame.com/. Barr, Pippin. Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment. 2011, http://www.pippinbarr.com/games/ letsplayancientgreekpunishment/LetsPlayAncientGreekPunishment.html. Blow, Jonathan. Braid. Number None, 2008. Brice, Mattie. Mainichi. Windows, OS X, 2012, http://www.mattiebrice.com/mainichi/. Cardboard Computer. Kentucky Route Zero. PS4, macOS, Windows, Xbox One, 2013. Chang, Alvin. College Scholarship Tycoon. browser, 2017, https://www.vox.com/policy-andpolitics/2017/11/1/16526202/college-scholarship-tycoon-game. Dallas, Ian. What Remains of Edith Finch. PS4, Switch, Xbox One, iOS, Windows, Giant Sparrow, 2017. Esposito, Ben. Donut County. macOS, Windows, PS4, Switch, Xbox One, Android, Annapurna Interactive, 2020, https://www.annapurnainteractive.com. Fox, Toby. Undertale. Windows, OS X, Linux, PS 4, PS Vita, Switch, GameMaker Studio, 2015. Gone Home: A Story Exploration Video Game. Linux, Microsoft Windows, OS X, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, iOS, Fullbright, 2013, https://gonehome.com/. Gualeni, Stefano. Something Something Soup Something. Windows, macOS, Linux, browser, 2017, https://soup.gua-le-ni.com/. Guerilla Games. Horizon Zero Dawn. PS4, Windows, 2017. Holowka, Alec, and Scott Benson. Night in the Woods. Windows, macOS, Linux, PS4, Xbox One, Switch, iOS, Infinite Fall, 2017. Indian Land Tenure Foundation, and Michigan State University Games for Entertainment and Learning Lab. When Rivers Were Trails. Windows, macOS, 2019, https://indianlandtenure. itch.io/when-rivers-were-trails. inkle. Heaven’s Vault. Windows, PS4, Switch, 2019, https://www.inklestudios.com/heavensvault/. Lambe, Ichiro, and Ziba Scott. Elegy for a Dead World. Windows, Linux, Dejobaan Games, 2014. Lantz, Frank, and Bennett Foddy. Universal Paperclips. browser, 2017, https://decisionproblem. com/paperclips/. LaPensée, Elizabeth. Invaders, 2015. browser, android, iOS, 2015, http://survivance.org/invaders/. Life Is Strange. Android, iOS, Linux, Windows, OS X, PS3, PS4, Xbox, Switch, Dontnod Entertainment, 2015. Maz, Alice. Average Maria Individual. 2014. McHenry, Tom. Horse Master: The Game of Horse Mastery. browser, 2013, https://tommchenry. itch.io/horse-master. Mike Bithell Games. Quarantine Circular. Windows, Switch, 2018. Moss, Olly, and Sean Vanaman. Firewatch. Windows, macOS, Linux, PS4, Xbox One, Switch, Campo Santo, 2016.

Selected Ludography ­Never Alone (Kisima Inŋitchuŋa). Linux, Windows, OS X, PS 3, PS 4, Wii U, Xbox One, iOS, Android, E-Line Media, 2014, http://neveralonegame.com/. Pixel, Momo. Hair Nah. browser, 2018, https://www.momopixel.com/hair-nah. Pope, Lucas. Papers, Please: A Dystopian Document Thriller. Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, PS Vita, 3909 LLC, 2013, https://papersplea.se/. Quinn, Zoe, and Patrick Lindsey. Depression Quest: An Interactive (Non)Fiction about Living with Depression. browser, The Quinnspiracy, 2013, http://www.depressionquest.com/. Secret of Monkey Island. Amiga, Atari ST, CDTV, FM Towns, Classic Mac OS, MS-DOS, Sega CD, iOS, Windows, OS X, PS 3, XBox 360, Lucasfilms, 1990, https://www.gog.com/game/ the_secret_of_monkey_island_special_edition. Suehiro, Hidetaka. The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories. Windows, PS4, Xbox, Switch, White Owls Inc, 2018. Team Salvato. Doki Doki Literature Club! Windows, macOS, and Linux, 2017, https:// teamsalvato.itch.io/ddlc. Thorson, Matt, and Noel Berry. Celeste. Matt Makes Games, 2018, http://celestegame.com/. Townsend, Michael. A Dark Room. browser, android, iOS, Switch, Doublespeak Games, 2013, https://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/. Walden, a Game. Windows, OS X, PS 4, USC games, 2017, https://www.waldengame.com. Watson, John. The Banner Saga. Stoic Studio, 2014, https://bannersaga.com/. Wreden, Davey, and William Pugh. The Stanley Parable. Windows, macOS, Linux, Galactic Cafe, 2011. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Stanley_Parable&oldid=1071279608.

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INDEX

AAA titles 95, 98 n.1, 229 Aarseth, Espen J. 3–4, 83–4, 87, 124 Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The (Twain) 5 Ahmed, Sara 31 Anable, Aubrey 124 analytical goals 76 Ancestry & Culture: An Alternative to Race in 5e (Marshall) 32 Animal Crossing 124 “Anthropological Video Games” (Morais) 117 Anthropy, Anna 220 Arden: The World of Shakespeare (Castranova) 199 Assassin’s Creed III (Hutchinson) 9, 144, 147–50, 152, 153 n.1, 157–62 Axelzon, Frederik 181 Azuma, Hiroki 93 Back, Jon 178 Baldwin, Sandy 104 Bantock, Nick 126 barcade 95, 98 n.2 Barlow, Sam 86–7 Bartle, Richard 74 Beardsley, Monroe 74 Beaujour, Michel 71, 73 Beerbohm, Max 6 behavioral neuroscience 209, 213, 215–16 Beneath Floes (Snow) 41 Bernstein, Charles 74–5, 78 Best, Stephen 74 Bioshock 3–4, 51 Board Games as Media (Booth) 182 Bogost, Ian 3–4, 6, 43, 81–3, 111, 116, 118, 122, 124, 147, 230 Bolter, Jay David 64, 66 Boluk, Stephanie 82 Booth, Paul 182 Braun, Erin Kendall 214 Browning, Robert 64, 66, 68–9 Bruss, Elizabeth W. 2, 72 Burke, Kenneth 88–9 n.2 Caballero, Vander 32 Caillois, Roger 72, 211 Capcom 91, 165 Carey, Peter 178

Carnes, Mark C. 179 Carson, Anne 126 Celeste (Thorson) 20–2 Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung 126 Chess, Shira 229–30 ­Chew, Sing 114 Cheyfitz, Eric 152 “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (Browning) 64, 66, 68–9 Choose-Your-Own Adventure (CYOA) Creation and Analysis 27, 30–1, 35–7 Civilization V 112, 114–15 Clutton, Mark 135, 141 Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Diamond) 114 Condis, Megan 103 conflict (external/internal) 138 Conquests of Camelot: The Search for the Grail (Marx) 15, 18 Conrad, Joseph 166, 172–3 Consalvo, Carmine 7 Consalvo, Mia 169, 173 n.1, 229 Cook, Michael 85, 89 n.4 Corron, Amy 229 Critical Let’s Plays 105–9, 109 n.1 critical making 218 Cultural Insights 134, 138–9 Damsel in Distress (Sarkeesian) 219, 222 Davis, Janet 224 Davis, J. C. 112–13 defamiliarization 125 Deleuze, Gilles 82 Deloria, Philip J. 159–60 Depression Quest (Quinn and Lindsey) 102, 220–2, 224 Derrida, Jacques 71 Diamond, Jared 114 Dictee (Cha) 126 digital humanities 230–3 Disaster Report (Irem) 94 Dolmage, Jay 28 Donaldson, Rob 178 Dr. Mario (Harada) 92 Dungeons and Dragons (Gygax and Arneson) 31–2, 204 Dys4ia (Anthropy) 83, 220

Index educational games 210 edu-larp 178–80, 182–3 Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Simon 136–7, 139 electronic literature 104, 123, 125–6, 232 Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) 125 Ensslin, Astrid 124–6 Entertainment Software Association 2, 217 escape rooms 209–11, 214–16 Eskelinen, Markku 84–5 Esmail, Sam 40 Essay on the Principle of Population (Malthus) 113–14 Everett, Anna 161 Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (The Chinese Room) 86 experiential goals 76 Facebook 43 Faerie Queene (Spenser) 65–6, 68–9 Fastaval 180–1 Fellowship of the Ring (Jackson) 66–7 Felski, Rita 77 feminist pedagogy 217–19, 221, 223 ­first-year-composition (FYC) course 49–50, 53–4 Fish, Stanley 71 foreshadowing 46 Francis, Tom 85 Fredeen, Amy 139 Fredersen, Joh 180–1 Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Lovelock) 115 Galloway, Alexander R. 82, 88 game creation 58, 122, 217–24 GamerGate 102–3, 105, 107, 217, 220 Gamer Trouble (Phillips) 230 game streams 101–9 gamification 5–7, 210 “Gamification Is Bullshit” (Bogost) 6 gamified pedagogical approach 187–91, 193–5 Gaming at the Edge (Shaw) 229 Gardenour Walter, Brenda S. 168 Gee, James Paul 95–7, 105, 199 gender 169–71, 217–19, 222–4 Ghost of Tsushima (Sucker Punch) 93 Gitelman, Lisa 123 Golumbia, David 6 Gone Home 29, 33 n.5, 44, 127 Grand Theft Auto V (Benzies and Sarwar) 217 Griffin and Sabine (Bantock) 126 Growing Up (Westerling) 181 Grusin, Richard 64, 66 Guattari, Félix 82 Gu, Casey 128 Guins, Raiford 210

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Hair Nah! (Pixel) 32 Hakunin Isshu 195 n.5 Halberstam, Jack 31 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 50–1, 53–6, 60–1 Hammer, Jessica 179–80 Harviainen, J. Tuomas 177, 182 Hayles, N. Katherine 86, 104, 125 Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 166–7, 169, 173 Heaven’s Vault (Ingold) 29, 85–6 Her (Jonze) 40 Her Story (Barlow) 8, 29, 40, 45, 85–8 Homo Ludens (Huizinga) 137, 195 n.1 Hope, Ishmael Angaluuk 134–5, 139 hostility 229 Huizinga, Johan 72, 137, 195 n.1 Hurst, Rachel Alpha Johnston 218, 221 Hutchinson, Rachael 169–70 hypermedia fiction 40–3 hypertext fiction 40–3 Hythloday, Raphael 113 immediacy 172 impostor 230–2 “Inevitability of Epic Fail, The” (Slota and Young) 203 information games 85–6, 89 n.4 insight 213 ­interactive games 212, 217 interactivity 3, 92, 94, 124, 133, 138–9, 160–3 Isbister, Katherine 160–2 Jackson, Peter 64–6, 69 Jacobson, Roman 125 Jagoda, Patrick 83 Japanese video games 92–4, 165 Johnson, B. S. 126 Jonze, Spike 40 Journey, The (Axelzon) 181 kai awase (shell matching) 195 n.4 Kanienkeha:ka (Mohawk language) 144 Kaplan, Nancy 232 karuta 195 n.2 Kentucky Route Zero (Cardboard Computer) 20–1 Kirschenbaum, Matthew 230 Knowles, Sebastian 71 Kojima, Hideo 92 Kostock, Conor 178 Kraus, Kari 123 “Kunuuksaayuka” (Cleveland) 133–4, 136, 139–40 Laiola, Sarah 218 Landay, Lori 138 Lang, Fritz 180–1 Lang, James M. 133 Lanham, Richard 151

Index Larp (Montola) 178–9, 183 Last of Us, The (Minkoff) 49, 51–5, 60 League of Legends (Riot Games) 108 LeMieux, Patrick 82 Leonard, David 161 Lissauer, Gabrielle 1 literariness 27–8, 30, 125–6 literary romance 67–9 Littleloud 116 locked-room mystery 209, 211 Lorde, Audre 106 Lord of the Rings, The (Tolkien) 63–6 Lothian, Alexis 233 Lovelock, James 115–16 Lowood, Henry 210 McCloud, Scott 137 McDonald’s Videogame, The 43 McGann, Jerome 86 McGonigal, Jane 6, 211 McLuhan, Marshall 92, 123, 183 McNeill, Lynne S. 31–2 Malthus, Thomas 113–14 Mandela Effect 214 Marcus, Sharon 74 Marshall, Eugene 32 Marx, Christy 15 Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs) 64 Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) 63–4, 69 Mastermind (Meirowitz) 212 ­Meier, Sid 112, 114–15 Melville, Herman 166 Metal Gear Solid (Kojima) 92 Metal Gear Solid 4 (Konami) 96 Metroid II: Return of Samus (Kano) 18 Metroidvania games 18–20 Metropolis (Lang) 180–3 Miller, Rand 127 Miller, Robyn 127 “Mission Assist” 205–6 Mistacco, Vicki 71 Moby-Dick (Melville) 166–7, 169 “Moment of Truth, The” 191–2, 194, 195 n.10 Montola, Markus 178 morae 185, 188–90 Morais, Betsy 117 More, Thomas 113–15 Morrison, Toni 162–3 Moulthrop, Stuart 232 Mr. Robot (Esmail) 40 Mukherjee, Souvik 4, 138 multimodality 40, 44–6 Murray, Janet H. 3, 98, 230 Mushroom Kingdom 97–8 Myst (Miller and Miller) 127

Nash Equilibrium 177 Naughty Dog 51, 55, 60 Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna) 9, 22, 133–41 Night in the Woods (Holowka and Benson) 20–1 non-playing characters (NPCs) 67 Nox (Carson) 126 Ogura Hyakunin Isshu (Ogura One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each) 186–8, 191, 194, 195, 196 n.10 Ōkami (Kamiya) 91, 93 OneShot (Velasquez and Gu) 128 Onimusha (Inafune) 165 online teaching 69–70 open-world games 156, 158 Operation KTEMA 199–206 Outer Wilds (Mobius Digital) 86 Page, Ruth E. 102 Paper Knowledge (Gitelman) 123 Papers, Please (Pope) 21, 117, 128 Papo & Yo (Caballero) 32 Patihis, Lawrence 214 pattern recognition 187–8, 195 n.7 Paul, Christopher 229 Pedersen, Bjarke 182 performance goals 75 Persuasive Games (Bogost) 118 Peterson, Andrew 178 PewDiePie 103–5 Phillips, Amanda 230, 233 Picard, Martin 165 Piper, Andrew 123 Pixel, Momo 32 ­play, definition of 212–13 Playing Indian (Deloria) 159 Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Morrison) 162–3 Poetics of Imperialism, The (Cheyfitz) 152 Pokémon games 101 Pong (Atari) 2 Pope, Lucas 128 Porpentine 128 procedural bibliography 122, 126–9 procedural rhetoric 42–6, 118, 122, 124, 128, 221 P.T. (Kojima) 95 pwning 63, 69–70 Quinn, Zoë 102–3, 107, 220–1 race 32, 157–8, 161–3 Raley, Rita 81 Reinhard, Andrew 135 Remediation: Understanding New Media (Bolter and Grusin) 64, 66–7 Resident Evil (Mikami and Fujiwara) 172

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Index Return of the Obra Dinn (Pope) 86 reverse-engineering 50–5, 58 Ricoeur, Paul 152 romance literature 63–4, 68 Romeo & Juliet Larp (Pedersen and Stark) 182–3 Rosenblatt, Louise M. 73 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Stoppard) 50 Rosenstrasse (Hammer and Turkington) 180, 183 Rothstein, Bret 211 Rouse, Rebecca 229 Ruberg, Bo 45, 84, 231 Sacks, Oliver 215 Salen, Katie 138–9 Sarkeesian, Anita 217, 219–20, 224 Schlovsky, Victor 125 Schoolcraft, Jane Johnston 9, 143–4, 146, 151–2 Secret of Monkey Island (Gilbert) 21 Shadow Warrior (Maddin, Norwood and Kowalewski) 165 Shakespeare, William 50, 52, 54–5, 60–1, 182–3, 199 Shape of Difficulty, The: A Fan Letter to Unruly Objects (Rothstein) 211 Shaw, Adrienne 229 Shrewsbury, Carolyn 218 Silent Hill series 165–73 Silent Hill 1 (Toyama) 167–8, 170, 172 Silent Hill 2 (Ōwaku) 167–72 Silent Hill 3 (Ōwaku) 167–71, 173 SimEarth (Wright and Haslam) 114–16 simulation games 111 Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning (Lang) 133 Smith, Jonas Heide 136–7, 139 Snow, Kevin 41 social goals 76 Soul Calibur (Yotoriyama) 169–70 Spenser, Edmund 65, 68–9 Spivak, Gayatri 152 Sploder 97 Squire, Kurt 141 ­Staaby, Tobias 44 Stark, Lizzie 182 STEM 8, 49–54, 56, 58 n.1, 217, 227, 229 streaming. See game streams Sugawa-Shimada, Akiko 91

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Suikoden III (Konami) 165 Suits, Bernard 72–3 Super Mario Bros. (Miyamoto and Yokoi) 18, 93, 97, 171 Sweatshop (Littleloud) 111, 116–18 tanka (short poem) 185–94, 195 n.6 technovania approach 18–19 Tolkien, J. R. R. 63–7, 69, 178 Tosca, Susana Pajares 136–7, 139 “To the Miscodeed” (Schoolcraft) 143 “To the Pine Tree” (Schoolcraft) 143–4 translation 143–7, 150–2 Treasure Trap (Carey, Donaldson and Kostock) 178 Trial of Galileo (Petterson, Carnes and Purnell) 179 Tribunal, The (Harviainen) 177–8, 182–3 triviality barrier (McNeill) 31–3 Turkington, Moyra 179–80 Twain, Mark 5–6 Twine 10, 23, 30, 35, 42, 55–7, 58 n.2, 128, 217, 221–4 Ultimate Werewolf (Alspach) 212 Understanding Comics (McCloud) 137 Undertale (Fox) 21, 23 Unfortunates, The (Johnson) 126 Unit Operations (Bogost) 147 utagaruta 186–7, 195 n.2 Utopia (More) 113–15 Van Dine, S. S. 211 Vanek, Aaron 178 Velasquez, Eliza 128 Walking Dead, The (Telltale Games) 44 Watkins, S. Craig 161 Westerling, Anna 181 When Rivers Were Trails (LaPensée) 29 White, Lynn Jr. 115–16 Wilder, Laura 22 Wimsatt, W. K. 74 Wolfe, Joanna 22 workplay (Consalvo) 7 World Ends with You, The (Nomura) 94 Wright, Will 114–15 Zimmerman, Eric 81, 86, 138–9, 230 Zuleika Dobson (Beerbohm) 6

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