Spring 2007: v1 n1

In this paper, I extend theoretical understandings of the gaming activity and literary form called the “quest” and its relationship to issues of interpretation, focusing primarily on game theory with concrete examples as well as some broadly applicable pedagogical uses of these ideas in literature classrooms. The argument contributes to a recent theoretical and practical discussion of “quests” by scholars of games studies such as Aarseth 2004, Juul 2005, Tosca 2003, and Tronstad 2001. I build upon and revise these theorists’ understandings by approaching a “quest” as a goal-oriented activity in which players undertake a journey in search of meaning. By demonstrating similarities between the literary traditions in which quests are central and the practice of digital game design, I argue that quests can be better understood theoretically and more productively used in the classroom if meaning and action are regarded as complementary design principles instead of conflicting impulses. A revised understanding of quests can help to mediate between games and narratives by showing strategies by which game designers have created meaningful action, often in ways that are either unconsciously similar to or inspired by the literary traditions of mythology, epic, and romance. Specifically, game designers can use level design to create labyrinthine spaces that encode thematic implications, in the tradition of literary allegory. If these symbolic spaces are coordinated with significant obstacles and challenges, the apparent conflict between meaning and action can be resolved through engaging gameplay that allows players to enact a range of thematic ideas, contributing to the ongoing replay value of a digital game. I also suggest ways in which this understanding of quests can allow literature teachers to plan assignments where students transform literary narratives into interpretative quests taking the form of digital games. As a paradigmatic example, I describe one such assignment, in which my students adapted episodes from Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 into design documents and prototypes, and I suggest some theoretical implications of its results for other instructors. By adapting works of literature into quests, students learn to discover and create meaning through the active exertion of cognitive and imaginative effort rather than absorbing it passively.

Lincoln/Net (http://lincoln.lib.niu.edu), a product of the Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project at Northern Illinois University Libraries, represents a new type of historically oriented digital library resource. Like many other digital libraries, it contains a large amount of searchable primary source materials. Like a number of other historically oriented online resources, project staff have organized Lincoln/Net around a specific topic, in this case Abraham Lincoln’s life and times in antebellum Illinois. In addition to Lincoln’s own papers, the project’s databases contain resources shedding light on his context, including letters, diaries, and publications prepared by his peers. Unlike most historically oriented digital libraries however, the project Web site also includes a wealth of multimedia materials, including image, sound, video, and interactive map resources. But Lincoln/Net is perhaps most unique in that it furnishes its users with an extensive set of interpretive materials. This approach suggests that historians may play an expanding role in the development of digital libraries. It can also provide them with a badly-needed means of communicating with an audience beyond their own scholarly community and students. This communication can facilitate what one digital history pioneer has described as the “democratization of history,” as defined by an expanded user group enjoying primary source materials and using them to engage in historical thinking .

For over a thousand years, Tibet has preserved and translated ancient Buddhist Sutras from India, keeping the tradition of Buddhist philosophy and meditation alive long after it died out in India by the 12th Century. Recent efforts to digitize materials from this textual tradition offer opportunities to broaden the circulation of rare materials to the exiled Tibetan scholarly community, but also suggest conceptual challenges arising from the complexity of the texts and their inherently multimodal character. This paper describes the scholarly and meditative traditions from which these texts come, and discusses possible approaches to their digitization.

Recent efforts to reconceptualize text analysis with computers in order to broaden the appeal of humanities computing have invoked the example of the Oulipo. Although there are similarities between the activities of the Oulipo and the new approach to computer-assisted literary analysis, the development of tools for the express purpose of encouraging scholars to play with texts does not follow the model of Oulipian research into potentialities. For the Oulipo, potential text analysis is less a question of interpreting literature than of supplying algorithms for the good use one can make of reading. Producing exemplary interpretations with algorithms is a secondary consideration. Oulipian constraints are better understood as toys with no intended purpose rather than as tools we use with some objective in mind. The procedures for making sense of texts provide for their own interpretation: they are not only instruments for discovering meaning but also reflections on making meaning.