The Ivanhoe Game

Ivanhoe: A Game of Interpretation

Geoffrey
Rockwell

McMaster University and University of Virginia
grockwel@mcmaster.edu

Johanna
Drucker

University of Virginia, Media Studies
jrd8e@virginia.edu

Bethany
Nowviskie

University of Virginia, SpecLab
bethany@virginia.edu

Andrea
Laue

University of Virginia, SpecLab
akl3s@virginia.edu

Jerome
McGann

University of Virginia, English
jjm2f@virginia.edu

Chandler
Sansing

Henley Middle School, Virginia
csansing@albemarle.org

Nathan
Piazza

University of Virginia, ITC Group
piazza@virginia.edu

2002

University of Tübingen

Tübingen

ALLC/ACH 2002

editor

Harald
Fuchs

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

Ivanhoe: A Game of Interpretation
Jerome McGann
Johanna Drucker

To date, the digital technology used by humanities scholars has
focused almost exclusively on methods of sorting, accessing, and
disseminating large bodies of materials. In this respect the work
has not engaged the central questions and concerns of the
disciplines. It is largely seen as technical and pre-critical, the
occupation of librarians, and archivists, and editors. The general
field of humanities education and scholarship will not take up the
use of digital technology in any significant way until one can
clearly demonstrate that these tools have important contributions to
make to the exploration and explanation of aesthetic works.
The Ivanhoe Game has been developed to begin such a demonstration.
Its purpose is to use digital tools and space to reflect critically
on received aesthetic works (like novels) and on the processes of
critical reflection that one brings to such works. Digital tools
bring great advantages to these kinds of reflective goals. First of
all, because digital environments increase one’s resources for
morphing and transforming aesthetic works, they are apt for
exploiting the inherently transformational character of such works.
Second, the tools also foster acts of reflection by diversified
persons and groups, and their storage mechanisms greatly augment the
scale and number of interactive dynamic relations. Third, the
environment encourages a (so to speak) theatrical deployment of
these operations. Ivanhoe Game players will intervene and engage
with aesthetic works in performative ways, and -- equally important
-- they will act in spaces that put their critical and reflective
operations on clear display. If the game is thus, most immediately,
a game of critical reflection/aesthetic interpretation, it is
ultimately a game for studying and reflecting on those acts of
critical reflection themselves. Finally, that its critical
reflection is executed in game form is crucial. Humanities
scholarship without gameplay, even when the scholarship explicitly
devotes itself to self-reflection, inevitably fails to engage with
essential features of the works it means to study, including the
workings of the mind engaged with such works.
The co-creators of the Ivanhoe Game, Jerome McGann and Johanna
Drucker, will make an introductory essay on the project available to
the audience before the conference.

Is Gaming Serious Research in the Humanities?
Geoffrey Rockwell

Games are used to teach the humanities not for research. We are not
even comfortable studying games seriously, let alone proposing that
games could be a form of research. It is only recently that computer
games have become the subject of serious humanities inquiry. [1] Espen Aarseth in his editorial "Computer Game
Studies, Year 1", which introduces the newly launched journal
Game Studies, writes that "2001 can
be seen as the Year One of Computer Game Studies as an emerging,
viable, international, academic field." <> At the same time there is a tradition that
proposes that what we do in the humanities is a form of play, even
if it is serious play. In theorists like Huizinga, Bakhtin, and
Gadamer play is presented as a component of humanities
practice.[2] See the section "Play as the clue to
ontological explanation" in Truth and
Method, page 101 and following. The playful
dimension of the dialogue of the humanities is that which
distinguishes our (hermeneutical) methods from those in the social
and natural sciences. If we want to resist becoming a (human)
science we need to reassert the playfulness of representation and
interpretation. That means acknowledging the place of games and game
theory in our practice.
In this component of the panel Geoffrey Rockwell will make the case
for building games and playing them as a way of modeling and then
reflecting on our activities that is in the spirit of the
humanities. Geoffrey Rockwell was invited to sit in on the design of
the Game and will provide a concluding presentation that reflects on
the witnessed process of developing Ivanhoe as itself a recognizable
form of research that combines the play of the symposium with the
implementation demands of digital practice.

References

M.
M.
Bakhtin

The Dialogic Imagination; Four Essays by M. M.
Bakhtin
University of Texas Press Slavic Series

Trans.

Caryl
Emerson

Michael
Holquist

No. 1
Austin
University of Texas Press
1981

M.
M.
Bakhtin

Speech Genres and Other Late Essays
University of Texas Slavic Series

Trans.

Vern
W.
McGee

No. 8
Austin, Texas
University of Texas Press
1986

Hans-Georg
Gadamer

Truth and Method
2nd Edition

Trans.

Joel
Weinsheimer

Donald
G.
Marshall

New York
Continuum
1996

Johan
Huizinga

Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in
Culture

Boston
Beacon Press
1950

A Wrinkle in Play: Building the Ivanhoe Game for Classroom Flexibility
Chandler Sansing

Secondary school teacher Chandler Sansing will discuss tests of the
Ivanhoe Game in several classroom contexts and will show
student-generated game material. Five major classroom case studies
and several in-house beta tests have been undertaken, using (among
others) the texts of Scott's Ivanhoe,
Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Shelley's
Frankenstein, L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, CS Lewis's Narnia books and
Henry James's The Turn of the Screw as
discourse fields. These practical exercises, conducted without the
use of a highly-articulated software framework for organizing player
moves and enforcing rule systems, are helping to reveal latent
assumptions in the game model and shape its implementation. Sansing
will argue that the strengths of successful instructional
technologies lie in their flexibility -- that teachers need
open-ended software they can adapt to their evolving content areas
and specialized methodologies. Proposals for a user-configurable
Ivanhoe Game rule and scoring system which builds this flexibility
into the software model are presently under consideration.

The Ivanhoe Development Process: Managing Complexity and Communication
Nathan Piazza

The developers of the Ivanhoe Game are, most of us, veterans of other
development projects affiliated with the University of Virginia's
Media Studies Program or Institute for Advanced Technologies in the
Humanities. By now we are well-versed in the difficulties of
navigating the waters of digital humanities development efforts.
However, Ivanhoe presents a unique challenge in the sense that it is
not chiefly a collections initiative, nor is it a straightforward
software development project. Instead, it will be a medium for doing
pedagogical and critical work in ways that, frankly, have rarely
been done before. As a result, it has been crucial for the
participants in the Ivanhoe group to develop satisfying methods of
working together, methods that insure that every voice is heard
while still sustaining the momentum of the project. Successful
communication of complex ideas between humanists and technicians has
been, and will continue to be, essential to the project's success,
because the form and structure of the application itself is the project. As a result, we have
down-streamed the issue of user experience, answering questions of
interface and interactivity even before the development of the data
models. This has allowed us to identify issues that might make our
technical infrastructure too inflexible to meet the rigorous goals
we have set for game play quality. We have used a process that is
informal, and iterative, taking inspiration from the idea that
software is built more after the fashion of a novel than a
skyscraper. It evolves over time through a process of constant
revision, and no set of blueprints will survive the construction
phase without alteration. Nathan Piazza will discuss the way of
working that has allowed us to continue to sustain ourselves with
the creative verve and critical insights from which the project
vision first evolved, even as we fit that vision into an
appropriately constraining technical framework.

Implementing Ivanhoe: Modelling a Discourse Field
Andrea Laue

I will review past, present and proposed implementations of the
Ivanhoe Game, focusing on the construction and representation of the
discourse field [1] Our working definition of
discourse field is: "the historical set of artifacts that
includes and describes a text; the expanded bibliographic
universe that invests a cultural artifact.". Particular
issues discussed include the modeling and visualization of the game
text, the association of roles and players, and the display and
typing of links [2] Our working definition of game
text is: "the (virtual) artifact that is generated by a
particular instance of the game.".
Played using email, Blogger or pen and ink, early instances of the
Ivanhoe Game couldn't produce an adequate game text. In addition,
these implementations didn't offer the option of anonymous roles. In
the prototype, we used XML, XSLT and JSP's to build a game text with
a corresponding visualization. The prototype also made possible the
separation of players and roles, prompting a debate about the
relationship between the two and the related game text. In our
forthcoming beta, we will build a more robust game text and
correspondingly more sophisticated visualizations. I will discuss
topic maps and their potential for modeling discourse fields and
generating game texts in the beta [3] For an
introduction to topic maps, see Steve Pepper, "The TAO of Topic
Maps," XML Europe 2000.. Although most often used to
structure metadata that describes existing corpora, topic maps also
present tremendous potential for generating dynamic documents and
visualizations, separating roles and players, and typing links and
moves in a manner that might someday be useful for rules and points
engines [4] For other interesting applications of
topic maps, see James David Mason, "Ferrets and Topic Maps:
Knowledge Engineering for an Analytical Engine," XML Europe
2001, and Jack Park, "Bringing Knowledge Technologies to the
Classroom", Knowledge Technologies 2001..

Patterns and Models: Some Applications of Game Theory to Digital Game
Design
Bethany Nowviskie

Until recently, game and educational software makers have worked
intuitively, virtually ignoring established ontologies and fields of
enquiry in engineering, design, and the humanities. However,
pressures in the industry are creating a new impetus toward
establishing a common vocabulary which critics, theorists, and
developers can employ to analyze games. As an introduction to the
use of models and pattern languages in digital game development,
Bethany Nowviskie will describe a branch of game theory called
mechanism design, with particular attention to models employing
Denettian or irrational agents as players in non-zero sum games and
games of incomplete information. Economic game theory, as an
interdisciplinary approach to analyzing human behavior and the
interaction of agents in closed systems, offers digital game
designers a rich vocabulary with which to express and interrogate
game models. Mechanism design employs the same vocabulary in
developing algorithms for games -- like Ivanhoe -- involving
multiple self-interested agents, each with private objectives and
preferred outcomes. Nowviskie will discuss the evolution and testing
of game models in Ivanhoe and suggest that, by taking an intentional
stance toward the computer as player, designers could appropriate
and adapt formal, game-theoretic patterns to aid in digital game
creation and analysis.

References

C.
Alexander

Notes on the Synthesis of Form

Harvard UP
1964

C.
Alexander

S.
Ishikawa

M.
Silverstein

A Pattern Language

Oxford University Press
1977

D.
Church

Formal Abstract Design Tools

Game Developer Magazine

3
28

July 1999

C.
Crawford

The Art of Computer Game Design

McGraw-Hill
1984

D.
Dennett

The Intentional Stance

Bradford Books
1987

B.
Kreimeier

Content Patterns in Game Design

Proceedings of the GDC 2002

2002

D.
Nguyen

S.
Wong

Design Patterns for Games

SIGCSE 2002

2002

A.
Rollings

D.
Morris

Game Architecture and Design.

The Coriolis Group
2000

D.
Ross

Dennett's Conceptual Reform

Behavior and Philosophy

22
1

1994