{"id":1495,"date":"2011-06-02T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-06-02T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=1495"},"modified":"2011-06-01T14:41:19","modified_gmt":"2011-06-01T18:41:19","slug":"play-as-hermeneutic-a-forgery-game-for-history-students","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=1495","title":{"rendered":"Play as Hermeneutic: A Forgery Game for History Students"},"content":{"rendered":"

At last year\u2019s THATcamp at the Center for History and New Media I helped facilitate\u00a0 a mini-game jam<\/a>. In an hour the 20 or so people that participated came up with 4-5 kinda cool ideas for humanities games. Each of the groups promised to post something about their game concept. As the session leader (read:me) failed to post I have no one to blame but myself.<\/p>\n

With that said, I\u2019ve been thinking about the game concept my group developed and I thought I would share it. If I remember right Bethany Nowviskie<\/a> and Doug Knox<\/a> were in my group, anyone else who was involved feel free to pipe up in the comments and I can add your name here. Further, if I am getting any of this wrong I would encourage anyone who was there to correct me.<\/p>\n

Play as hermeneutic<\/h2>\n

Each of the game jam groups took very different approaches to games. We were particularly interested in the idea of\u00a0 using games as hermeneutic tactics to interpret texts, objects and evidence. The idea behind this came from Ivanhoe, a game which Bethany had been involved in creating.<\/p>\n

The central idea behind Ivanhoe is that students take turns making \u201cinterpretive moves.\u201d Now, as we are frequently talking about games as video games on this blog, it is worth noting that this game, and the game we developed is really more like a parlor game, or something like pictionary. Just as you can learn a lot about a person from how they play those kinds of parlor games you can learn a lot about a text by creating a game as a tactic to further your understanding of it.<\/p>\n

Ivanhoe the Game<\/h2>\n

Ivanhoe<\/a>, was developed at UVA by Johanna Drucker, Jerome McGann, Bethany Nowviskie and others. I will quote at length from Jason Jones<\/a> description of how he uses Ivanhoe to teach. \u00a0If you are already familiar with the game just skip ahead.<\/p>\n

Students, working in groups of 3-5 (obviously no magic about those numbers), choose a text, and then take turns making a series of interpretative moves. \u00a0To make those moves, the students must take on a different identity, and the range of identities is quite large. \u00a0Maybe it\u2019s a character in the text. \u00a0Maybe it\u2019s an unseen editor, rewriting the text. \u00a0Maybe it\u2019s a figure from real life. \u00a0(For example, if Hard Times were your text, maybe one person would be a factory owner, another a Chartist, etc.) \u00a0Maybe \u00a0you play the role of an actual critic who has published on this topic. \u00a0(\u201cHi, I\u2019m Richard Altick, and I think . . . .\u201d)<\/p>\n

Once students have chosen their roles, the only constraint is that it needs to be clear that moves respond in some way to earlier moves\u2013that is, one\u2019s understanding of the text in question should evolve over the course of the game.<\/p>\n

The way students set up the game is that they sign up for a free blog somewhere, and set up the permissions such that all members of the group can edit it. \u00a0(I usually ask to be set up as an editor, too.) \u00a0Students can make the blog readable only by themselves, by classmates, or by everyone. \u00a0Normally if they use a critic or other still living person, I ask them to make the blog private, to prevent self-googling issues.<\/p>\n

Students make a pre-determined number of moves\u2013say 4\u2013over the course of a week, and then they collaboratively write a one-page paper about what they learned about the text from playing the game. \u00a0I also usually designate someone to serve as the coordinator, and encourage that person to keep track of how smoothly the process worked. \u00a0Finally, they usually make a brief presentation of their game to the rest of the class.<\/p>\n

Ivanhoe is a kind of role playing game thats’ intent is both to act as a teaching tool, to prompt students to think about texts differently, but also as a hermeneutic tactic which can provide new insight and ways of understanding a text.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Taking Ivanhoe as a model we wanted to translate some of the ideas behind the game into the context of history.<\/p>\n

Evidence and Loss<\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/a>Our group decided to focus our game on helping players understand the nature of historical\u00a0 evidence, and deal with loss and the limits of history.\u00a0 The audience for this game is upper level undergraduate students or grad students in a history research methods course.<\/p>\n

The goal is twofold.\u00a0 First, to get students to grapple with the nature of historical interpretation.\u00a0 Second, to prompt them to think about developing research questions that are\u00a0 possible to answer.<\/p>\n

Speak for Themselves\/Forging History: Our Proposed Barely Game<\/h2>\n
    \n
  1. Start with a burning research question:<\/strong> It is a research seminar, so everyone should be trying to think of this sort of thing. Each student proposes a historical question they want to answer. Everything from what caused the civil war, to was Lincoln a racist, to how has the mini-mogue changed the history of music.<\/li>\n
  2. Imagine the smoking gun of evidence: <\/strong>The next step is to think about what the most amazing piece of evidence to answer that question would be. Each student dreams up the smoking gun and jots it down. It might well be a letter where Lincoln confides in a friend, a transcript from a hearing which includes some key piece of expert testimony, a diary entry, a photograph, the DNA test from a hair follicle of the accused.<\/li>\n
  3. Forge it: <\/strong>They then forge a bit of that document or object and bring it to class. Making a convincing forgery is not really the goal. The goal is just to get the key components that you think are relevant to your analysis.<\/li>\n
  4. A different student interprets the forged document :<\/strong> At this point they pass their forgeries to a different student who then interprets it. The goal here is to have the student who receives the forgery to suggest what questions they could answer with it and to note what potential ambiguities would still need to be tracked down and explored.<\/li>\n
  5. Reveal the forgers intent: <\/strong>The forger then explains what question they thought the document would allow them to answer and the group discusses how successful they were at identifying the features of their object which would be required to answer their question. If you want to assign a winner it would be the person whose intended question was the closest to the other players interpretation of their object.<\/li>\n
  6. Going from there: <\/strong>Now even if you win, that thing does not exist. This becomes a chance for a writing prompt. Can you answer this question without this evidence? Where do you look when this doesn’t exist? Do you need to change the question to reflect the kinds of things that you know of?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Alternate Rule:<\/strong>
    \n4.a One could also do this as something akin to     Eat Poop U Cat<\/a>, where people continue to translate the translation of the document\u2019s historical question back into a document and back from document to question. I am not sure this would serve any particularly useful goal, but I would imagine that the game of telephone in here would be a good time.<\/p>\n

    Where does this get us?<\/h2>\n

    Our group left the conversation about this quite excited. I am sure there are all kinds of folks who would be quick to say “That’s not a game.” There is a ton of excitement about games, and that generally means video games, but I think the broader idea of play, of parlour games<\/a>, of barley games<\/a> is actually a rich way for us to think about creating things like this that help us to hone our thinking.<\/p>\n

    So, what do you think of this game activity? Further, what do you think about the bigger idea of creating games as hermenutic devices?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    At last year\u2019s THATcamp at the Center for History and New Media I helped facilitate\u00a0 a mini-game jam. In an hour the 20 or so people that participated came up with 4-5 kinda cool ideas for humanities games. Each of the groups promised to post something about their game concept.Continue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":1496,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[15],"tags":[140,37,138,139,88],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["entry","author-owens","post-1495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-articles","tag-evidence","tag-historical-thinking","tag-parlour-game","tag-primary-sources","tag-teaching"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/300px-Vinland_Map_HiRes.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1495","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1495"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1495\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4318,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1495\/revisions\/4318"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1495"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=1495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}