Ivanhoe Panel Discussion

Ivanhoe: A Game of Interpretation
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 Ivanhoe Game is one of a number of projects of the Speculative Computing Lab (Spec Lab) founded by the co-creators of the Ivanhoe Game, Jerome McGann and Johanna Drucker. An essay by Drucker and McGann introducing the project will be made available before the panel so as to introduce the presentations. The five presentations that compose the panel will start with a history of the implementations of the game and move to reflections on the place of games in humanities computing research. The panelists are all involved in the design, development or testing of Ivanhoe. A handout will be circulated which will include links to the associated web sites for the SpecLab and Ivanhoe for those who wish to see transcripts of played games, specifications of the system, and research materials developed for the project.

Presentation 1: Implementing Ivanhoe: Modelling a (defined) Discourse Field
Andrea Laue will review past, present, and proposed implementations of the Ivanhoe Game. First played as a simple email exchange, the Ivanhoe Game and the data structures supporting it will eventually mimic and expand current methods of scholarly argument and interchange. Three stages of development will be covered. First she will introduce Ivanhoe as email exchange, briefly recalling the initial, (technically) simple implementation. A more robust version of the game, which used Blogger to manage and preserve the moves will also be discussed. Second is the XML/XSLT prototype of the Ivanhoe system. This automatic annotation engine allows on-the-fly document generation and modification. Several decisions and some compromises preceded the development of this prototype, illustrating the complex negotiations between the philosophical positions underlying our project and the technology available for actually building it. Looking ahead to the third implementation, we plan to prototype two key aspects of the game: an abstract game-play diagram and a data structure that more accurately represents the complex interplay of roles and moves, of scholars and arguments. To our annotation engine, we will add Topic Maps to represent the complex and emerging discourse field as well as the collaborative environment that constructs it. Here we will model a game as a process of (re) constructing a structured semantic network.

Presentation 2: A Wrinkle in Play: Building the Ivanhoe Game for Classroom Flexibility
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.

Presentation 3: The Ivanhoe Development Process: Managing Complexity and Communication
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.

Presentation 4: Patterns and Models: Some Applications of Game Theory to Digital Game Design
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.

Presentation 5: Is Gaming Serious Research in the Humanities?
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. At the same time there is a tradition that proposes that what we do in the humanities is a form of play. Gadamer, for example, focuses on the playful dimension of the dialogue of the humanities as 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 and 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.

Presentation 6: Game Economies: A Bibliography
David Patch and Bethany Nowviskie are presently conducting and reflecting on a literature survey concerning game economies, which they define as those in-game systems (often closed systems) in which transactions of units (whether points, money, fuel, or some other virtual commodity) are an integral part of the games structure or ruleset and serve to shape player experience. This ongoing research, along with the resource Patch is compiling as part of an independent study project under the auspices of SpecLab, will be presented.

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