A
Wrinkle in Play:
Adapting the Ivanhoe Game for Middle School
by Chandler Sansing
The premise of the game -- and of our critical ideas in general -- is that works of imagination contain within themselves, as it were, multiple versions of themselves: not just many meanings, but many (often divergent and even contradictory) lines of possibility and development that appear to us (perhaps) only in latent or relatively undeveloped forms (for various reasons). The game is to expose and develop those lines.
McGann and Drucker, "The Ivanhoe Game"
The object of the Ivanhoe Game lies in the discovery and development of "latent or relatively undeveloped" versions of imaginative works, which for better or for worse I will call stories. Such a game must appeal to middle school teachers if for no other reason than a philosophical one: as educators, we take turns each day trying to discover and develop the latent or underdeveloped talents of our pupils. That is to say, we strive to help our students find multiple versions of themselves so that they can succeed at Language Arts, at Math, at Science, at Social Studies, and, of course, in the hallways between classes -- though they seem to need less help there.
In a series of experiments I've undertaken with my students at Henley Middle School in Crozet, Virginia, I am exploring the extent to which viewing school as a game -- with a rule set, with scores to keep and moves to make -- can be useful for teachers and students. The idea of playing a game is much more relaxing for students than the idea of going to school, and the idea of making a 4th quarter comeback down by two is much more romantic -- if I may -- than the idea of needing two points to pass a class. A version of Peter Suber's "game of amendment," Nomic, in which each move of the game constitutes a modification to the game's rules, has proved useful to my students as a model for classroom behavior. Students self-legislate by invoking norms and standards ("rules") they have themselves created and amended as a way of making classroom etiquette personal, understandable, important, and fun.
Similarly, playing the Ivanhoe Game sounds bit more exotic -- a bit more fun -- to my students than "studying literature" or "practicing writing." My experiments with Ivanhoe and Nomic suggest that introducing ludic or game-like qualities in the English classroom increases student motivation and learning.
Under the direction of Jerome McGann and Johanna Drucker, the Ivanhoe Game working group of the University of Virginia's Speculative Computing Lab is developing a text- and web-based computer game for literary play and analysis. Some of us might be reminded of Infocom's Zork or Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books by this enterprise, though our students will not. The Ivanhoe Game differs from the old pop-culture classics in that its model is proactive instead of responsive. In Zork, you read the text and make a move; in the Ivanhoe Game, you write the text and that is the move.
The purpose of the Ivanhoe Game (in terms best suited to my eleven-year-old players) is to explore books from as many angles as possible in order to find new stories within them.
Thus, in the Ivanhoe Game, players try to approach the text not as passive readers or recipients, but as actors more deeply involved with the book as an object or as a story. Players therefore assume the roles of different characters that are somehow involved with the chosen book. That is to say, players can play the game as any of the characters, authors, readers, publishers, editors, or even scholars involved in or with a particular text.
To make a move in The Ivanhoe Game, you write it. That is, you assume the voice of the character you choose to play and write down what it is you imagine your character doing, thinking, writing, or being. It is accepted by players of the game that this move is now part of the story--whether as an addition to the narrative of the imaginative work studied or a reflection on its publication or reception history. You can make a move by writing what happens before the story begins, or by writing what happens after the story ends, or by writing about something that happens during the story out of sight of its readers, or completely outside the scope of the book. Therefore, you can add to the story by writing a new passage or chapter about characters or actions that the original author did not include in the book, or you can add to the work's historical context by playing outside its covers. Thus you define and analyze the story by writing your move, and every player move can be expected to exhibit critical thinking and strategy. Players shape a shared experience of the text by adjusting their strategies in the face of other players' moves. The Ivanhoe Game is therefore an exercise in thoughtful improvisation with the aim of illuminating the latent possibilities of any narrative.
In college literature courses, this exploration of narrative and critical theory is -- in and of itself -- an appropriate and attainable instructional and theoretical objective. However, at the middle school level, this goal is problematic for two reasons.
First, middle school students have neither the critical background necessary to appreciate the game in its theoretical and historical contexts nor the need or desire to be given such context. Indeed, while most middle schools have literary curricula to cover, theory is seldom more than reader response at work without the teachers' or students' knowledge of the term or their practice of it. (Of course there are exceptions to this rule, and both teachers and students are the richer for it when such environments develop.)
Second, the abstract thinking skills students need to confront or even recognize a literary theory are, in McGann's terms, latent. While playing the Ivanhoe Game might help teachers and students develop an articulate and complex approach to literature, students will most likely not view such an approach as a theory, and therefore not think of themselves as its practitioners in the sense the Ivanhoe Game is meant to encourage. "Theory," in the middle school classroom, is still a vocabulary word.
None of this is to say that the Ivanhoe Game has no place in a middle school. To the contrary, I've found the game invaluable and its model versatile enough to aid me in accomplishing instructional objectives appropriate and necessary to middle school students. These students are just beginning to learn and employ the vocabulary and skills upon which much of literary theory is based. I'm talking about a vocabulary here that includes words like "character" and "setting" which help out when we get to symbolism; I'm talking about words like "conflict" and "climax" which we use as ciphers for subtexts like class struggles; I'm talking about skills like author study and WebQuests through which we get at the biographical and historical contexts of works that help inform them.
The Ivanhoe Game can be adapted to teach to a wide range of instructional objectives at the middle school level. These objectives include my favorite: "Students will have fun learning."
Let me tell you a bit about how we play the game in my classroom, and then I'll offer serious proof of fun.
We introduced ourselves to the game through Direct Instruction. I told the students about the game: about its origins, its purpose, and about how it is played. I explained that we would use a recent class text, Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, as our "game board" and that we'd be making moves within it using our "tokens" or characters. Then we picked our tokens.
To do so, and to prevent all students from choosing Meg, Calvin, or Charles Wallace, we brainstormed a list of characters on the blackboard that included all the major figures in the book -- good and bad guys -- as well as several minor characters such as the Boy Bouncing the Ball on Camazotz and the Happy Medium. Students also volunteered characters--or rather groups of characters--who were represented in the book by one or two major or minor figures. Thus our list included Urielians, 2-Dimensional People, Camazotzians, Stars, Other Fighters for the Light, and even Tentacled Beasts.
Then, we discussed how our moves would be made. We undertook 6 moves: Exposition, Conflict, Climax, Denouement, Conclusion, and Reflection. I chose to limit the number of moves a university-level Ivanhoe Game encourages and constrain their narrative content to reinforce a recent lesson on plot structure. I added a sixth move, Reflection, to allow students a formal opportunity to comment on the game in their own voices. (This sixth move is formalized in the Ivanhoe Game as the "player file." Player files seemed too unwieldy and regimented for the experimental version of the game I wished my students to play.) I provided short prompts for each move that can be found on the attached schedule of moves.
Finally, I asked students to begin referring to one another's characters and moves in their own stories after a first, expository move. Students were invited either to appropriate their team-mates' characters for use in their own plots, or to reference the plots of others.
This leads us to matters of methodology. My students sit in arranged workshop groups for writing and reading workshops. Therefore, when we began play, we had six groups already formed, and thus six games of 3 or 4 players each. I chose to play with a group of 3 both to learn about the game from the inside out -- which seems to me to be in the spirit of the game -- and also to model appropriate gamesmanship for the problem students in my group. By participating in one group's game, I also made sure that my group acted as a model for the rest of the class. Therefore, I called attention to the fact that my group members took notes on one another's moves and began referencing one another's moves during the second move.
We played in 30 minute rounds, split into 20 minutes of writing time and 10 minutes of "sharing time." There were six rounds -- one per class for six consecutive days after one day of introduction to the game -- played from the 8th to the 16th of October.
Because the software which will facilitate the Ivanhoe Game is still in development and we do not have the resources to play on a weblog in the manner of the UVA beta tests, we played our version of the game on pieces of notebook paper. We took our moves simultaneously in rounds rather than turns, writing for twenty minutes per move, and immediately thereafter shared our moves. During the sharing we found out how each of us built on the group's previous moves, and this allowed us to assess our position in other players' moves and to react accordingly in our own next contributions if we desired to do so. We were also free simply to use other players' characters as if they were our own after their players introduced them in Move 1. In a 6th Grade Classroom it would be pedagogically deadly, I believe, to have one student per group make his move before another while the rest of the group waited for every player's move to be made in any given round or turn. That would mean with 20 minutes of writing and perhaps 5 of sharing. Hence we would take 75-100 minutes per move, per group, rather than the 30 minutes we used.
Students' attention spans would not last the 75-100 minutes required by turn-based playing--one student would have the floor writing and reading for half an hour while the others played mute witness. If the non-writing students were given a task to do to fill the interim before their turn to move, such a task would most likely supplant any interest in the game, as well as disrupt the game's senses of continuity and urgency. This also seems true if the players performed their moves in turn as a rotating homework assignment. Simultaneous play, however, allows students to engage at once with the game in a direct, participatory manner, and to split the sharing time between them--there is much less to pay attention to for much less time, and interaction seems more immediate and rich.
My students' attention seemed to hold well throughout every move of our 30 minute per-round game.
After our last move (#6. Reflection), we held a fishbowl discussion. In a fishbowl discussion, one student per workshop groups sits at a table surrounded by the other students' desks. The initial representatives begin discussing the matter at hand. When a student in the circle wants to make a point, he or she taps out his or her representative and takes a spot at the table. Students who take seats from others are asked to articulate not only their own points, but also the last point of whomever they replace. The fishbowl discussion format is taught in many American schools and used with success at J.T. Henley.
I asked students to begin the fishbowl discussion by sharing something from their own Reflection responses. They did so, and the subsequent arguments and points made by all students reflected the attitudes toward the game recorded in their written responses.
My students especially enjoyed the fishbowl format after playing the Ivanhoe Game. Both the motion involved and the patience they were forced to display amused them. Their comments were substantive and to-the-point.
After approximately 40 minutes of discussion on 5-8 topics I called a halt to the proceedings to move on with necessary class business. My students, however, were lined up to take seats at the table and to continue.
[Sample student responses and moves will be printed here after parental permission is granted. Link to PDF archive of moves, but also reproduce some representative Move #6 student reflections in line here.]
Obviously, though perhaps not every student would not say the game met his or her strict definition of "fun," it created enthusiastic responses in them, both during play and after reflection. I am incredibly encouraged by their engaged behavior during the game and by the pieces of writing they produced as a result. I believe the game model encouraged sophisticated, imaginative, and reflective responses to A Wrinkle in Time. Perhaps the best news of all for the creators of the Ivanhoe Game lies in my students' common perception that it opened up for them latent "lines of possibility" and "undeveloped forms" in what they earlier saw as a static story.
In the interest of allowing my students to take a much-deserved bow, let me close with the following:
"Playing the Ivanhoe Game contributed to my knowledge of A Wrinkle in Time very much. It made me realize how complex and interesting the book really is. I understood how Madeline L'Engle could have gone off on every different scene and character, and make the book even more complex."
--6th Grader