Teaching Games and Game Studies in the Literature Classroom

Pugh, Tison, and Lynn Ramey. "INTRODUCTION: LUDOLOGY, NARRATOLOGY, AND TEACHING LITERARY GAMES." Teaching Games and Game Studies in the Literature Classroom. Ed. Tison Pugh and Lynn Ramey. London,: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. 1–12. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 3 Oct. 2022. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350269743.ch-I>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 3 October 2022, 15:28 UTC. Access provided by: BC August 22 Authors Copyright © Tison Pugh and Lynn Ramey and contributors 2022. All rights reserved. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without prior permission in writing from the publishers. INTRODUCTION: LUDOLOGY, NARRATOLOGY, AND TEACHING LITERARY GAMES Tison Pugh and Lynn Ramey Literature is a game. This statement could be read metaphorically, as suggesting the recreational nature of the form and the playful engagements it elicits between authors and readers. Or, this statement could be read structurally, as suggesting that poetry, fiction, and other literary forms bear the requisite elements of a game, particularly in their rules, strategies, and players. Or this statement could be read pessimistically, in the assumption that literature’s ludic qualities would necessitate that it therefore involves the tedious win/loss binary so central to many games’ form and function. Or this statement could be read defensively, as part of the simmering debate between narratologists and ludologists, who view the shifting landscape of the humanities from different and at least potentially oppositional frameworks. Or this statement, despite the inherent tautology, could be read literally: literature is a game in all of its constituent parts and possibilities. Beyond a doubt, games and literature have long intertwined, with ludic themes circulating throughout the literary realm and literary history, including the riddles of the Sphinx in Oedipus Rex, the tale-telling game of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the narratological games of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler—even the beheading game of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Sports novels and nonfiction, such as Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, Don DeLillo’s End Zone, and Lauren Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit, merge the literary and the athletic. Virtually all detective fiction can be construed as a game, even from its beginnings in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” in which authors challenge readers to unravel the puzzles created for their pleasure and frustration. Various poetic forms—sonnets, villanelles, rondels—demand precise adherence to metrical rules, with poets constraining their lexical options to adhere to these arbitrary yet essential requirements. Analyzing the protocols of fantasy literature, which requires an imaginary landscape that must nonetheless be anchored by some sense of order, Gabrielle Lissauer states that the genre “must have rules. Not only that, but these rules must be consistent. There must be continuity. If there isn’t any, then the seams in the world are evident and the illusion of story is broken” (172). Given this long history of the literary and the ludic intersecting, it is not surprising that many recent novels, such as Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One and Neal Stephenson’s Reamde, are inspired by video games, and just as novels can be adapted into films or films can be reconceptualized as novels, so too do many popular video-game franchises offer novelizations of their storylines. Teaching Games and Game Studies Further along these lines, ludic and literary scholars have long pursued the intersection of literature and games. In his foundational study Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, Johan Huizinga devotes a chapter to play and poetry, describing the latter as a “social game” (124). The 1968 volume of Yale French Studies, with essays by Jacques Ehrmann, Michel Beaujour, A.J. Greimas, Michael Holquist, and Mikhail Bakhtin, remains of critical importance to scholars of literature and games. Studies of literary games could be largely subdivided into those focusing primarily on games (e.g., Jenny Adams’s Power Play: The Literature and Politics of Chess in the Late Middle Ages), those focusing primarily on authors (e.g., Kathleen Blake’s Play, Game, and Sport: The Literary Works of Lewis Carroll), and those focusing on ludic and literary strategies (e.g., Peter Hutchinson’s Games Authors Play), but such an approach would simply impose an overarching structure on a phenomenon predicated on rich interconnections. In her foundational study of games and literature, “The Game of Literature and Some Literary Games,” Elizabeth Bruss posits a universal ludic form present in virtually all aesthetic artifacts: “Every symbolic product, literary works included, presupposes a situation of exchange: there is no significance, no communication, without the minimal engagement of a sender and a receiver” (153). For Bruss, these exchanges create the ever-present potential of a ludic experience existing concurrently with a narrative one. Writing in the late 1970s, Bruss could hardly have envisioned that the ensuing decades would witness an explosion of games and the birth of game studies as a field of humanistic endeavor. While the release of Atari’s Pong in 1972 might not have caught the attention of literary critics, games as a cultural phenomenon became increasingly impossible to ignore over the subsequent decades. Middle-class children of the 1970s and 1980s grew up with rudimentary gaming consoles in their households, and subsequent decades witnessed the establishment of game studies as a serious scholarly field, with the International Board Game Studies Association (IBGSA) coalescing in 1990 and the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) emerging in 2003. By 2018, the Entertainment Software Association reported that video game sales reached $43.4 billion, thus attesting to its premier position within the world’s cultural economy. Simply put, games are here to stay, and they cannot help but influence our understanding of preceding cultural forms, including literature. Yet the intersection of cultural forms at times generates controversies, and the relationship between interactive storytelling and video games has long been complicated by a desire on the part of some to separate gameplay from narrative. Today most economically and critically successful video games at least nod toward a storyline, although this was not always the case. The earliest graphical arcade games like Pong incorporated one- or two-player competition and scoring but without an overt story line. The plotline of Space Invaders (1978) is fully encapsulated in its title, as is that of Asteroids (1979) and Missile Command (1980), and the play of these minimally narrative games was equally simple: shoot and destroy. Other early games engaged more directly with literary culture: Atari’s breakout game Adventure (1979) alluded to Beowulf in the name of one of its dragons—Grundle—and incorporated a storyline reminiscent of the Arthurian quest for the Holy Grail. Text-based games like Oregon Trail (1974), Zork 2 Introduction (1977), and Rogue (1980) employed absent or light graphics while allowing players to progress through a narrative with multiple outcomes. Video game production, both text and graphics based, moved along in time with technological developments, eventually privileging computationally heavy graphics over storylines as users and game developers stretched to make the most of the rapid improvements in video cards. Whereas many game studies scholars date the founding moment of their field to Chris Crawford’s The Art of Computer Game Design (1984), for literary and narrative scholars Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (1997) stands as the pivotal study, as it recognized the power of games and claimed their equal status with literature and movies. Furthermore, she saw the early text-based narrative games as new forms of writing and storytelling with enormous potential. The same year, Espen Aarseth published Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, a book that took seriously the field of video game studies and electronic literature. Both Murray and Aarseth advocated for the aesthetic and narrative potential of video games and cybertexts, with Murray recognizing the role of storytelling in games and Aarseth focusing on the essential differences between games and cybertexts. At a conference in 1998, then graduate student Jesper Juul weighed in, suggesting that the tension between gameplay and narrative in narrative-leaning video games produced something that was neither a good game nor a good story. Interactivity requires the user to be in the “now,” whereas narrative places the user in the “past.” A game could not be a narrative because they were “two phenomena that you basically cannot have at the same time” (Juul). Ian Bogost created a visual sendup of the dispute pitting ludologists versus narratologists (see Figure 0.1). This debate about the primacy of game play (ludology) over storytelling (narratology) continued throughout the late 1990s and into the twenty-first century. In 2005, Murray claimed to have the “last word” on the ludology versus narratology debate, suggesting that ludologists suffer from a Bloomian “anxiety of influence,” seeking recognition and separation for the field of game studies from the oppressive dominance of literary criticism (“Last Word”). The conflict appeared to wane, although documented and kept alive in such volumes as Matthew Kapell’s The Play Versus Story Divide in Game Studies: Critical Essays (2016), and it was unexpectedly revived when Ian Bogost’s 2017 The Atlantic essay “Video Games Are Better Without Stories” was met quickly with responses from video game journalists Patrick Klepek of Vice and Tom Battey from Gamasutra, not to mention Twitter tirades, including a notable one from Danielle Riendeau. Unlike the Murray-Aarseth dustup, when the conversation moved from academic debate to a public forum, very little support emerged for the exclusively ludologist camp. As scholars engaged in this engrossing version of the chicken/egg debate, game designers continued designing games of increasing technical and narrative sophistication, with an apparent turning point emerging with the release of the critically acclaimed series Bioshock (2007). Bioshock was not the first to tell a story with a first-person shooter format, but its ground-breaking graphics combined with an engaging story moved video games into an era of new acceptance. In a seemingly ideal configuration, it was generally recognized that games could tell engrossing stories and engrossing stories 3 Teaching Games and Game Studies Figure 0.1 Ian Bogost’s Playful Poster Depicts a Clash between Janet Murray, Representing Narratology, versus Espen Aarseth, Representing Ludology. Courtesy Ian Bogost could be played. Critically acclaimed narrative games proliferated: The Last of Us (2013), The Walking Dead (2012), and Gone Home (2013) figure among the better-known titles. Despite the ongoing tirades of some narratologists and ludologists about the primacy of one perspective over another, many scholars now recognize the importance of uniting critical perspectives from both disciplines. As Souvik Mukherjee states, “It is a common fallacy within the game-story debate to identify one of the entities as being subsumed by the other or being equated with the other” (93–4). On the contrary, ludonarratology as a critical field has emerged more distinctly from these discussions, as scholars recognize that the intersections of game and literature result in kaleidoscopic shifts to dominant cultural forms. As Tison Pugh explains, “Ludonarratology, in uniting narrative theory with gaming theory, recognizes the ways in which these forms are currently shifting in light of their increasing intersection, while also retrospectively enhancing our understanding of narrative and ludic forms of the past” (12), suggesting as well that 4 Introduction “To define ludonarratology, then, is not to establish a fixed set of parameters for all texts and for all games, but primarily to realize their mutual and fruitful overlap in the particular instances when they enlighten the gaming text, or textual game, at hand” (37). Ludonarratology stands as a key intervention in both literary and game studies, and, even if the issue is not fully resolved for game studies critics, the general public has enthusiastically embraced narrative games. Certainly, the students in our classrooms are often eager to discuss the narrative aspects of games: in our experience, if we ask a generalized question about narrative form, character, plot, or theme requiring students to generate examples from a wide range of cultural artifacts, their answers are as likely to come from video games as they are to come from literature, theater, poetry, television, and film. Given these conditions, this volume explores the benefits of introducing games and game studies into the literature classroom, as well as the gamification of the classroom inherent in this process. At its simplest, gamification can be defined as the incorporation of ludic elements into activities that one might otherwise prefer to avoid, with this practice increasingly encoded into myriad aspects of modern life. Long before its current heyday, Mark Twain satirically depicted gamification as the bailiwick of hucksters and fools in his The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In an iconic scene, Tom is tasked with whitewashing Aunt Polly’s fence, an onerous chore that he transmogrifies into “play” for his gullible peers. The first dupe protests weakly until Tom quells his argument with a bit of solipsistic philosophizing on the nature of work and play: Tom contemplated the boy a bit, and said: “What do you call work?” “Why ain’t that work?” Tom resumed his whitewashing, and answered carelessly: “Well, maybe it is, and maybe it aint. All I know, is, it suits Tom Sawyer.” (30; italics and punctuation in original) The line demarcating work from play, Tom suggests, is drawn by the individual, not by any inherent or preconceived qualities belonging to work or play. Tom convinces his chums to hand over a kite, twelve marbles, a tin soldier, a couple of tadpoles, and sundry other prized possessions in exchange for the “pleasure” of labor, with Twain concluding of his protagonist’s adventures in whitewashing: “If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do” (32). Obligation and choice, respectively, distinguish work from play, yet as Twain’s humorous scene exposes, gamification blurs their borders, dissolving any preconceptions of work’s drudgery and play’s frivolity. Gamification’s advocates would surely point out that muddying the differences between work and play achieves laudable objectives, and within Twain’s fictions, Aunt Polly would likely agree that someone had to paint her fence, with the results arguing for themselves. Proponents of gamification enthusiastically endorse the virtue of cloaking work under the guise of play, and recent volumes in the field promise that games will enhance 5 Teaching Games and Game Studies one’s success in various aspects of life, including such disparate endeavors as business, child-raising, and education (e.g., Kapp). Envisioning gamification’s limitless potential both to imbue life with pleasure and to resolve society’s most intractable problems, Jane McGonigal stirringly declares: “The great challenge for us today, and for the remainder of the century, is to integrate games more closely into our everyday lives, and to embrace them as a platform for collaborating on our most important planetary efforts” (354). For gamification’s devotees, anything is possible by incentivizing people as players through ludic structures: if we build enough games, kids will love learning, the perils of global warming will be resolved, world peace might just be attained. Others take issue with this utopic kernel assumed to inspire gamification, questioning the rush to exploit the inherent pleasure of games for a variety of non-ludic ends. Furthermore, it is worth considering the benefits of the work/play dichotomy as efforts increase to blur its boundaries. David Golumbia observes that many recent games appear divorced from any sense of play and instead align more closely with the realm of work from which they are purportedly distinct: “On careful examination, many of the programs we call video games today much more nearly resemble something like work, embodying what literary theorists and philosophers recognize as a means of enacting a Nietzschean lust for power and, in Derridean terms, a desire to constrain play—much the opposite of what their construal as games might be understood to indicate” (179; italics in original). In their frenzied dedication to achieve a game’s objectives, which are often arbitrary constructions designed to invoke closure with little sense of resolution, some players appear oblivious to the laboriousness of their efforts. As games are increasingly deployed to make work more appealing, a potential consequence will not be that work becomes more pleasureful but that games become less so. Ian Bogost excoriates the pretenses of this emergent ludic form in a blistering critique, bluntly titled “Gamification Is Bullshit”: “Gamification is marketing bullshit, invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is video games and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway.” More so, teachers long exhausted by the influence of popular culture on their students—some of whom expect more to be entertained than to be educated—now must contend with serving as the magister ludorum of the classroom as well. Surely such instructors can empathize resignedly with the Duke in Max Beerbohm’s classic satire Zuleika Dobson when, exasperated beyond measure, he admonishes an Oxford undergraduate: “The Socratic manner is not a game at which two can play. Please answer my question, to the best of your ability” (230). And for narratological purposes, it is worth remembering that Twain tells his story aligned with Tom Sawyer’s perspective, not that of his duped friends. As much as Tom’s gamification may have promised them pleasure, it was never delivered, and thus they have little story to tell of their day’s events. Whitewashing a fence becomes a story mostly from the perspective of the manipulator, less so from that of the manipulated. Offered as a panacea, gamification is little more than a strategy to enhance engagement, surely effective in some instances, ineffective in others. Players embrace games for their manifold pleasures, whereas people in various other circumstances—frequently children, students, and workers—are lured 6 Introduction into gamified experiences precisely because the gameless versions of these activities traditionally require work and dedicated attention with little immediate payoff—or perhaps because they are just simply boring. And, of course, a system predicated upon work and dedicated attention with little immediate payoff that many denigrate as “simply boring”—but with unparalleled long-term returns—aptly describes education. Lest we appear to be undermining the ambitions of this book, we must interject that we are not arguing against gamification in the literature classroom but advocating for its purposeful and meaningful deployment. Pursuing the laudable objective of enhancing educational outcomes, gamification’s proponents extol the potential of games to facilitate learning, passionately arguing for their inclusion in the pedagogical realm, and games are increasingly being introduced into the school curriculum, with the objective of helping students to assimilate and retain their lessons. Carmine Consalvo extols the concept of “workplay,” which “connotes the nature of not only the educational processes it describes but also the creative organizational culture that it promotes,” positing further that “work is being infused with new expectations and a new spirit. It is being elevated to a new status, one that is more akin to joy and worship than inconvenience and drudgery” (1). For instructors of literature, our classrooms are not places of inconvenience and drudgery but of aesthetic pleasure and delight. When used well, gamification can assist instructors in sharing such pleasure with a wide range of students. As with any pedagogical strategy, gamifying the literature classroom should be assessed objectively, with a steady eye to its benefits and liabilities. Of course, the purpose of this volume is to outline key strategies for its benefits, for gamification, when done well, can enhance students’ participation in the classroom and increase their enthusiasm for analytical and evaluative exercises. We do not offer gamification as a panacea for dull, listless classes, but we do offer it as an appropriate strategy, one among many others, for engaging our students with the literary realm. In the four units of this volume— “Theories of the Ludic and Literary Classroom,” “Video Games and Interactive Media in the Literature Classroom,” “Gaming Identity and Ideology in the Literature Classroom,” and “Gamifying the Literature Classroom”—our contributors discuss strategies that they have found effective in generating productive classroom activities that capture students’ interest in and enthusiasm for the nexus of literature and game. The first section, “Theories of the Ludic and Literary Classroom,” focuses on the conceptual frameworks employed by instructors who address the interplay between games and literature. In the opening chapter, “Developing and Teaching Games-Focused English Courses: A Technological and Curricular Walkthrough,” Eric Detweiler chronicles his experience implementing a general-education class, shepherding it through curricular committees and overcoming technological hurdles encountered in many classrooms. By relaying his experience, he helps other instructors plan for common issues that arise when proposing courses at institutions without an existing game studies program. Regina Marie Mills, too, deals with the introduction to literary studies classroom, this time from the student perspective as she details how her course engages a diverse student profile by teaching basic literary analysis through games, in the essay “Gaming Literature: Games as an Accessible Entry into the Study of Literature.” Student engagement, she shows, is 7 Teaching Games and Game Studies not guaranteed by developing a class that incorporates video games. The third chapter, “Levelling Up: Transferring the Analytical Gaze from Print Literature to Digital Literature and Digital Games in the Literature Classroom” features Nolan Bazinet’s experiment with integrating games as a means of understanding and differentiating between terms for literary and media analysis. Gaming theory and terminology can provide a new lens for interpreting other genres. John Misak, in “Reverse-Engineering Stories in the Literature Classroom: Linking Video Games and Traditional Narratives to Foster Critical Reading Skills,” picks up on this need to teach analytical skills, describing his experience with STEM students taking a required first-year composition course. Engaging students who are not traditionally in our humanities courses is one of the benefits of using games in the literature classroom. Moving to a much larger and entirely online audience affords and requires a different approach, as Don Rodrigues and Jay Clayton illustrate in “Pwning Tolkien’s Trilogy: Game Studies in a Massively Open Online Course (MOOC).” Their experiences offer practical insights on how to handle very large class sizes and asynchronous learning. Rounding out this unit, Mitchell Gunn argues in “How/Why We Read/Play: Conceptualizing Reader Goals in the Game of Literature” that literature shares much in common with games, illustrating how instructors can benefit from an approach that applies game studies techniques to literature rather than the more common practice of using literary analysis to understand games. The second unit, “Video Games and Interactive Media in the Literature Classroom,” is comprised of accounts of specific methods, texts, and games employed in a variety of contexts. Craig Carey explains, in “Ready Player Action: Teaching Close Reading and Critical Play in a Ludic Century,” how games like Her Story can help students grasp close reading techniques. The parallels between reading and play allow the fields of game studies and literature studies to mutually inform each other. In “Teaching Japanese Video Games: Practical Strategies for Analysis and Assessment,” Ben Whaley details the ways in which second language instruction can be enhanced by tapping into cultural cues in target-language video games. The availability of games from cultures around the world offers a new tool for classes that teach global understanding. Cody Mejeur offers methods to incorporate discussion and raise awareness in “Intervening in Game Cultures: Video Game Streams and/as Literature.” Video game streams are all too often a space where negative narratives around race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality proliferate, so instructors need to be aware of these issues when planning their classes. Raising awareness through games is also the focus of Harry Brown and Nicole Lobdell’s chapter, “Ethical Simulation Games in the Liberal Arts Classroom: Civilization V, SimEarth, and Sweatshop,” which uses carefully curated games to talk about such important topics as environmental stress, consumption, wealth inequality, and the notion of progress. The goals and win conditions for these society-building games can be considered alongside utopian literatures to allow students to uncover what the authors term “procedural ethics,” moving them toward a process for thinking out the incremental impact that decisions can make in a society. In “Procedural Bibliography: A Ludoliterary Pedagogy for Thinking Outside the Book,” Chloe Anna Milligan concludes this unit by suggesting that instructors should pair experimental literature with video games, 8 Introduction and thereby demonstrate to students the strong affinities these different media share. As students begin to see “bookish games” as an alternative type of reading, they move from understanding the “literariness” of games to creating their own digital, game-based literature. In the third unit, “Gaming Identity and Ideology in the Literature Classroom,” contributors consider the ways in which issues of personal identity are mediated through video games, as well as these games’ utility in pedagogical settings. Games allow students to play as themselves while simultaneously inhabiting alternative identities, thus allowing them to experience various possibilities and enactments of diversity. Natalie Neill, in “Teaching the Iñupiaq Video Game Never Alone and/as Literature,” demonstrates the benefits of theories of narrative adaptation through video games, using Never Alone, the adaptation of a Native Alaskan legend, as her example. Video games, oral traditions, and literature converge in Neill’s classroom, allowing students to consider their complex interrelationship as related to their own sense of play and self. Jillian Sayre, in “First Person in Translation: Gaming Perspectives on Indigenous Languages and Literature,” sets the video game Assassin’s Creed III in conversation with early-nineteenth-century poet Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s poetry, theorizing the ways in which they seek to defamiliarize their respective players and readers from the traditional perspectives of the Western world. Using theories of translation, Sayre argues for the ability of games and literature to communicate new possibilities of being through the practice of confronting the previously unknown. James K. Harris, taking another look at this game in “Playing in the Dark: Teaching Representation, Appropriation, and Identification with Assassin’s Creed III,” analyzes its presentation of race and identity, asking provocative questions about how its portrayals intersect with issues long germane to ethnic studies. Some games facilitate cultural exchanges, yet the attendant ethical issues of these games must be examined as well. In the final essay of this unit, “Constructing Subjectivities and Teaching Otherness through the Silent Hill Series,” Katsuya Izumi compares these video games to such literary classics as Moby-Dick and Heart of Darkness, examining the ways in which they foreground similar questions of identity and the Other, despite their differences in media. Many video games are based on an assumption of antagonism— that players must mindlessly kill their enemies stands as the central premise of so many titles—yet Izumi details the ways in which, in key moments of the Silent Hill games, the player must confront their very selves in these encounters. In this volume’s final unit, “Gamifying the Literature Classroom,” contributors discuss a variety of strategies for incorporating games, but not necessarily video games, into the literature classroom. Evan Torner, in “Film and Literature Instruction through Live-Action Role-Play,” advocates for students not merely reading film and literature but playing the scenarios that its characters confront—that is, to larp (live-action role-play) them. Looking at a variety of narratives and their larping adaptations, Torner details how larping encourages students to inhabit characters and negotiate the situations they face—an invaluable lesson in both empathy and critical thinking. Catherine Ryu details the ways in which poetry can be likened to a game, and thus how to engage students in the play of poetry, in her “How to Develop Gamified Pedagogical Strategies: A Case Study 9 Teaching Games and Game Studies of Classical Japanese Poetry in the Undergraduate Classroom.” As she writes, “Poetry is intrinsically a meaning-making game,” and her classroom activities exploit the ludic nature of poetry to assist students in building their understanding and interpretations of it. For over a decade, Roger Travis has structured his classes in classical historiography as a game, and he shares the successes achieved and obstacles overcome in “Designing and Implementing a Roleplaying-Game-Based Course in Advanced Classical Literature: Challenges, Benefits, and Iterations.” Roleplaying games immerse students in alternate realities, yet present a welter of challenges for instructors who must construct all aspects of these alternate realities. Escape rooms have exploded in popularity in recent years, and Michelle Robinson and Marsha Penner propose the utility of this ludic structure and of detective fiction for enhancing student instruction in their interdisciplinary intervention, “Games We Play on Paper: Understanding the Process of Discovery through Detective Fiction and Behavioral Neuroscience.” Collaborating from the fields of neuroscience and literary studies, Robinson and Penner explicate the similar deductive skills required of students of multiple disciplines. Gabi Kirilloff concludes this section with “Making Feminist Games in the Gender Studies and Literature Classroom,” detailing how students can create their own interactive media—either narrative games or ludic narratives—to address critical issues of gender, identity, and culture. With the open-source platform Twine, Kirilloff ’s students make games that thematize issues of deep personal interest that unite with textual interpretation, in a compelling example of the intersection of students’ creative and analytical skills. And finally, noted game studies scholar Anastasia Salter concludes this volume with an afterword, “Confessions of a Game Scholar in an English Department,” in which they explore the interdisciplinarity nature of games and game studies through their experiences in moving from a Digital Media Department to an English Department, and the resulting disciplinary questions such a transition generates. Questions such as what is game studies, what is literature, and how do their union in English departments reflect the shifting dynamics of both fields can never be fully circumscribed, but Salter’s personal experiences nonetheless chart an intriguing, if not fully determined, path forward. Although literature and game studies bear the potential for fruitful inquiry, it should be noted that this volume focuses on games and game studies, not on game theory. Game studies analyzes the cultural phenomenon of games in their various incarnations, particularly board games and video games, as well as the constituent elements of their play and creation, whereas game theory is a mathematically based discipline analyzing the processes by which individuals make strategic decisions, as famously illustrated in the paradox of the prisoner’s dilemma. This school of thought has been successfully applied to literature in such intriguing studies as Michael Suk-Young Chwe’s Jane Austen, Game Theorist and Steven Brams’s Biblical Games: A Strategic Analysis of Stories in the Old Testament. Nonetheless, this approach lies beyond the purview of the present volume. Along with the essayists of this volume, we view the introduction of games and game studies in the literature classroom optimistically, as an approach that will enhance an appreciation for literature and literary history rather than simply supplanting it. Similar hopes and fears were expressed when film entered the college and university curriculum, 10 Introduction and yet the two media are now seen more as allied than as antagonistic. We predict a similar future for literature and games, in which their commonalities inspire a deeper understanding of their similarities and their differences. The following chapters invite readers to join the game, already afoot for so many of our colleagues. Works Cited Battey, Tom. “Videogames Can, Do, and Should Tell Stories.” Gamasutra: The Art & Business of Making Games, Apr. 27, 2017, https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/TomBattey/ 20170427/296978/Videogames_Can_Do__Should_Tell_Stories.php. Beerbohm, Max. The Illustrated Zuleika Dobson. Yale UP, 1985. 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