Introduction: Reflections on the Ivanhoe game

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Drucker, Johanna
  • Rockwell, Geoffrey

• Ivanhoe is both a game and a project that is documenting a discussion around play and literary criticism. This collection of papers presents our current thinking on the Ivanhoe project. Produced after three years of research conversations among the members of the Speculative Computing Lab (SpecLab), the papers provide a glimpse of the complex threads through which we have developed our thinking. Each of us contributes from our own area of expertise: textual studies (McGann), philosophy of ludic activity (Rockwell), visual theory (Drucker), critical insight into digital production (Nowviskie), experiments in visualization (Laue). In looking over the collection, we realize that for a first time reader, many questions would arise. What is Ivanhoe? How did we get to this point in the project? How is Ivanhoe actually played or used? In our individual papers, none of us has chosen to describe the development of the project in its various iterations or what it is like to play the game. This introduction will therefore describe the history of the project and provide a description of one of the most “mature” games played to date, the Spring 2002 The Turn of the Screw.

• Date created

  2003

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Text analysis
  • Video games
  • Visual analysis

• Type of Item

  Article (Published)

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R34M91Q30

• License

  © 2003 Johanna Drucker et al. This version of this article is open access and can be downloaded and shared. The original author(s) and source must be cited.