Critical Gaming: Interactive History and Virtual Heritage

Erik Champion

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317157380
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book explains how designing, playing and modifying computer games, and understanding the theory behind them, can strengthen the area of digital humanities. This book aims to help digital humanities scholars understand both the issues and also advantages of game design, as well as encouraging them to extend the field of computer game studies, particularly in their teaching and research in the field of virtual heritage. By looking at re-occurring issues in the design, playtesting and interface of serious games and game-based learning for cultural heritage and interactive history, this book highlights the importance of visualisation and self-learning in game studies and how this can intersect with digital humanities. It also asks whether such theoretical concepts can be applied to practical learning situations. It will be of particular interest to those who wish to investigate how games and virtual environments can be used in teaching and research to critique issues and topics in the humanities, particularly in virtual heritage and interactive history.

Chapter 1
Digital Humanities and the Limits of Text

Names are important and definitions are important; the mission and goals of digital humanities will see course numbers, grant applications, centres and careers rise or fail. So I can appreciate the reasons behind the burgeoning literature attempting to define digital humanities (Cohen et al., 2011; Terras et al., 2013). Digital humanities (DH) is a big business, at least in terms of grants, novelty, media releases and career promotion.

While many proponents of DH talk of it as a broad church or even as a tent, I tend to view it more as a campsite, where positions and prime spots are visibly or surreptitiously contested and fought over under the veneer of collegial agreement. In particular, some definitions of DH worry me. There has long been a debate on what exactly DH is, but in 2012 I was struck by Dave Parry’s succinct bifurcation of DH. In his chapter ‘The Digital Humanities or a Digital Humanism’ in Debates in the Digital Humanities (Gold, 2012), Parry raises the controversial question as to whether DH would be best considered as the application of computing or an inquiry into how digital media has irrevocably changed the humanities (Parry, 2012).

More recently, I have moved away from taking an either/or position; I believe that DH at a fundamental level considers how to integrate computing with humanities and attempts to understand how both computing and humanities must change. It needs to do so in order to best meld two quite different approaches together. What does worry me here is a subtle suggestion running through some texts that DH are primarily or uniquely or best viewed as computing services and tools applied to the digitalization and processing of text or literature (Baldwin, 2013). For various significant reasons that will hopefully become abundantly clear, a perspective arguing that humanities is primarily or fundamentally text-based would be mistaken, and such a viewpoint would impact negatively on the development of both non-text-based and text-based DH.

I have four reasons to be concerned with any idea that DH is primarily text-based (and in particular not related to visualization). Some might argue that there is a clear separation between written language and images, that to be a humanist or a humanistic scholar (which are not the same thing), one has to have high levels of literacy, that non-text-based media is not part of DH, or that visualization cannot provide suitably scholarly arguments.

In my opinion, visualization projects are typically missing or downplayed. This concern might seem a little paranoid; clearly, there are presentations on visualizations at DH conferences. So here are some examples of what appears to me be a text bias. The index to the book Debating The Digital Humanities: A Reader lists a ‘visual turn’ on page 179. Yet turning to pages 178–179, you will find that Patrik Svensson’s chapter actually decries the lack of reference to visual media projects or to multimedia in general (Svensson, 2013). As Svensson points out, the field of humanities computing has focused on the textual, but this does not mean that other projects were not developed. To quote from Hannah Gillow, who was critiquing Stephen Marce’s article ‘Literature is Not Data: Against Digital Humanities’ (Gillow, 2013):

The first problem with this article is the title itself. In the best interpretation possible, the title suggests that Digital Humanities is limited to text mining and textual studies. Worst case, it suggests that digital humanities’ only purpose is reclassifying all literature as simply data.

As we are well aware, both these statements are patently untrue. Digital Humanities encompasses an incredibly vast amount of categories, textual studies being only one of them.

While Marce would be well within his grounds to point out the frequent hype that purports to be DH, to lambast the entire movement through attacking straw men does seem to be a step too far. However, the problem is more insidious than the opinion of just one critic. The low regard in which visualization is held seems to be shared by some of the academic press. For example, according to Lev Manovich (2012), the ‘Cambridge University Press Author Guide’ suggests that authors avoid illustrations as they will detract from the main argument.¹

You might counter that DH derives from the humanities computing field, which is itself heavily indebted to text-based research. After all, Susan Hockey wrote the following in her chapter ‘The History of Humanities Computing’ in one of the first definitive books on DH (Schreibman et al., 2004):

Applications involving textual sources have taken center stage within the development of humanities computing as defined by its major publications and thus it is inevitable that this essay concentrates on this area. (Hockey, 2004, p. 4)

On first reading, this seems reasonable. Yet one of the major journals listed was known at the time as Literary and Linguistic Computing. Weren’t there great advances in archaeological computing at the same time, which were not necessarily text-based? Yes there were, but they weren’t published in that particular journal.

More subtly, various ontologies for directories of DH tools and methods in European projects (such as DARIAH and NeDiMAH) and in American or international projects (such as DiRT Bamboo, currently known as DiRT) are heavily influenced by the ontology of DH as developed at the University of Oxford. This in turn was based on the scholarly ontology devised by John Unsworth (2007). The University of Oxford definition of DH, at least on its webpage (undated), is text-based and desk-based. Its http://digital.humanities.ox.ac.uk/Support/whatarethedh.aspx page says that, amongst other new advantages, DH offers ‘new desktop working environments’ and ‘new ways of representing data’.

Figure 1.1 Digital Sarcophagus – Cat Scans of Pausiris Mummy

Source: Paul Bourke

Where is visualization as a research tool in its own right? Can’t visualization actually create new research questions? Why must working environments be desktop-based? Must all humanists have a digital version of a horizontal writing surface? I would suggest that there are two main reasons for this: non-text-based humanities publish in other journals and present at other conferences; and many traditional humanities departments do not necessarily have access to or are even aware of the potential relevance of virtual reality and other non-desktop-based digital environments.

An example of visualization as research is the use of CAT scans to create a 3D model of a mummy without opening the sarcophagus, the Pausiris mummy projection created by Paul Bourke and Peter Morse for the Museum of New and Old Art (MONA), Hobart, Tasmania. There are two cabinets in the room. One cabinet contains the real Pausiris mummy (unopened) and the other the digital interpretation (Figure 1.1). Paul Bourke describes the museum exhibit on his website (Bourke, 2011):

The digital representation reveals the interior of the mummy casket, slowly peeling away the casket and wrappings. One approaches the two display cabinets by walking on stepping stones, the room is flooded by black dyed water.

In many examples in archaeology, you can only see the artefact from visualization, be it the fall of light on a statue at solstice, the clap that creates the sound of a bird as acoustically reflected by Mayan temples, or the simulation itself; in many cases, we cannot see the object with the naked eye in the real world – it has to be re-created or projected for us. Another example would be augmented reality, augmenting artefacts with knowledge that is no longer part of the physical object, such as the EU CHESS project, which will be discussed in Chapter 3.

Figure 1.2 EU CHESS Project

Source: Fraunhofer IGD and the Acropolis Museum

A simple if cheeky test is to ask someone what the acronym ‘VRE’ stands for. If they say Virtual Research Environment (VRE), they are probably a European-based DH researcher; if they say Virtual Reality Environment, they are probably involved in a visualization-related field, but they don’t have to be computer programmers (Das et al., 1993), they could be architects and designers or archaeologists (Acevedo et al., 2001; Slator et al., 2001), or they could be researchers in the area of tourism (Gurau, 2007) or educational design and psychology (Patera et al., 2008).

I have great respect for many of the DH projects at Oxford, and this approach to DH is an interesting one; those at Oxford did not create a DH centre, nor did they label certain people as ‘Digital Humanists’. Instead, they provide support and facilities in DH for any academic with DH needs. And I agree with the below statement on their website:

Doing digital humanities does not necessarily mean becoming a technology specialist, but it does entail gaining some idea of the relevant technologies and exchanging expertise with technologists. Exchange is the key term: the digital humanities are most successful where there is a two-way collaboration between scholars and technologists, not where either side is merely at the service of the other.

DH revolves around not just what we can do with a million books, but also what the community can do with humanities; we require collaborative frameworks, tool-making systems and spaces (Factor, 2011; Kelly, 2014). We now have a near-instant audience (Elliott and Gilles, 2009) and even if technology can get in the way (Hitchock, 2012, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, n.d.), academics no longer have to wait years for people to read their books – academics and non-academics can now build infrastructure frameworks that allow others to build on and extend academic output. Social media has turned a comparatively one-way process of scholarly dissemination into an interactive circle. This is the revolution; we have moved beyond traditional research publications and beyond tools (that virtually make books and their successors) towards tools that allow people to make, share and collaborate on their own books (or whatever the media or even objects might be).

Considering that academia is supposedly concerned with the dissemination of knowledge, especially critical awareness of knowledge, communality, public accessibility and public visibility could easily be improved, even if Gibbs (2011) argued that public levels of complaints are very low. In the book Digital Humanities in Practice (Warwick et al., 2012) and on the related blog (Warwick, n.d.), Warwick, Terras and Nyhann have decried the lack of public dissemination of DH projects. In his 2010 blog post ‘What is Digital Humanities’ (2010), Matthew Kirschenbaum remarked:

Whatever else it might be then, the digital humanities today is about a scholarship (and a pedagogy) that is publicly visible in ways to which we are generally unaccustomed, a scholarship and pedagogy that are bound up with infrastructure in ways that are deeper and more explicit than we are generally accustomed to, a scholarship and pedagogy that are collaborative and depend on networks of people and that live an active 24/7 life online. Isn’t that something you want in your English department?

Digital humanities require more than the mere act of people coming together, they also require space that helps bring people and new ideas together. For example, Kelly noted (2014):

Therefore, if we are going to do digital right in our departments, we need to create collaborative spaces where the making of digital history can happen.

Even if we manage to create the right sort of collaboration spaces, we also need to tackle the problem of literacy, digital literacy and digital fluency (Resnick, 2002). Despite my rather utopian talk of a revolution in scholarly discourse, not all can read. A concern or predilection with text-based material is obstructing us from communicating with a wider audience. Multimedia, visualizations and sensory interfaces can communicate across a wider swathe of the world’s population. And although literacy is increasing, technology is further creating a fundamental divide between those who can read and write and those who cannot. UNESCO (2014) reported:

Over 84 per cent of the world’s adults are now literate, according to the latest data from UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics (UIS). This represents an eight percentage point increase since 1990, but it still leaves some 774 million adults who cannot read or write … Literacy also remains a persistent problem in developed countries. According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), one in five young people in Europe had poor literacy skills in 2009, and some 160 million adults in OECD countries were functionally illiterate. This means that they do not have the skills needed to function in today’s environments such as the ability to fill out forms, follow instructions, read a map, or help with their children with homework … ‘This situation is exacerbated by the rise of new technologies and modern knowledge societies that make the ability to read and write all the more essential’, said UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova in her message for International Literacy Day.

Historically, the distinction between text and symbol has been blurred, from early European languages to Asian languages and as part of world history in general. For example, writing has been discovered in China that is 5,000 years old (Tang, 2013). Only this ‘primitive writing … [lies] … somewhere between symbols and words’. This language exists, in other words, when five or six of the symbols are combined; they are no longer symbols, but words.

The alphabets for many modern languages were originally derived from images. Even today, language is geographically influenced, according to Mark et al. (1989, p. 4):

Whereas human senses operate in very similar ways, regardless of culture or language, human perception (that is, the mental interpretation of sensory inputs) is influenced by language and interpretive image schemas (see Lakoff, 1987, and Johnson, 1988). The title of Leonard Talmy’s (1983) seminal paper on this subject, ‘How Language Structures Space’, expresses this position very well … Depending on the situation, human languages may use gestalt reference frames, based on inherent properties of the ground or reference object, or canonical reference frames, based on the speakers’ or listeners’ viewpoint. There also are cross-linguistic and cross-cultural differences in reference frames; a good example is the common use of radial rather than Cartesian orientation systems by island-dwellers.

Even cave paintings were spatially planned – they were placed near resonant locations in the caves, and the density of the pictures appears to be ‘proportional to the intensity of that spot’s resonance’ (Viegas, 2008; Brown, 2012): Cave paintings happened tens of thousands of years ago, so why are they still relevant? The answer is that they show the long-term association between image, space and meaning.

A contextual appreciation of Mayan ‘writing’ would necessitate understanding the essential link between image, glyph, building, space and audience. Their most sacred inscriptions we...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Abbreviations
• Key Terms
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Digital Humanities and the Limits of Text
• 2 Game-based Learning and the Digital Humanities
• 3 Virtual Reality
• 4 Game-based History and Historical Simulations
• 5 Virtual Heritage and Digital Culture
• 6 Worlds, Roles and Rituals
• 7 Joysticks of Death, Violence and Morality
• 8 Intelligent Agents, Drama and Cinematic Narrative
• 9 Biofeedback, Space and Place
• 10 Applying Critical Thinking and Critical Play
• Index