robotnik2004 | Pastplay

Last week I had the pleasure of taking part in a terrific two-day symposium on playing with, making, and teaching history, hosted by Kevin Kee and funded by The History Education Network (THEN/HIER). The Twitter hashtag was #pastplay, although as I remarked at the time, we were often too busy playing to tweedle.

The first day was organized on the emergent unconference model. There was no formal structure, other than a mandate to play with history and technology. People brought games and toys and ideas, and we went at it. (Actually, it occurs to me we were supposed to record some reflections in a video “confessional” a la reality TV, but I never did.) On the second day we workshopped the draft papers written by each participant for a possible edited volume. The authors of each paper could not speak while their paper was being discussed, other than to ask clarifying questions–a key hack that kept things moving at a pretty good clip.

The two days were quite different in structure and tone, but I thought the sweet n’ sour pairing worked well. Things were freer and more fun than most traditional academic history conferences, but also more satisfying and productive than a pure unconference can be. Your first unconference is a little like your first rave, I think. You can’t believe it’s going to work until you see it in action; then you spend forty-eight hours blissed out and wondering “why can’t life be like this all the time?” But each time after the first, the seratonin high is a little less intense. You can only enjoy so many group hugs before you want to start putting that energy to work. So right now I’m most excited by hybrid meeting forms that combine playfulness with real productivity.

Barely Games

My contribution to the first day was a set of “barely games” for playful historical thinking: quick, low-tech exercises that each transgressed against professional historical practice in some playful way. (The term “barely games” comes from this lovely talk by Russell Davies, which I find a far more appealing take on little games than Jesse Schell’s blithe dystopia.)

Russell Davies: “When I think about games and playfulness, [commercial video games] don’t come to mind at all. What pops into my head is … that experience of driving in the back of the family car, scrunching you eyes up at night to turn the streetlights into laser weapons and shooting other cars. Or watching the passing shadows on the road beside you, imagining shapes and rhythms.”

We played a little “Who Would Win“, a little “Would You Rather,” and a terrific round of “The Old New Liar’s Club,” all described in recent posts here. (Many thanks to Devon Elliott for providing the Liar’s Club Mystery Object, a “ghost slate” used by fraudulent mediums to produce fake messages from the spirit world. It worked like a charm.) We also tried a new exercise I called “The Paranoid Style,” an attempt to simulate historical apophenia–the uncanny way that history has of providing evidence to confirm whatever paranoid historical theory you just set out to prove.

The “Paranoid Style” game was suggested by some friends of mine, many of them Shaolin masters in playful historical thinking. After a little briefing on pareidolia and apophenia, illustrated with the most convincing five minutes of the old Dark Side of the Moon / Wizard of Oz mashup, I asked each participant to choose one well-known historical figure. Then I told them we were looking for evidence of the secret conspiracy of vampires that has pulled the strings behind the world for hundreds of years. So we went through what we knew about each of our historical figures and found “evidence” of each one’s role for or against the Great Vampire Conspiracy.

I had a smaller group than I’d hoped for–I was competing with Bill Turkel’s wonderful toys. But the participants were more than game, and I thank them for indulging me. If anything, they were too willing to indulge me: we very quickly spun out a goofy little chronicle of the vampire-vs-electricizer war behind the world, but we probably didn’t work at it long enough to get to the real kick of autohistoric apophenia, when the evidence starts to line up all too well with the fantasy you have just concocted, and you skate right up to the edge of believing. It’s a powerful and uncanny feeling, and if it serves as good inoculation against pseudohistorical thinking, it also colors your relationship with “real” history ever after.

Edited To Add: Trevor Owens, who would’ve fit right in at #pastplay, points out an iPhone game called Wiki Hunt that lives in the “everything is connected” space. As is often the case, this seems to be a commercialization of something the kids were doing anyway: I’ve heard tell of clever youngsters playing “how many links to get from a random Wikipedia article to Justin Bieber” with nothing more than a desktop computer and a web browser. Back in my day it was Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Or was that Sir Francis Bacon?

Bleeding Play

Our contribution to the second day was a paper I wrote with Tim Compeau describing a pervasive game for history education that he and I are designing and some of the difficulties we’ve run into. I haven’t blogged about this project much, for fear of leaking spoilers, and we put a password on our paper for same reason. I intend to post a spoiler-free version soon, or at least parcel out the key paragraphs on this blog. Unfortunately, in my opinion, the conversation in our allotted 30 minutes turned mostly to issues of publishing and peer-review–worthy subjects, certainly, but the questions I really wanted help with did not get taken up as much. How does one do iterative design of a game that cannot really be repeated? Can you control design sprawl in a genre that is about all about surprising players with how big the game really is? Are ARGs always inevitably allegories of conspiracy?Still, reaction to our paper and our project seemed positive. The general sentiment seemed to be that we were (or I was) worrying too much and should just charge ahead. “You’re on the bleeding edge,” Kevin said. “Just bleed!” That can be arranged.

Up With People

Finally, I have to say something about what a terrific group of people I met or remet at this little conference. Seriously, I was just floored by the intelligence and creativity and generosity and awesomeness of all the people there.

I have some qualms about the “digital humanities” label, currently having its Elvis moment. (Not the label, I guess, just the way it’s exploded in the last year or so. The inevitable anti-DH backlash is currently scheduled for Spring 2011; watch this space.) But I have nothing but love for the people who do this kind of work. Historians powered up with coding chops and tech fu; geeks leavened with humanist soul. What could be better? I could name names, but I’d have to list basically every one.

[Cross-posted from Old is the New New. Comments welcome here or there.]