Path of Honors: Towards a Model for Interactive History Texts with Twine

An “Alternative to the Pen”? Perspectives for the Design of Historiographical Videogames

“…Overall, when designing HVG videogames, authorship must not be seen as indivisible not be claimed by the author alone. As previously stated by Janet Murray (2000, p. 74, 81, 129), “authorship” in digital environments is shared, supposes a partition between an “author” in charge of tuning the system's parameters and a “reader” whose role is to explore that system. In other words, any choice actualized by the latter is necessarily contained within a set of virtual choices defined by the author.…”

“…Fortunately, judging from the existing projects, the need for the acquisition of a minimal degree of computer-game literacy has been taken into consideration, as historians actively engage in the design process. For instance, historian Kevin Kee acted as project manager, researcher, and writer for Outbreak (Kee & Bachynski, 2009, p. 5), while Jeremiah McCall used the quite accessible Twine engine coding language to transpose his own historical works into the game Path of Honors (McCall, 2018).…”

“…Exploiting the properties of the classic text form seems a promising path to follow. Explaining his use of the Twine game engine, McCall states that it provides the historian with a set of tools that are both familiar and less so, as they can make use of both the "descriptive precision of text" and the engaging potential of "choice-making" (McCall, 2018). In Path of Honor, choosing to display the reference material (and reading it) results in both a better understanding of the historical argument and its grounding (what we named historical mediation), as well as an increase in information relative to the current game state and the availability of choices (ludic mediation) (McCall, 2016).…”

Matière à jouer : un projet historien de recherche-création vidéoludique pour mettre en jeu les traces du passé

“…1 Depuis plusieurs années, une part croissante des tenants d'une approche historienne du jeu vidéo (les historical game studies, qui s'intéressent aux représentations du passé et aux discours historiques véhiculés par les jeux vidéo, Chapman et al, 2016) déplacent leurs efforts de l'étude des oeuvres vidéoludique à celle de leur conception. Ils se proposent d'en décrire les ressorts, d'en documenter les pratiques, voire de prescrire les codes esthétiques et les principes méthodologiques vers lesquels devraient tendre les productions futures (Egea-Vivancos et Arias-Ferrer, 2021 ;Hiriart, 2019 ;McCall, 2018McCall, , 2020Yang, 2021). L'un des enjeux centraux est de parvenir à identifier les principes de conception sur lesquels reposent les dispositifs ludiques les plus aptes à véhiculer une représentation valable du passé, à communiquer « des thèmes, des théories, des preuves, des arguments » (Chapman et al, 2016, p. 11) d'une manière conforme avec les principes méthodologiques de la discipline historique.…”