Category: Main Quests

Due: 9/22

For this assignment, each student will be taking part in the project to document and “unpack” Manuel’s Tavern. You’ll be choosing artifacts from the walls, researching more about what those objects depict or represent, and then composing texts that describe and play with the item. You’ll submit your entries to the folks at Unpacking Manuel’s and hopefully they will eventually be included in the site once it’s fully unveiled.

As you compose your Manuel’s text, I’ll ask that you be thinking about the process of such research and writing — what rhetorical situations does this sort of activity apply to? what sorts of audience(s) do you imagine for your text? how does writing your own descriptive text help you to think differently about similar texts you encounter in your own life, particularly in games but perhaps in other settings as well?

Some Context Unpacking Manuel’s

Last year, this project was described in the New York Times:

The artist and documentary filmmaker Ruth Dusseault calls the stuff that has found its way onto the walls of Manuel’s Tavern, a beloved Eisenhower-era dive bar here, an “organic archive” and a “60-year installation piece.”

[…]

Ms. Dusseault, a lecturer in the communications department at Georgia State University, is convinced that these items tell a rich and complex story of Atlanta. In an ambitious and slightly weird act of scholarship, she and a group of local academics have begun digitally documenting all of the curios and ephemera for an online research project they have titled “Unpacking Manuel’s Tavern.”

Ms. Dusseault likened the idea of examining the junk on the walls of a bar to the work of archaeologists. “They’ll go to a site, and they have a fascination with garbage,” she said, “because it can tell them so much about the civilization they’re studying.”

You can check these out to get a sense of where this is headed:

• Early gigapan tour demo, with one student project included.
• YouTube interview (doesn’t work in Safari? Perhaps best viewed on a phone?)

Assignment Details

detail from Minnesota Braves Wall at Manuel’s Tavern

You will each choose one object from the Minnesota Braves wall. I’ll loaded a spreadsheet in Google Drive that lists objects on that wall with some very basic information about each of them and you’ll each claim one item.

You will research that item and then write an entry of something like 500 to 1000 words. You’ll publish the entry as a set of pages (not blog posts, but pages) on your own site, with images, audio, and any other media as appropriate. You’ll also publish a piece of reflective writing in which you analyze your own process and learning as one of those pages. When you’ve finished your draft, you’ll write a blog post on your own site, linking to the splash page (introductory page) of your piece, and provided a bit of additional reflection on your work. When your post syndicates to the class site, that’s when your assignment is “turned in” to me.

I’ll expect each of you to read each other’s work and to comment on and to discuss with each other the work. There will be opportunities for review and revision, both formal and informal, before I officially grade your final draft.

Assignment Steps

Research

Once you’ve chosen an object from the wall and signed up on the spreadsheet, zoom in as close as you can on the high resolution gigapan of the wall and grab a good screenshot of your object.

Based on your observation of the item you’ve chosen and the information provided in the spreadsheet, research that object and try to ascertain as much information as you can about the significance of the object and what it represents. Take notes for yourself of not only the results of your research but of the steps you go through and of your own thinking about the process.

As part of your research, make sure to perform a reverse image search using your screenshot to find other similar objects. The reverse image search will probably be most fruitful with advertisements but definitely perform the search with your object and pay attention to any interesting comparisons you get back.

Writing

Publish a page to your class site with a 500 to 1000 word entry on the object that you have analyzed and researched. This write up should include a fairly detailed description of the item itself as well as a discussion of the relevant details you have gleaned during your analysis. A student at Georgia State has produced an excellent example in her blog entry on object #21, the Dekalb Seed Company flying ear corn sign.

Your page should include at least the good screenshot you took from the wall. You might also include other images that you turned up during your analysis (make certain you provide captions for any images, with attribution information and links to the images).

You should also publish a second page, as a subpage underneath the one described above, in which you explain your research and thinking process as you analyzed the source. List the sites you went to as your researched your object and what you found useful or difficult along the way. How did you determine what sources were relevant in your search?

(Note that in class, I had raised the possibility that you might be allowed to write something fictional in your entry, but for now at least, stick to a strictly nonfiction account of the object.)

Once those two pages are published, make certain they show up in your menu and are accessible. Then publish a blog post, which should include a link to this assignment page and a link to the main page describing your object. That blog post should also include a paragraph which serves as preview of your discussion of the object — think of it as a brief teaser that a reader might see and be interested by, and thus follow your link and read the essay you’ve written. Make certain your blog post includes an image too (and image credit) too!

Next Steps

Once you’ve completed the first drafts of this work, there will be additional steps for revision and for building on these entries as a class, but let’s discuss those once you’ve made some progress on the drafts first.

Works Cited

Fausset, Richard. “Digital Dig Unpacks Atlanta Dive Bar Rich in History.” The New York Times 9 Nov. 2015. NYTimes.com. Web. 10 Nov. 2015.

Due: 11/13

Trauma and Thoughts

First consider these two texts about trauma and thoughts:

Trauma, in effect, issues a challenge to the capacities of narrative knowledge. In its shock impact trauma is anti-narrative, but it also generates the manic production of retrospective narratives that seek to explicate the trauma . . . culture rehearses or restates narratives that attempt to animate and explicate trauma that has been formulated as something that exceeds the possibility of narrative knowledge. . . . if trauma is a crisis in representation, then this generates narrative possibility just as much as impossibility, a compulsive outpouring of attempts to formulate narrative knowledge.
– Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question

And the Invisibilia episode “The Secret Life of Thoughts,” which asks the question, “Are my thoughts related to my inner wishes, do they reveal who I really am?” There are two parts to the episode: the story of a man gripped by violent thoughts, and how various psychologists make sense of his experience, and a man trapped inside his head for 13 years with thoughts as his only companion (the first part is more directly applicable, but the second part might also be of interest to you too):

Games in Wolf in White Van

We’ve spent a lot of time this semester playing and discussing video games that are in one way or another about trauma and its aftermath. And now we have read this novel which is, at least in part, about the ways in which the protagonist creates and runs a game as a response to his own trauma and the ways in which its players react to the game and its portrayal of a post-apocalyptic dystopia.

“[T]he way a role-playing game can parallel a person’s real life,” according to Carmen Maria Machado’s review, is one of the central themes of Wolf in White Van. “After all, what is life but a scrupulously detailed, real-time Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story with actual death at the end of its infinite plotlines, most of which you will never see?”

Perhaps surprisingly given the fact that the game Trace Italian is such a focus of most readers of the novel, John Darnielle explains in an interview with Gabriella Paiella at Electric Lit that the game was not present in the initial draft of the novel but was added later as its present shape came into view because he realized that Sean would go on with his life and Darnielle had to ask “what does this person then do in his life if he’s alive? […] and, you know, there’s all kinds of things you can do from home.” He goes on in the interview to describe the difference between playing Trace or other RPGsand video games: “It’s the engagement. When you play a computer game, even if it’s in the first person, you are moving some other creature around. If you do this thing, you are making a bunch of ‘I’ statements about what you’re doing. You’re kind of method acting.”

Essay Prompt

Write an essay of 750-1000 words (that would be 3-4 pages in a print format) in which you analyze Darnielle’s portrayal of trauma and games. Are there examples in the narrative of characters coping effectively with trauma? How does the structure of the novel (or the structure of Trace Italian) reflect that trauma at its core? Do you read this novel as ultimately about healing and recovery? Or do you read it as more of a “manic production of retrospective narratives,” in the words of Roger Luckhurst? Or is the novel doing something else with the way in which it portrays its traumatic events? Does the novel suggest ways in which gaming, in particular, arises from or helps to cope with or circles around or holds at bay traumatic experiences?

You do not need to refer to outside sources for your analysis, but feel free to pull in other texts when they are appropriate to your argument. In particular, feel free to bring in comparative examples from some of the other games we have played this semester. (Though ultimately your focus should be Wolf in White Van, so use other games to provide perspective on your primary text, where useful, but don’t use them to avoid grappling with the novel.)

Nuts and Bolts

Publish

Publish your essay as a page on your site. You will publish a reflective blog post once it’s up (reflection prompt to come soon).

Quotes

Your essay must include direct quotes from the novel to support claims that you make. You can also quote from reviews or from the other games, where appropriate. You should always have at least as many of your own words discussing the significance of a quote as there are words in the quote itself. And you should always incorporate quotes into your own sentences — no dropped quotes. In other words, build quote sandwiches in your essay.

Make certain to include MLA-style in-text parenthetical page numbers for quotes from the novel and a Works Cited entry for each source you quote from.

Audience

You should assume an audience that has read Wolf in White Van and thought about it a little bit but who understands the novel not quite as well as you do.

Images

Make certain you have at least one image on your page. I would prefer that the image not be the cover of the novel but that instead you take a phrase or term that your essay addresses and search Flickr to find a CC-licensed image that you can use to illustrate your essay. Make certain you have a good image credit citation on your page.

Works Cited

Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. London and New York: Routledge, 2008.

Machado, Carmen Maria. “The Monstrous And The Beautiful Dance In ‘White Van.’” NPR. 16 Sept. 2014

Paiella, Gabriella. “INTERVIEW: John Darnielle, Author of Wolf in White Van.” Electric Literature. N.p., 16 Sept. 2014. Web. 29 Mar. 2016.

Spiegel, Alix and Lulu Miller. “The Secret Life of Thoughts.” Invisibilia. 8 Jan. 2015.

“With Hearthfire you can finally place a permanent mark on the world of Skyrim by designing, building, and maintaining your own home.”

In many fantasy roleplaying games, characters need to acquire a home or a base of operations as part of game play: in Lego Lord of the Rings, once a player gets to Rivendell, it becomes the place to view the trophies for completed minikits.

“My Megaton House” screenshot from Fallout 3 by Bethesda Softworks.

In Fallout 3, players can acquire a home in Megaton once they have defused the Megaton Bomb and then they can add storage containers, an infirmary, a workbench for repairing and upgrading equipment, and some other features–including a display case for showing off the bobblehead dolls you find throughout the game that give your player character perks.

Screenshot of “a renovated Villa Auditore” in Assassin’s Creed 2 by Ubi Soft.

In Assassin’s Creed 2, players eventually gain the familial stronghold in the town of Monteriggioni, the Villa Auditore. As they complete quests the estate is restored from a dilapidated wreck to a gleaming castle, eventually uncovering hidden chambers that hold the keys to advanced gear and skills.

Domain

In Skyrim, there is an add-on game that is just about managing your home base, called Hearthfire. There’s a fairly elaborate guide in the Elder Scrolls Wiki on the steps involved: purchasing land, planning and preparation, building a small house, adding a main hall, adding specialized towers and wings, building out the area around the stronghold and adding personnel and animals.

In this class, you’ll be building your own homestead in the form of a domain of your own. Like in the games described above, in this class you’ll start with some basic components for your domain and then slowly add on additional specialized rooms to flesh out your estate or to aid you in acquiring new skills and perks.