Full Panel
Lauren Burr, Michael Hancock, Andy Houston
Abstract
What if you designed an alternate reality game and nobody showed up to play? This is a legitimate question that plagued the design team of Bonfire of the Humanities, and one that would never be put to the test. This particular ARG, a collaboration between members of the University of Waterloo Games Institute and Drama Department for the 2012 meeting of the Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences, was shut down the evening before launch. The decision to cancel the game was the result of miscommunicated and misconstrued intentions, as well as exaggerated security concerns voiced by both the administrators of the university and official Congress organizers. Our choice of politically charged subject matter in a game about Congress, designed specifically for Congress, was also seemingly against Congress, at least from the administration’s perspective. From its inception, Bonfire of the Humanities was meant to be a social experiment that justified our value as humanities scholars by critiquing academia from the inside out. In expanding the magic circle of gameplay to include Canada’s largest academic conference and its attendees, we sought to engage both players and bystanders in an act of self-critique and self-justification as scholars “in an uncertain world.”
When we first embarked on this project, we intended to make a statement about the perceived and actual value of the arts, both within and outside the university. Our narrative revolved around the Torch Institute, a fictional neoconservative youth group plotting a protest campaign against government funding for the arts. We created the Torch Institute as a satirical representation of a dominant discourse in our society that seeks to delegitimize humanities scholarship as elitist, impractical, archaic and profitless. But as the process moved forward and we struggled with the demands and challenges of such an enormously complicated undertaking, Bonfire of the Humanities became a much stronger statement about the value of interdisciplinary, practice-based research in the humanities, and about finding new applications that would allow us to maintain our relevance in the digital twenty-first century.
This panel will take the form of a roundtable discussion between several members of the Bonfire of the Humanities design team. English graduate students and Games Institute members Michael Hancock and Lauren Burr will provide a brief history of alternate reality games, outline Bonfire of the Humanities’s transmedia narrative and puzzle structure, and offer their perspectives on the collaborative design process. Drama Professor Andy Houston, director of the Torch Institute cast, will share the experience and challenges of integrating improvisational site-specific theatre into the medium of a pervasive game, as well as the risks involved in doing so. In the remaining time, the panelists will engage the audience in a reflective and critical discussion of the project’s collapse and political fallout, as well as the implications for experimental collaborative research, not just in the digital humanities, but in the academy at large. The abrupt termination of the project exposed a serious conflict of interest between innovative modes of academic research and the governing bureaucracies of the university. We were no longer fighting against a phantom Torch Institute, but our own administration. In an escalating conflict that several members of our team viewed as a violation of academic freedom, the Torch slogan “fanning the flame of freedom” suddenly acquired new significance.
Biographies
Lauren Burr is a PhD student in the English Department at the University of Waterloo, studying locative media and pervasive games. Her doctoral research investigates the creation of participatory location-based narratives and their relationship to the politics of urban space. In addition to the Bonfire of the Humanities alternate reality game, Lauren’s recent projects include Cytopath, an augmented reality necromedia game set in downtown Kitchener, Ontario, and House of Lexia, a locative hypertext remediation of Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Lauren conducts her research with both the Critical Media Lab and The Games Institute at UWaterloo, and continues to collaborate as an adjunct researcher with the Carleton University Hypertext and Hypermedia Lab in Ottawa after completing an MA at Carleton in 2011. Other research interests include game studies, spatial theory, electronic literature, transmedia and augmented reality. Lauren’s doctoral research is generously funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Michael Hancock, PhD Candidate, is a graduate student at the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario. He specializes in digital media and literary theory, with a strong interest in popular culture relating to television, comic books, and film. His primary area of focus is the study of videogames, and his dissertation is on the evolution of image and text representation in videogame history. He is particularly interested in narrative and game, game design, close studies of individual games, and the texts created by game players; it is this last element in particular that draws him towards ARG related gaming practices. He has spent an inordinate amount of his life reading videogame manuals.
Andy Houston is an artist-researcher in site-specific and environmental performance, and associate professor of drama at the University of Waterloo. He and Kathleen Irwin started Knowhere Productions Inc. in 2002, a company devoted to the exploration of site-specific and environmental performance (see www.knowhereproductions.ca). As a scholar, he has published broadly in his field and edited a Canadian Theatre Review issue on site-specific performance, as well as a collection of writings on environmental and site-specific theatre in Canada, published by Playwrights Canada Press. Most recently he has directed two projects focused on the animation of place through site- specific soundwalks: Garden / / Suburbia, a site-specific animation of Lawrence Park, Toronto, which premiered as part of the Performance Studies International conference, at OCAD in June 2010, and Here Be Dragons, a multi-media performance that took its audience on a journey of displacement; a mythogeographical mapping of queer, Asian- Canadian identity in downtown Kitchener, Ontario, as part of the IMPACT ’11 Festival of International Theatre in September 2011.