Off Center Episode 16: Alternate Reality Games with Patrick Jagoda

Scott Rettberg: Welcome to another episode of Off Center. Today we're here with Patrick Jagoda. Welcome, Patrick.

Patrick Jagoda: Hi Scott. Good to be here.

Scott Rettberg: And we're going to talk today about alternative reality games and their effects on social change. Patrick is a specialist in media theory, game studies and design, science studies, and 20th and 21st century American literature and culture, and the William Rainey Harper Professor at the University of Chicago. In addition, he's the co-founder of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab and the Transmedia Story Lab, and the executive editor of the journal Critical Inquiry, among many other things. Patrick, can you tell us just a little bit about your research journey, sort of how you ended up doing all these things? Among your other titles, in addition to professor of Cinema and Media studies, is a professor of obstetrics and gynecology. So, you have a–you wear a lot of hats. But tell us how you got to all these places.

Patrick Jagoda: I hope I can explain that last one in some way. When I started getting into academia, at first, you know, I majored in in philosophy, did a bunch of creative writing, ended up getting a PhD in English, and then kind of scattered off from there into an expanded media studies. And so, when I think about my research now, it falls into three different areas. First of all, there's something like media theory and game studies. I mean, I write books, humanistic texts. Second, I'm a game designer and oftentimes make alternate reality games, video games, and board games both that fall in the kind of serious game side, and then also on the art game side. And then third of all, I spend a lot of time working with people in medicine, public health, working with psychologists and sociologists to create digital media and study how effective they are using qualitative and quantitative methods. So that last one is how I eventually got into obstetrics and gynecology, working on a series of projects about sexual and reproductive health through digital media and through games.

Scott Rettberg: That's fascinating. One of the things that these alternate reality games can do is address public health as well as the other types of games that you make. But a lot of our listeners probably don't know what alternative reality games are. So, the main topic of today's conversation is alternative reality games and transmedia storytelling. Maybe we can start out first by defining those two terms, and the difference between them and, say, role playing games or live action role playing games.

Patrick Jagoda: I think of alternate reality games as narrative driven scavenger hunts that unfold both in physical space and online. They're very different from video games like RPGs, in the sense that they don't unfold on a single screen. You're moving across multiple devices, multiple platforms, multiple media. You're interacting with live characters but also doing things online, so it's transmedia and not multimedia in that sense. There are similarities to live action role playing games or LARPs, but with a LARP, you know that you're playing a game, you're cosplaying, you're entering into a space where you understand the fact that what you're doing is fictional, whereas with an alternate reality game, there's what's called a “this is not a game” aesthetic, so there's some level at which there's a blurring between reality and gameplay, and that's been harder and harder to do since the early 2000. But we still try to blur those two as much as we can for productive ends.

Scott Rettberg: Why is that harder now than it was?

Patrick Jagoda: I mean, the early ARGs in the early 2000s like The Beast or I Love Bees were still working with a much earlier version of the web, so people didn't have those conventions down. There wasn't always computing in the way that there is now, so it was easier to trick people using technology or to invite them into this other kind of world. When the beast started, the rabbit hole into it was a single credit in Steven Spielberg's film AI. When that preview came out, there was a line about a sentient machine therapist and everybody saw the director, the writer, the actors, and here there was this line about a sentient machine therapist, and they were like, what is this? Right? There's no such thing. This was 20+ years ago, there weren't AI in the way that we have now with generative adversarial networks or neural networks, so this was especially weird. That one detail, that person's name, Jeanine Salla, led to a rabbit hole online. Of course, there were fewer web pages than there are now, so those game designers could really control the path that you were taking and could really blur reality. Now, the form is slightly better known 20 years later, it's harder to make people think that what they're doing is integrated in everyday life.

Scott Rettberg: But there's a suspension of disbelief that occurs.

Patrick Jagoda: Yeah. I like to make this distinction between “suspension of disbelief” and “production of belief”. Suspension of disbelief is what we talk about a lot in literature. It's what you do when you read a novel, and you let yourself become immersed in its world. It's what happens when you play a conventional video game like Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and you allow yourself to get lost in Hyrule. You, of course, know that you're in a fiction, but part of you is suspending disbelief in order to be fully a part of that world. Whereas production of belief is perhaps more similar to what happens — a bad example would be something like a cult. It is a fiction. It is a construction in some ways, but you move entirely into it, and that's a dangerous line in many cases, but it's also a really beautifully generative one, when you're creating certain forms of fiction. When we produce belief through these games, we also have to be super careful to debrief people and to give them a chance to ask any questions that they want about the game once it's over, to really think about what we're making, socially, but also making sure that no one is actually getting tricked. This is very different from a practical joke where there's an in-crowd and an out crowd. We want everyone to be part of the in-crowd.

Scott Rettberg: You mentioned, social change and I think a lot of your projects, as you said, have revolved around public health or other kinds of social changes. Can you talk a little bit about how that approach evolved from the first work you were doing in The Game Changer Chicago Design Lab?

Patrick Jagoda: When I got to the University of Chicago early on, I was lucky enough to meet Melissa Gilliam, who's a medical professor, an OBGYN. She's now president of Boston University but back then, she was a medical professor. We started talking when I was still a postdoc there, she really wanted to combine digital media with some of the things that she was working on around health equity, around questions of race, gender and sexuality in medicine and I said, “why not work with games?” This is a medium that young people are really invested in, and we could do something interesting with. Those conversations led to a series of small projects, and those small projects eventually became The Game Changer Chicago Design Lab. There we were thinking about things like pathways into science, technology, engineering and math fields for young people, especially black and brown youth on the South Side of Chicago, where we're located. There's a very local dimension to that work. But we hope also that it's a model for projects that people could do elsewhere with different kinds of populations.

Scott Rettberg: Could you give us an example of one of the ARGs you've done and one of those that that have involved, a larger community, not just sort of university students, but also, students in local schools.

Patrick Jagoda: Yeah, we've done a bunch of these, but one of the oldest happened in 2013. This was called The Source. We basically ran a five-week summer camp for 140 students where they were coming to campus every single day, Monday through Friday and we had to create, I think 6- or 7-hours’ worth of content for them. We basically created a game-based summer camp that was organized around this form of alternate reality games, and we tried to make it super realistic. Back then in 2013, we imagined that there was a young woman, Adia, whose father had left home when she was younger, and she found a game that he had left her, and she needed the help of these students, of these players, in order to solve all of these puzzles and find out what message her father had left for her. For the longest time, there was this kind of production of belief where it wasn't clear whether Adia was a real person or whether she was a character in this game. There was a moment several weeks into the game where we actually brought the actor, who previously had only been creating these webisodes, into the physical space where the campers were, and it totally blew their mind to see that this was a physical person. There was this gasp, I remember, as she walked into the room for the first time where they were located, and that moment really captured our imagination, and it showed us how real these games can be and how positive they can be if they're aimed toward making these people's lives better, these players’ lives better. We did that and then, just one other quick example is more recently in 2022, we made another game about climate change called Scene that was made for about 350 middle schoolers and those were not —Chicago students. They were much younger. Three different schools: a public school, a private school and a charter school. We created a three-week curriculum around environmental science that was all game based.

Scott Rettberg: Wow. I assume you're not organizing 350 students in person at a time. I’m assuming that the middle school teachers also get invested in these projects.

Patrick Jagoda: Yeah. I was working with an awesome team at our forecasting lab collective. People like Heidi Coleman, Mark Downie and Ashlyn Sparrow were working with me to organize the teachers early on to get a sense from them of what they wanted the curriculum to look like, but also to tell them, “hey, we're willing to take some of this work away from you and do some of it as long as you tell us what your priorities are”. We didn't want to parachute into the schools and just drop our curriculum there. We wanted to collaborate with the teachers, but also to make this easier on them and I hope we achieved that. In the end, there was a very positive sense from both the students and the teachers about how energetic those three weeks were, and we were able to embed so many vocabulary words like CO2 and Anthropocene into the games. We were able to make puzzles that led them to think about ways of mitigating, you know, CO2 levels or think about rising sea levels or things like that. They were able to make creative projects, including small e-lit projects, as a part of the quests that we gave them on a daily basis. It still took a lot of evaluation of those quests on our side, but overall, I think we were able to distribute the labor cost of this quite well.

Scott Rettberg: And it sounds like the students are learning a lot of different things, both about the subject matter, in this case, climate change, and I know in other cases it's been about different health conditions, but also learning about things like media production. I think that's a great form of engagement. Maybe just another question I had, but what sorts of effects do you think those projects have had beyond that? And you said a little bit about how the people you're trying to communicate with responded. But I'm also wondering, is there any way to do evaluation of the efficacy of these projects?

Patrick Jagoda: Yeah. This is something I've really learned over the last decade. I came into these projects as a humanist and an artist, as someone who knew how to make games and write about them, but not necessarily to evaluate them in any meaningful way. But across these projects, we've worked with economists, psychologists, sociologists, public health researchers, all of whom have been able to work with us to use qualitative and quantitative methods to get a sense of whether these games are effective, and that includes, you know — we make alternative reality games. We also make educational video games, we make board games, we make card games, and in all of those cases, we try to implement pretests and posttests when possible. Right? To see what somebody knows before playing the game, what somebody’s learned after playing the game. But we also have qualitative interviews and focus groups because sometimes content knowledge is limited or short-lasting. If you can get a sense that someone was excited and engaged by the unique form of the game that you gave them, or that they're suddenly excited to study art or science in a way that they weren't before, or that, even in some cases, that they're excited to go to college, where they weren't before. You know, you're inspiring their spirit and not just getting the content to them in a more effective way. Those qualitative measurements have been really crucial to us.

Scott Rettberg: I think that's probably really important where you're at, the University of Chicago, an elite university, but a lot of the surrounding areas include at risk students. A lot of students who wouldn't necessarily have the opportunity or interest in going to college. There's certainly some value just in making learning fun, right?

Patrick Jagoda: Yeah. The connections we're able to make with these young people are often amazing, too, because we learn about their lives, they get to be on campus, and maybe campus doesn't look quite as frightening to them as it did before. As with many universities in the US, there's an often-strange relationship between the university and the community, and we've been really trying to, over many years, make that boundary easier to cross. Show them that there are people at the university who care about them beyond a single project, and part of that has been a long term commitment to working with particular schools, to working with particular after school programs for creating paid opportunities for students to be able to be with us over the summer, because a lot of these young people otherwise would have to work, to make money from even an early age for their families. If we're able to offset some of those costs, they're getting an educational opportunity and still being able to make some money at the same time. It's taken us a while to figure out how to do that optimally, but I find that taking it slower and being really careful about the people that you're working with pays off in the end, instead of, again, parachuting into a particular neighborhood and just doing a one-off project and then disappearing.

Scott Rettberg: I want to give you a chance to plug your recent, multimedia book, Transmedia Stories: Narrative Methods for Public Health and Social justice. Of course, a lot of the stuff we've already been talking about is in there, but maybe you could just give us a basic rundown of the topics you explore in the book.

Patrick Jagoda: Yeah, this this was an open access book that I did through Stanford University Press with my collaborators, Ireashia Bennett and Ashlyn Sparrow, and it was basically covering about ten years’ worth of projects — a mix of projects, workshops, video games that we made, alternate reality games as well. Each chapter takes a different narrative method. Something like digital storytelling or speculative design or even thinking about alternate reality games, not as, genre, but as a method. What would it mean for an ARG to be a kind of experiment or an intervention? Each chapter gives a theoretical overview of that method, but then also does an in-depth case with the hope that people are reading this and can start to replicate some of these forms themselves. We included interactive timelines, we have short documentary videos, and there we have hundreds of color photos and curriculum items. The hope really is that people will see things in those curriculum items and be able to apply some of these projects to their own cities, to their own towns, to their own issues as they see fit. It's not about replicating exactly what we did. It's about an added form of inspiration for work people are already doing.

Scott Rettberg: Sort of a toolbox.

Patrick Jagoda: Exactly.

Scott Rettberg: And it’s open access.

Patrick Jagoda: It's totally open access, really oriented toward things like public health education, social sciences. It's taking the tools that we have in the humanities, in the arts, and it's moving it into this more social register.

Scott Rettberg: That's great. We'll link to the book online and the references below. I'm interested in the movement between narrative video games and alternate reality games. And as I understand it, sometimes movement between the two that you have in your projects. So how do participants experience those different modalities, and do you find a difference in the kinds of effects that those two forms of gameplay have?

Patrick Jagoda: Yeah, I respect and love both forms and I work within them, but I understand that they have different kinds of payouts, right? A video game is a piece of software. It's usually pre-authored. You can of course have updates and things like that, but usually for university-based projects or independent projects, those will be somewhat limited. You're creating a piece of software and passing it over to the players on the other end. It's much more like writing a novel and handing it over to readers. What I love about an alternate reality game, by distinction is that they're constantly improvised, and I think improvisation can be such a powerful part of learning and co learning between teachers and students. When we make an ARG, we may plan this thing for months and months and months and have a story and have puzzles and whatever, and the players can come on day one or day three and wreck everything that we've created. There's a constant attunement to feeling out who your players are, what they want, what they know, what they don't know, what is kind of difficult to them, what is very difficult to them, and adapting in real time. I've studied a lot of improvisational arts, whether that's improv and comedy, improv and jazz and martial arts, even in conversation. What we're doing now is improvisational. We didn't come up with these exact words, this exact order. Speech is just something we're more accustomed to improvising within. With these ARGs, we really wanted to have a mass collective improvisation. So rather than just like scene partners onstage improvising with each other, what would it mean if hundreds or thousands of people improvised over weeks or months? Because these are also long duration games. A video game you can pick up for a few hours, and maybe that game is 100 hours long, but it's like you're coming to it, you're leaving it behind, you're going to work. With an ARG you're living with it nonstop, like it is in the background of your world for weeks or months, so it becomes integrated into the way that you live, and it takes on reality effects that I think even the most realist or narrative rich or immersive video games aren't quite able to achieve.

Scott Rettberg: Right. It seems like you've done them — they range from very short, to not very short, but say —you have done some that are just a few days and some that are actually spread over the course of full semester.

Patrick Jagoda: We did. We did this crazy ARG in 2012, and I had no idea what I was doing back then. We ran this conference set at the University of Chicago, where the opening of the conference was a cocktail party, a wine party. Usually these things are, you know, maybe there's an announcement, maybe there's a short event, there's people milling around and talking, and we thought to ourselves, what if we turned this cocktail party into an ARG. We had, I think it was 16 prints that were in this space on the ninth floor of our Arts building, and people were walking around with wine or water or whatever, and there were these images of little rubber duckies all across the city of Chicago. As you're looking at these very weird pieces of art that we had made for this occasion, there were waiters walking around and giving them little cards, and these cards have strange actions that they could perform in the space. It was almost Fluxus like in some ways. The first people are playing by the rules of the cocktail party and not doing weird stuff, but there were just enough weird people coming from theater or the arts in there that suddenly the space started transforming into a very playful, childlike milieu. Eventually a few of those cards told people to take the images off, rip them up, and find things that were embedded within them. So, it ended up being this whole, crazy three-hour experience that turned from a conventional conference opening into something much more interactive. That was the shortest one we've ever done at about three hours. But I've run these games where they can go as long as six months sometimes, that's exhausting.

Scott Rettberg: I'm just imagining how much effort goes into all these projects and you clearly must still enjoy doing them. It takes a lot of time, on top of everything else you do.

Patrick Jagoda: Yeah. I mean, they're super fun. Usually when they're done, I'll try to sleep for a week, successfully or not. I tell myself I'm never doing this again, and then a month passes, and I feel like something's missing.

Scott Rettberg: Great. Let's come back and zero in a little bit about the history of transmedia storytelling, I know this is something you get a little bit into your book and how it's evolved, because I think there's a lot of different inputs into what became transmedia storytelling.

Patrick Jagoda: I think transmedia storytelling in the way that we have today wouldn't have been possible 30 years ago. There are technological reasons for that. There are cultural reasons for that as well. Even if you think about the history of television, TV was extremely episodic in the 50s, 60s and 70s, and you didn't really have long form, complex narrative television until the 90s and the 2000s. One of the reasons is, you just didn't have online forums and places where people could obsess about the Easter eggs and obsess about the complexities of a plot, before the moment of that fan community and that online forum. With TV, it was also the case that reality TV started up at that point and long form, complex television was something that —

Scott Rettberg: That could compete with that.

Patrick Jagoda: Yeah. There are all kinds of reasons. I think that multilinear works has moved from the space of the experimental into something that mainstream audiences are interested in. Of course, electronic literature and hypertext fiction are doing some of these things at an earlier moment.

Scott Rettberg: And that comes out of postmodern fiction in the 1970s, 1980s.

Patrick Jagoda: Precisely. You have things like Burroughs, Barthes, multilinear text of that sort, Robert Coover's The Babysitter, etc. and then, later, there's the ability to have multiverses, and a multiverse is something that a single reader or player or viewer probably won't experience by themselves. If you think about the DC multiverse, that's millions of pages, right? No one's going to read through all of that. Even the Marvel films and their various spin offs are just so complex that you need different people in conversation, in a network to even start making sense of that. And those are the popular versions of it. I think with a lot of transmedia storytelling, the idea is also that we now have so many different platforms, we have so many different media, what would it mean to tell a Frankensteinian story across that patchwork, rather than just in a single book or in a single piece of software, for instance?

Scott Rettberg: Yeah, it's incredibly ambitious in a way, in terms of just thinking about all the different narrative registers involved.

Patrick Jagoda: Yeah, it's crazy when you have a character contact players, say, via email or social media, and eventually you're putting on a full theatrical, in-person set piece that is following up on that, and then you're moving into a small video game, and then you're moving into a series of phone calls with a character. There's this kind of whiplash that can happen moving across all these different media. But there's also realism to it, right? Because we live in a world where we're constantly navigating among media.

Scott Rettberg: Among many different channels, ranging from our in-person interaction, to television, to games, to the life that we live online. Do you think there's anything about the specific media involved in the digital context that has driven us more towards this multilinear media engagement?

Patrick Jagoda: Yeah, I think we're able to multitask in ways that we weren't before. I mean, Katherine Hayles writes about this, for instance, right? In the way that she thinks about hyper mediation versus, say, the kind of focused reading that a novel or a poem might take us to. I think the way in which our attention is expanded and the ways in which links and other kinds of digital structures allow us to move in multiple directions make us more ready for those forms of storytelling. Even Netflix's Bandersnatch was a very popular TV version of multilinear storytelling that just wouldn't have been as popular ten years earlier.

Scott Rettberg: Yeah. I'm thinking too of the book, Everything Bad is Good For You, by Stephen Johnson, probably 15 years ago now or something like that. How do you think, when you're interacting a lot with these students, with these high school students, with middle school students, do you think that they're learning in a completely different way now? And maybe even one of the things I always think about is, maybe the structure of our thoughts, maybe our way of thinking has changed. I'm just wondering how much people are embracing this approach, because in a way, you might say, okay, let's throw out the textbooks. I'm wondering if there's any backlash that you get from people.

Patrick Jagoda: I do think we think very differently than we did before. I mean, even when I was growing up, there was much more of a 19th century industrial relationship to education. I memorized a lot of things. I mean, memorization isn't necessarily bad, right? There's a discourse against rudeness that I think is partially justified. But I think memorizing something also gives you proximity to it that you might not otherwise have. On the other hand, the devices that most of us carry in our pockets allow us not to remember things. The number of times you're out at dinner and someone can't remember the name of a film or TV show they want to talk about and quickly search for it because they know the pathway to get to the knowledge that they need. They just don't have the exact piece of content available to them at that moment, because their phones are, in a way, extensions of their sensoria. They're added pieces of memory that they have.

Scott Rettberg: Like I always explain to my wife if she asks me what our anniversary is, I say, “well, my Mac remembers it for me”.  It'll pop up with a reminder sometime in June.

Patrick Jagoda: I think that counts. It's like your arm or something, right? I mean, this is the way that McLuhan thought about media as well as extensions of ourselves. I know there are other theories of how media work, but I think in terms of learning, what's so interesting about a game —a video game in particular is that it moves through so many modalities. You have text, you have sound and music, you have images and animations, and you have forms of interactivity and social interaction. Compared that to a conventional lecture in which someone is talking to you or at you for an hour or an hour and a half. Given how many learning styles there are, the game, if it's well designed, has the potential to be much more effective than that very flat lecture. Now, I think there are benefits to lectures or podcasts as well, but I think that games can be a great supplement to the forms of education we've seen in the past.

Scott Rettberg: I think what you're doing, the wonderful thing about it is this hybrid experience where often the projects engage people online and there's always game play elements, but there is also that human interaction. One of the things I was really afraid of during the pandemic, as we got accustomed to life on zoom, was that we might just carry that mode over and certainly there is a drive towards that. In some quarters, why should you go to the expense of having lots of buildings for universities, when you could just turn on your computer and everyone gets educated like that? I think that value of humans being together in a space and having an embodied learning experience is so important.

Patrick Jagoda: Even during the pandemic. In 2020, when the stay-at-home orders came into place and our students were sent home and had to do the rest of their studies that year from home, my forecast lab group kicked into gear immediately and we designed a game on the fly called A Labyrinth. We basically designed it in like six weeks. It was running by April of 2020. The idea was to connect students, staff, even some faculty, to one another from a distance. We gave them quests that also allowed them to create creative pieces together at a distance outside. There were pieces that they would film or record with one another, not fully socially isolated, but socially distancing at the same time. There was one group I remember that recorded this dance where they were at all times, three feet apart, wearing masks outside. At that moment, it was this beautiful moment of being together in the park but still honoring the different aspects of what we thought that moment was about.

Scott Rettberg: So weird. I remember going to — one of my students had a party after finishing her PhD, and she loved music and dancing. She's a DJ. We actually did have a five-foot space to dance for anybody. It's a big group. And we’re kind of boogieing about five feet from each other.

Patrick Jagoda: That's awesome.

Scott Rettberg: Let's talk a little bit about some of your new projects, or at least one of them. One that intrigues me, especially, is this project Encounter. This involves live performance in a very kind of direct way, gameplay and storytelling and one on one human interaction.

Patrick Jagoda: Yeah. This is, again, a project that the Forecast Lab has been working on, we made all of these big ARGs, and we thought to ourselves, can we go small for once? Can we actually focus on something that maybe involves only one actor? The idea here was to create an improvised piece with one actor via live streaming, who's interacting with a bunch of people at home. Every single performance is unique, where that person is walking around a domestic space and the people at home are typing to one another and seeing that chat come up on screen in the way you would on Twitch, and suddenly that person in the room hears what they're typing, as if it were a voice coming to them. The first move of this game, if you want to call it that, is for them to look into the distance and say, “Who are you?” And at that moment, the audience can decide, we’re an alien swarm or a ghost who has come to haunt you. We’re a voice from the future, we’re death come to collect your soul, etc., etc.

Scott Rettberg: They're voting on this?

Patrick Jagoda: We have up voting mechanisms built into this platform. Not all of the text is being communicated to the actor. The director is actually talking into an earpiece and giving the actor key elements, but to the audience, it feels like they're having a collective conversation with this actor. Every single time, the scene, the narrative arc is unique. So, the idea was to create a piece of media performance that was also an infinite storytelling machine through a layered or scaffolded improv. We're still working on it, but we've been experimenting with different small performances, and truly, every time the story is different.

Scott Rettberg: Yeah, that's one of the things I like about your work, too, is that they often very clearly function as experiments and new types of narrative at the same time as many of the works, are experiments and different kinds of communication, social problems and health problems, and at the same time, they’re artworks, right? So that you're able to both be an experimental researcher and an artist at the same time. I'd imagine, is that exciting as well for the people who are coming from completely different fields? Like say, medical health professionals.

Patrick Jagoda: Yeah, like you, I think I'm excited both about the way that you write about e-lit, and you have also made e-lit, there's something that you learn on both ends when you theorize something, you find categories of work that people haven't already made. When you're making work, you realize that there are details that people aren't necessarily thinking about or writing about. And then there's the piece that you're describing, which is bringing in people from fields that are so distant that they would have normally never had a relationship to the thing you're making. There's such big vocabulary differences, for instance, between me coming from an English department and my collaborator in the medical school, but we're constantly teaching one another things, she's teaching me about qualitative, quantitative methods, how to set up a research study, things like that. I'm hopefully introducing to her how the granular aspects of game design can produce fundamentally different experiences and outcomes, and how the smallest aesthetic decision can be this major hinge in someone's memory and their desire to move forward. We're coming at this with different intensities, different vocabularies, different methods. But we're still making the same project. There's constant learning which is exciting.

Scott Rettberg: Let's wrap up by switching to another project that you're working on that I think is very exciting. Something like freedom. This is a project you're developing with Ashlyn Sparrow that's focused on the intersection of game studies and black studies and the other thing that's really intriguing about this project is that it involves both a book and a companion video game you’re developing. Can you explain what you're trying to tackle here and how the game will relate to the content of the book?

Patrick Jagoda: Yeah, this is a project that's at a very early stage. Ashlyn and I have given some presentations on it so far and have an essay that we're finishing now that will probably end up being a version of the first chapter. This project came from a real interest of the intersection between black studies and game studies and media theory. It came initially from this idea that so many people in game studies talk about choice, but not necessarily about freedom, right? Choice is this often binary thing, or at least this limited movement and so many decision trees and things that we do in games come down to choice, and sometimes choice and freedom are treated as being similar to one another, especially in places like the United States, where getting to make consumer decisions is one of the core definitions of freedom, at least for a particular group of people at a particular time. But we were interested in how hard it is actually to talk about freedom as a concept within the realm of games. We both love games, and we both think about issues of social justice, especially as organized around race. And yet, the nature of that intersection is very opaque. There's certainly writing at that intersection, but we wanted to delve deep into that concept and some other adjacent ones. The video game we've started to work on is called Afterlife. That's also an attempt to maybe take up some of these questions about freedom and digital media in the context of the history of slavery, for instance, or racial capitalism, and hopefully do something aesthetically interesting with it. We're thinking about it less as a direct companion piece to the book, because it's really for a slightly different audience, but we thought it might be interesting to take our time and work on the book and the game at the same time and see how they cross-pollinate.

Scott Rettberg: Yeah, I'm wondering, are you learning things about — I'm just trying to think of games that do encounter things like the history of American race relations and the history of slavery and the Middle Passage and things like that.

Patrick Jagoda: Yeah, we're working on everything from kind of older games from the late 80s or 90s that are very much about things like slave rebellions or moving from the south to the north during slavery to games like Assassin's Creed: Freedom Cry, which is a much more fictional, much more action based game that takes place in the Caribbean, that takes place in Haiti, and it's thinking about some of these issues, but for a much more popular audience. We're also thinking beyond video games. We're thinking about how tabletop story games like Coyote and Crow, for instance, or card games like Trading Races, can give us a different kind of improvisational access to what it is that freedom is or can be. And freedom is very hard to define. It obviously differs across cultural and historical context, but we think we have a way into it and around it through games.

Scott Rettberg: Well, thanks so much, Patrick. We've run out of time, if not completely out of air. Thanks so much for being with us and for visiting us in Bergen. It's been a great visit. You're here for a semester we've really enjoyed having you so far. We've been talking today with Patrick Jagoda, game maker, critic, theorist of alternate reality games and also just beginning to think about how race history in the United States is represented in video games, among other topics. So, thanks again.

Patrick Jagoda: Tusen takk, Scott.

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References:

This research is partially supported by the Research Council of Norway Centers of Excellence program, project number 332643, Center for Digital Narrative and project number 335129, Extending Digital Narrative.

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