Critical Interactives

From Serious Games to Critical Interactives: The Development of a Concept

For the past 4 years, we have been attempting to imagine how ludic methods might function to call into question and change conventions of scholarly practice and pedagogy. At a most basic level, our goal has been to facilitate discussions about the contingency of knowledge and the kinds of politics underpinning knowledge production and dissemination. By inviting people to engage a variety of socially and historically informed interactive scenarios, we propose to encourage more complex understandings of how the world and knowledge about it come to be framed, represented, and made accessible. We are interested in drawing attention to the fact that someone—or more to the point, an institution or institutions—produces an account of the way things are. We encourage recognition that differing interpretations of, for example, an event are possible. In this way, we have been endeavoring to provoke inquiry into and discussion about how public policy, as articulated via the public institution of the university, shapes but also might work to make visible otherwise obfuscated processes that function to establish and perpetuate as status quo public understandings of institutional histories and the related sociocultural assumptions about place and relations of power.

Our narrative begins in June 2010, when the University of South Carolina hosted a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)–funded Humanities Gaming Institute (HGI) that brought to Columbia, South Carolina, more than 20 scholars from across the United States for 3 weeks of intensive conversation about and engagement with games as instruments for pedagogy and research. We, along with faculty colleague Simon Tarr, facilitated a unique opportunity for multidisciplinary interaction across a broad range of interests and levels of expertise. Not only committed to providing hands-on experience with existing games and game models, HGI personnel, along with three invited guest experts, each of whom served as a week-long consultant, strove to engage participants in discussions about theoretical and methodological issues of gaming and play, and how games and ludic methods might serve scholarly and educational goals.

The Institute was structured around three themes. The first week’s theme was “making and playing” and had, as guest consultant, technohumanist and cultural theorist Anne Balsamo from the University of Southern California. The second week’s theme was “designing play,” with game designer Tracy Fullerton, also from the University of Southern California, as the consultant. The third consultant was game designer and theorist Ian Bogost from Georgia Institute of Technology, who headed a week geared toward “effective play.” Readings and subsequent discussions drew from the guest experts’ scholarship and practice and were intended to benefit the proposals put forth by participants. In the first week, presentations for a nonspecialist audience were made by University of South Carolina students and faculty on Flash programming for gaming, on iPhone programming, and on Android programming, with the intent to familiarize participants with the three major technical trends in gaming development. Likewise, the 3 weeks offered—both formally and informally—opportunities for a variety of play across diverse medial platforms (e.g., cards, board games, hopscotch, videogames, etc.).

Early in the Institute, participants presented concepts for possible humanities-oriented game prototypes. Discussion with the guest consultants continued during the Institute about those proposals, with the consultants offering suggestions that would lead to further development of the plans and ideas. Subsequent to the Institute, we concluded that, of the projects presented, Dr. Ruth McClelland-Nugent’s Desperate Fishwives (DF) was the most suitable for immediate future development. A prototype of the project is currently under development with support from an NEH Level Two Start-up Grant. ¹ Conceptualized as a social history game, DF intends to introduce students at the college and advanced high school levels to the kinds of social and cultural practices that would have been “in play” in a 17th-century British village (see Figure 1). The game’s aesthetics rely on two-dimensional woodcut images appropriate to the period. This choice aims to make familiar to students the visual codes that correspond to the game’s historical setting. The game encourages students to learn about early modern British living by enacting historically informed social interactions and cultural rituals through individual and collective play. Up to nine students attempt simultaneously and cooperatively to resolve one of a variety of social ills common to the time (e.g., spouting heresy, abusing apprentices, premarital pregnancy). This ill threatens the communal life of the village and is best addressed by actions of the village citizens to forestall “the Big Bad”—the formal intervention of either church or state. Resolving the problem of the social ill is accomplished by successful accumulation of resources (goods, information, reputation) across a collective of characters, and the successful completion of a pertinent social ritual (e.g., gossip, economic noncooperation, shaming). At the conclusion of game play, students are presented with a chronology of their individual and collective game play so they might translate their gaming experiences into a prose account of “what happened” and thereby learn about the nature and complexities of historiography. Crucial to the educational experience will be the analysis of the game process for the students by the instructor and by the students’ ability to replay the game with the option for making different choices. Additional paths through the game might lead to an improved outcome (should the original play not result in the village’s having resolved the problem and thus intervention by the state), or might provide the opportunity better to understand the nature of historical interactions by comparing and even calibrating multiple instances of game play.

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Figure 1.

Desperate Fishwives interface

Inspired by the results of the HGI, and in conversation with development of the DF prototype, we team-taught a course called “Gaming the Humanities.” Undergraduate and graduate students from humanities and computer science read theoretical and practical texts about serious games and project development, and they debated terms such as “game,” “play,” “fun”—and the possible relations and/or dependencies among these. Mid-term, students formed project teams for the development of five different humanities game concepts: a first-response training simulation using as its point of departure the 2010 Haiti earthquake; a puzzle-oriented game raising questions about how the management of information enables control of “reality”; an adventure game attempting to apply an ethical measure to a player’s game play; and two projects taking up the racial history of the University of South Carolina—an interactive fiction and an augmented reality (AR) application. The course culminated in an evening of formal introduction to the projects (which were still very much works in progress) and an opportunity for attendees to stroll among the demonstration tables and interact with the different teams.

By the conclusion of the cross-college course, we had arrived at a realization: the insufficiency of the term game. Of habit, the word “game”—and its derivative, that is, gaming—connote fun. But the projects we are interested in pursuing do not promise fun. And in many cases, they intend to challenge habitual pleasures. Thus, we have begun to use the term critical interactives. The neologism underscores what is fundamental to the projects we are developing: engaging participants in ludic interaction with socially and politically sensitive, indeed controversial, subject matter. Informed by Mary Flanagan’s scholarship on “critical play” (2009) and Ian Bogost’s work on “procedural rhetoric” (2007), the term critical interactive proposes that there is another viable way to impart knowledge, build awareness, and provoke thinking and raise questions. Specifically, we imagine a mode of scholarship that invites people to imagine themselves as active participants in conversation with the materials of intellectual inquiry. What computers and their mobile and desktop interfaces offer is the possibility for more dynamic access to knowledge. In this regard, critical interactives are an alternative to the scholarly monograph, which continues to be the privileged vehicle for the dissemination of knowledge in the humanities. Certainly, critical interactives do not dispense with critical inquiry into socially, politically, and/or philosophically charged questions. But unlike traditional scholarly practice, they take advantage of ludic methods in order to invite an audience to engage critical—by which we mean, theoretically informed and ethically oriented—questions and/or problems that affect a community of individuals.

We contrast our notion of critical interactive with more familiar consumer- and tourist-oriented applications and programs, such as museum and historical site tours, which generally proceed in linear fashion. While they may have the display afforded to mobile devices and screens, they tend to be restricted to a narrative and often didactic treatment of content. Our notion of critical interactives includes the ludic devices of dialogue trees and multiple paths by means of which participants are afforded the capacity to move through content in diverse ways. Much of the attraction of games is the experience by the participants of a variety of options that can be selected and the uncertainty of the outcomes, because the outcomes depend on the nature and the quality of the “play.” These features are essential to our conception of critical interactive. The potential for surprise or discovery that play engenders is what we endeavor to achieve. More locally, we are interested in bringing into view how policy decisions at the level of the university have allowed for certain erasures regarding its own history and its relationship to the community of Columbia, South Carolina. And it is at the very level of the institution that we hope to accomplish this.

The University of South Carolina’s Historic Horseshoe as a “Landscape of Slavery”: A Case of an Institution’s Growth and Development

The University of South Carolina is the flagship research university of South Carolina. It is home to 14 degree-granting colleges and schools and boasts a student population of approximately 30,000 (Fall 2010). Established in 1801, ² the university has expanded around its original grounds. This “historic heart of the modern campus” (Weyeneth et al., 2011), formerly South Carolina College (SCC), is now known as the Horseshoe. Eleven of 14 antebellum buildings that comprised SCC, constructed between the years 1805 and 1860, remain. Now absent are the slave quarters and outbuildings (e.g., brick kitchens) that once defined the social space of the college. ³ That absence entails a fundamental erasure in the history of the institution—that of the slave labor that enabled the university’s early growth and development.

Our understanding of this history derives from work of colleague Bob Weyeneth (Department of History) and graduate students of Public History who in Spring 2011 published a robust scholarly website, “Slavery at South Carolina College, 1801-1865: The Foundations of the University of South Carolina,” dedicated to “[telling] the largely unknown and unfamiliar story of slavery at South Carolina College” (Weyeneth et al., 2011). In providing an account of the institution’s foundations, the website discloses what official histories leave unmentioned: “Slaves quite literally built the college [SCC]” (“Slaves & Campus Slavery”). Not only did their labor ensure the proper functioning of the college on a daily basis (e.g., cooking, serving meals, cleaning facilities, keeping the grounds, chopping wood, etc., for both faculty and students), but they also provided the “labor and skilled knowledge necessary to work under contractors who received credit for each building’s completion” (“Slaves & Campus Slavery”). More materially, their hands molded the very bricks out of which the still extant antebellum structures are built—including “the Wall”—a six foot nine inch tall brick wall that encloses the original campus grounds that constitute the Horseshoe.

To better understand what escapes notice in day-to-day traversals of the Horseshoe, it is necessary to consider slavery in the larger context of Columbia, South Carolina (ca. 1800s). Unlike slavery on plantations, urban slavery operated according to a flexible model of short-term service wherein individual slaves were “hired out”—that is, “temporarily leased”—to Columbia residents and institutions. In fact, most of the slaves who worked at SCC were not owned by the institution or its faculty (and students were not permitted to bring slaves with them, although faculty were permitted their slaves). As the Weyeneth et al. (2011), website explains, “College officials relied on the hiring-out system” (“The Hiring-out System”). At the same time the hiring-out system supplied SCC with labor necessary for maintaining its daily operations, it provided a means for owners “[to generate] revenue from their slaves’ labor without having an investment in the actual work itself” (“The Hiring-out System”). On one hand, as Weyeneth et al. note, the hiring-out system demonstrates slavery’s flexibility; on the other hand, it allows for a convenient (and for some, a necessary) institutional amnesia.

Not only are the slave quarters and outbuildings absent from the modern Horseshoe, so is mention by the university of this part of its history. Evidence of this policy of institutional forgetting can be obtained by a visit to the University of South Carolina’s website (http://www.sc.edu/). Click the “About the University” tab and one arrives at a page where, if one scrolls down far enough, she can select a link called “University history.” Beneath the title appearing at the top of the newly accessed page, one reads in bold font, the following: “Founded in 1801, then-South Carolina College flourished pre-Civil War, overcame post-war struggles, was rechartered in 1906 as a university, and transformed itself as a national institution in the 20th and 21st centuries” (http://www.sc.edu/universityhistory/index.shtml). A proclamation of perseverance, aspiration, and adaptability, the text points to a history of trials overcome and accomplishments attained. Subsequent text appearing in regular font offers an account of the institution’s laudable development. An early instance of the “Southern public college movement spurred by Thomas Jefferson” and bearer of the nation’s “first freestanding college library building [South Caroliniana Library],” SCC managed to survive both an 1811 earthquake and an 1855 fire. Moreover, the institution overcame the ravages of the Civil War to become the “only Southern state university to admit and grant degrees to African-American students during the Reconstruction era.” However, this policy of integration only lasted 4 years when the institution closed its doors in 1877. Despite this admission, what the regular visitor to the website is invited to imagine on the whole is a vibrant and forward-thinking institution that has overcome various obstacles to arrive at well-deserved cultural recognition and academic reputation. While this claim to accomplishment is valid broadly speaking, it is worth taking a closer look at how it functions to reframe—disavow, even—a legacy it might, and we contend ought to, acknowledge.

Interestingly, the concluding words on the “University history” page promise a future to match the university’s “rich past.” In this forecast lurks a deep silence. Nowhere in the preceding account is there mention of the specific labor underpinning this claim to richness. Perhaps it is possible that one might interpret the statement that “[SCC had earned] a reputation as the training ground for South Carolina’s antebellum elite” to be an indirect acknowledgement of the history that remains off-page and out of view. For example, “antebellum elite” might infer a propertied wealth of a necessarily white gentry whose livelihood depended on slaves. And mention of the terms “antebellum” and “secession” locate SCC and its history quite clearly in the South where the institution of slavery was embraced. Still, the decision to avoid explicit mention of slavery and its contribution to the establishment of SCC and its infrastructure makes possible a critique. ⁴ We do not intend “critique” to connote criticism in the negative sense of the term. Rather, we are interested in inviting awareness and informed conversation about a history that is materially relevant to what the institution is today so as to shape what it might become. Such a conversation would seem to be necessary if the institution is to become a university for the entire population of the state. As is true of most public flagship institutions in the South, the university’s 11% African American undergraduate enrollment is not reflective of the state’s 28% African American population. ⁵

Ghosts of the Horseshoe (Ghosts) ⁶ : Critically Interacting with Lasting Effects of Institutional Policy

The Ghosts project endeavors to bring into view—literally, on mobile micro screens (iPhones and iPads in the first versions)—the largely unknown history of slavery that made materially possible the physical site of what is now the University of South Carolina. Its deployment of game mechanics and architectures aims to generate awareness of and questioning about what might otherwise seem status quo. It features the University of South Carolina’s historic Horseshoe, which is and has been “central” to campus and to campus happenings. As a site, it is rarely (if at all) questioned by students or visitors who traverse its grounds. We can provide a means for changing this perception by inviting those who are on-site to “see” the site through a different “lens”—one that provokes and reminds visitors, students, scholars, administrators, laborers, and members of the surrounding community of the institution’s complex history. As indicated in the previous section, this provocation is inspired by the research already conducted by Weyeneth et al. (2011).

At present we envision three distinct “layers” that address overlapping and complementary points of departure for thinking about and engaging with the historic Horseshoe: (a) the historic campus Wall that still today delineates the boundaries of the original SCC, (b) the “disappeared” slave quarters and kitchen buildings that historians can document and map but that modern visitors to the Horseshoe can no longer see, and (c) the story of slaves and slavery at South Carolina College that links the extant and missing buildings into a comprehensible “landscape of slavery.” Those traversing the site with Wi-Fi- and GPS-enabled screen technologies, such as the iPhone, will be invited to download the AR application. Likewise, we foresee the university’s Visitor’s Center, the university’s freshman orientation course (UNIV 101), and [public] history courses directing people to the application. Those who elect to participate will be able to activate one or more of the three layers.

As currently planned, activation of any one of the application’s layers will mobilize AR and Wi-Fi functionality as well as location awareness. Activating layer “a” will draw attention to the character and legacy of the University of South Carolina Wall. As one explores the historic Wall in real time, one will have access to an accruing combination of narratives that suggest the ways in which places acquire identities. The narrative will evolve in relation to a participant’s ⁷ real-time physical exploration of the Wall as it is imagined to operate variously as perimeter, boundary, threshold, barrier, and so on. The point is to encourage participants to consider how binaries such as inside-outside and inclusion-exclusion have functioned to define the institution of the University as a site for the organization and management of people. Layer “b” will represent virtual reconstructions on mobile microscreens of, for example, once extant antebellum outbuildings in the context of the many still-standing buildings (see Figure 2). One of the intentions of this architectural “ghosting” is to draw attention to the ways that a history of place requires an “eye” for how institutional landscapes take shape in the context of politically motivated (matters of funding, leadership, etc.) physical transformation, and that such transformation always results not just in material loss of some sort but also in a loss of the historical context in which the remaining infrastructure was built. Finally, layer “c” focuses on people, that is, the slaves (both named and unnamed), students, and faculty, who worked and lived on the premises during the antebellum period. For example, as one walks the Horseshoe grounds, one will have opportunities to encounter “ghosts” that materialize as interference in the real-time camera image. These “glitched landscapes” function to represent those whose histories have largely been forgotten or erased (see Figure 3). Thus, layer “c” makes visible how slaves and racial slavery underpin the growth and expansion of an institution such as the University of South Carolina. ⁸

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Figure 2.

Buildings/outbuildings of South Carolina College

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Figure 3.

An augmented reality layering of the Ghosts of the Horseshoe

Unlike DF, which deploys a games architecture to focus student-players’ attention on modes of sociality particular to a 17th-century British village, Ghosts challenges its participants to engage with an unrecognized part of the history that made possible the current institution that is the University of South Carolina. As we have indicated, this history includes an institution’s deployment of policies that promoted and relied on slavery and then its failure to disclose fully this practice. As a critical interactive, then, Ghosts charges its participants to acknowledge their relation to this history and embrace a responsibility to a legacy that has been obfuscated—and continues to be so. In other words, Ghosts of the Horseshoe aims to intervene in how people approach, “see,” and experience the physical grounds of the Horseshoe as a site of historical erasure. It does so in order to counter what has been a persistent and unfortunate social blindness.

Critical Interactives: A Medium for Affective Change

We believe that the interactive AR experience can foster a greater understanding of and responsibility to complexly polemical histories and other socially and politically sensitive content. This is the kind of work for which we would propose critical interactives. In making this claim, we take our cue from recent scholarship regarding the digital humanities. ⁹ Multimodal and transdisciplinary, the digital humanities have the potential—and according to some, the obligation—to play a pronounced role in shaping higher education for the needs of our postindustrial present. Alan Liu (2011), for example, argues that the digital humanities ought to “help the humanities and higher education serve a larger society so as to show the distinct value of the humanities” (p. 30). For Liu, the digital humanities should not simply be a reflection of the “postindustrial paradigm of knowledge work” that informs current service-oriented business models (p. 10). Long-distance education—which, as a money-generating extension of the university, promises the possibility of increasing enrollments without incurring the costs of hiring additional faculty and staff or building and outfitting instructional facilities—functions according to this logic of flexibility, efficiency, and marketability. What Liu underscores, in contrast, is the digital humanities’ capacity to raise “new kinds of questions” not about technology but questions that involve technology, that are possible by the very fact of technology (p. 21). In other words, the digital humanities understand that technologies (here, Liu means computers) participate as “co-discoverers” in scholarly inquiry, intellectual pursuit, and academic productivity (p. 22).

Important to underscore is Liu’s point that digital humanities are “uniquely positioned” to serve society. At a time when the humanities have suffered “systematic defunding by governments and public university systems,” the digital humanities have become “capacious and multifaceted enough” to stand-in (metonymically speaking) for the study of human culture. But in order to fulfill the field’s potential, digital humanities scholars, as Liu (2011) charges, will need to recognize the “complex nature of the higher-education institutions” for which they work (p. 28). Part of this involves developing an awareness of the fact that higher education—technical and vocational schools, community colleges, state and private universities—is one among a number of institutions that mediate between people and states, and that, as an institution, higher education mediates differently than do other institutions (e.g., the military or business). The question, then, becomes how the technologies employed by the digital humanities participate in what Liu deems the possibility of the digital humanities: both advocacy for the value of humanities-oriented inquiry and critique of higher education’s embrace of a postindustrial business model and related policy practices.

One way of approaching an answer to these questions is to consider what the humanities become in the context of ever more advanced digital technologies and processes. According to Liu (2011), it is a matter of size: “big humanities projects” by “big humanities” (a la “big science”; p. 20). As he discusses, the qualitative change that digital humanities afford is a consequence of “scaling.” Referring largely to projects based on text corpora, Liu points out that all projects in which experts attempt to maintain “scholarly quality-control” run up against a barrier when a corpus grows larger than what can be managed by human experts. Expanding to the terabyte and petaflop levels of storage and supercomputing necessarily require algorithmic methods for processing data. Such methods fail to generate outputs that abide by the criteria defining “standards of scholarship” as conventionally understood. Instead, digital humanities need to establish new standards that take into account the importance of “theorizing the ‘scaling up’ of information” (Liu, 2011, p. 20)—especially as “scaling up” applies to humanistic phenomena themselves (e.g., proliferation of visual, audio, textual artifacts).

We offer critical interactives, such as DF and Ghosts (described above), as an example of both how to leverage scale for thinking about how digital humanities might pursue scholarly inquiry and how to promote such strategies of inquiry in a way that does not simply extend the logic—that is, expand the scale—of distance education as a policy for the purposes of fiscal gain. In the first instance, robust critical interactives offer a multiplicity of interactions by means of which participants can engage different (albeit related) lines of inquiry. In the case of Ghosts, inquiry might pursue insights about relations between official institutional history and local histories, questions of historical artifacts and their degree of visibility and/or accessibility (i.e., to a public or community), or realizations about the (dis)connections between written history and historiography (the process of writing history). Lacking any determinate [linear] narrative, argument, or trajectory of thinking, critical interactives extend inquiry beyond the ability of any one scholar who might enumerate a priori a desired outcome of learning. Rather, it is precisely the case that critical interactives provide a multiplicity of possible interactions such that participants might attain an understanding of, for example, history, not as a definitive account of what happened “back then” but as one possible interpretation of the past as present evidence might make possible. In other words, critical interactives invite participants to think about and recognize the workings of historically situated sociocultural logics through experience. They do not simply require the reception and accumulation of information, that is, about culture and society, as if such information were simply delivered via a lecture or series of lectures. Rather, they encourage the construction of an understanding that is oriented toward an affective relation to content.

Here, we are interested in empathy and its capacity for effecting change in the way people understand and inhabit the histories that make possible their surroundings, shape community, and underpin institutional infrastructure. We draw on the work of philosopher John Protevi, political scientist William E. Connolly, digital humanist Cathy N. Davidson, and neurophysiologist Antonio Damasio in order to suggest how moments of empathic identification (e.g., with ghostly personages from antebellum South Carolina) might alter habitual ways of thinking about the past such that sociocultural blindnesses—as institutionalized by social and political policies perpetuating deep-seated allegiances to notions of “the South,” as well as more local policies that enable or facilitate forgetting—are challenged (Connolly, 2002; Damasio, 2010; Davidson, 2011; Protevi, 2009). Happening at the neurophysiological level of being (wherein mirror neurons instantiate a relational “as if” of simulation, Damasio, 2010, pp. 102-103), empathy is “an immediate emotional link” that binds people together (Protevi, 2009, p. xv). Such moments open onto what Protevi calls “adaptive response” (p. 54). In other words, empathy invites people to “see” (i.e., feel) things differently and, therefore, “rearrange” (p. 38) their ways of inhabiting the world. Because it is “an important instance of affective cognition” (p. 9) empathy can work to counter socialized patterns of thinking that abide and reify categories of race, gender, and so on. Insofar as we experience empathy, there is the possibility for modifying our cognitive habits (Protevi, 2009, p. 54), for example, as these register and respond to demographic designations that interpret people according to population-oriented measures, categories, and statistics (Protevi, 2009, p. 35). How to “reeducate” (Connolly, 2002, p. 75) people’s habituated modes of thinking about their relation to others and, moreover, how to encourage a different understanding of, in the case of Ghosts, an institution and its racial history: This is our project.

We are, however, aware of the challenges we face. In particular, we realize there is no guarantee that a critical interactive such as Ghosts will succeed in eliciting empathy. But we contend that the affordances of mobile micro screens—connectivity, location awareness, and the potential for accessing and interacting with a variety of content—will allow participants to become part of a larger story of place, which might engender the conditions of possibility for empathic identification. In this regard, we agree with Davidson’s point that our technologies and our bodies are entwined in ways that defy the kind of mechanistic “on and off” logic that came to define life during industrialization (Davidson, 2011, p. 173). And we embrace her call to challenge a 20th-century logic that persists in upholding out-of-date disciplinary practices that equip (i.e., train) people to “fit” neatly into categories and that prescribe what one can or should know—and how. We likewise contend that access to knowledge ought to happen in ways that “speak” to people who now live in the 21st century. In this regard, we heed Davidson’s observation that we are actually better equipped for “interaction, collaboration, customizing, remixing, iteration, and reiteration” (p. 179), processes that foster a very different capacity for learning, working, and relating. Insofar as Ghosts, as a critical interactive, deploys a strategy compatible with and conducive to 21st century ways of thinking, it promises to “meet” people where they are and in a manner with which they are familiar—in real-time via the mobile microscreens they carry with them everywhere.

Of course, “meeting” people where they are via an interface that encourages interaction means that a project such as Ghosts will bear the burden of complexity. That is, in being ludic, multithreaded, and iterative in nature, critical interactives like the ones we have described here have too many paths that might be traversed. Control over any participant’s experience is impossible to program. (This is analogous to the “scaling up” problem mentioned by Liu with regard to text corpora.) As is typical of games with dialogue trees, ¹⁰ we will be able to control only locally the transitions from one part of the program to another; we will not be able to exert global control. But we will be able to crowdsource user feedback, gathering actual data about patterns in and volume of participation (similar to the data aggregation of Google Analytics). Doing so will allow us to refine how Ghosts “delivers” its content, making it possible for us to offer an increasingly more dynamic and intuitive interface, one that will more effectively convey the unacknowledged history of SCC and thereby inspire empathy for “the landscape of slavery” that is foundational to the University of South Carolina.

Conclusion

Davidson (2011) advocates gaming as a way to engage people in learning. Jane McGonigal (2011) makes a similar claim in her book Reality Is Broken. But some topics simply are not suitable for a “game,” and some subjects really do require serious, that is, critical, engagement and reflection. We propose critical interactives as a medium for conveying socially and politically sensitive material to a diverse population of students, faculty, administrators, community members, and visitors, and we believe our path from “serious games” to critical interactives can serve as an example. We do not promise “fun.” We do, however, want to engage people. What we have learned from our progression from serious games to critical interactives is that the educational leverage that comes from gaming is from the engagement and active participation that is not found in lectures and guided tours. We have found that the ludic method “works” in engaging participants. Even as we do not yet have measures to support this claim empirically, our experiences with two of our own team-taught classes (Fall 2011 and Fall 2012), together with discussions with faculty teaching UNIV 101 and local educational experts (K-12) provide consistent if anecdotal feedback that the digital experience can provoke thought and discussion and contribute to a greater understanding of this history.

Our goal is for participants to come to a sense of empathy with the history and the historical figures by being drawn into relation with the places in which the history occurred. We aim to turn the mobile microscreen into a “window” onto the past, one whose (real-time) image responds to touch, gesture, and positionality. In this way, the digital experience has the power to “fill in the gaps” where the official institutional history falls short. Not just the digital but more specifically, the mobile and, therefore, embodied experience facilitates a deeper empathy with the history and historical figures. It is not just that one imagines the work of slaves forming, firing, and carrying bricks and, subsequently, building a wall, for example, but that one becomes capable of imagining in situ the daily labor done by slaves to create the wall that stands physically before him or her today. The mobile device used by a participant, backed by a server storing the paths taken by him or her and by the other participants, can provide the participant with a context of place and of presence in the history. We feel it would be difficult to present this in other ways or with other media. The use of present-day real-time imagery from the camera, with overlays from archival photos and with digitally modeled images of slave quarters and outbuildings no longer in existence, relies on the power of the digital device to be in the present and yet to display the imagery of the past. These mobile devices equipped with cameras, Wi-Fi connectivity and location-awareness provide for an augmented, interactive, iterative—and real-time—engagement with this history and, as such, mitigate the silences that mark, quite literally, the grounds of the University of South Carolina.