Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticism made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed. – Herman Melville
The project is completed. My research and case notes are posted to a site on the Commons, here is the link: https://bartleby.commons.gc.cuny.edu/.
The actual game is posted here: https://bartleby.nfshost.com/.
Thank you for playing.
One of my favorite online games is The Kingdom of Loathing. Published by Asymmetric, it’s a simple, web-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) that does a comic take on the medieval quest venturing genre. The art is primitive, black line drawings of stick figures and mapping icons. All the fun is in the writing. Also, it’s free, works in any browser, and is low bandwidth. It’s been a long-time companion during airport waits.
Introduction panel from the Kingdom of Loathing
Because this game is mostly text-driven with the player making simple choices like fight or flight, what keeps folks playing is the feedback they get as they wander the various quests. It can get more complex the longer one plays, in terms of weapons and skills acquired, but the story is what makes it fun. Reading the professor’s suggestions revealed a software I didn’t know. Twine is an “open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories” (About Twine). Poking around its site, I started thinking about how I might have fun with an existing story, and Bartleby, the Scrivener came to mind.
Readers will recall the frustration of the characters in that story when they found they could not mediate any kind of change in Bartleby’s behavior. While much of the action takes place in law offices, mentions are made of what the characters do when they are not in Bartleby’s presence, like Turkey’s time spent in bars drinking, or Ginger Nut’s forays to the market to buy treats for the staff. For this game, we would find the different characters outside the office and follow them as they went about their daily lives. An example follows.
Location: A Local Tavern
History: Information about what dining was like around Wall Street in the 1850s. Include some pictures.
Description: The place is crowded, men standing at the long high bar, others seated at tables with benches.
The Scene: Turkey and Nippers are lunching together and their talk turns to Bartleby.
The Options: Turkey might have choices like ordering another beer or going to see the minister on Bartleby’s behalf. Nippers might have choices like ordering another coffee or changing the subject. Each choice takes the player to a new page that moves that storyline forward.
For me, the fun of the project will be in sharing more about what living and working were like in the New York of the 1850s. And, in mapping some game-play without having to use something really complex, like Unity.
“About the Kingdom.” The Kingdom of Loathing, Asymmetric Publications, LLC, 2020, www.kingdomofloathing.com/static.php?id=whatiskol.
“About Twine.” Twine / An Open-Source Tool for Telling Interactive, Nonlinear Stories, twinery.org/.
Melville, Herman. “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street by Herman Melville.” Project Gutenberg, 1 Feb. 2004, www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11231.
You might enjoy an early 2000s Bartleby hypertext edition that I’ve rediscovered via the Internet Archive’s invaluable Wayback Machine. It starts with Bartleby’s blank wall and goes from there: cute, no?
Pretty cool version of Bartleby edited by a Slate writer, Andrew Kahn, last year. It’s richly illustrated and contains a wide range of notes that provide historical context and a sense of some of the diversity of critical opinions on the text over the years since its publication. And there’s even an audiobook version on the site for good measure.
As such, it also points towards our second collaborative project together, in which we’ll be doing something similar (though with much lower production values!) with Benito Cereno, so as you check it out, think about what Kahn did to make this work. Or not.
Finally, although it sometimes seems like ancient history, Bartleby played a starring role in the Occupy Wall Street movement in and around Zuccotti Park in 2012. I’ve collated a few pieces from that time that capture the flavor of the way Bartleby haunted that space and that time:
You might enjoy an early 2000s Bartleby hypertext edition that I’ve rediscovered via the Internet Archive’s invaluable Wayback Machine. It starts with Bartleby’s blank wall and goes from there: cute, no?
Since we’ll start discussing Melville’s work next week, I thought I’d mention two Melvillian manifestations in culture today. First, the excellent publisher Melville House, a scrappy outfit that publishes an amazing list and has had the courage to tell Amazon to go %$#^ itself. If that wasn’t enough, well looky here:
Some of you will get this on the way home, as it were, but trust me: it’s pretty funny.
Second, enterprising academics have created a (decidedly adult) game out of the text of Moby Dick. Especially interesting looking forward to our “playing” Billy Budd via the Ivanhoe WordPress theme in a couple of months.
