The ludic edition: playful futures for digital scholarly editing

The practice of creating scholarly digital editions of literary texts has now a substantial body of examples of and scholarship about the problems and possibilities (and various methodologies) of digital editing. A sophisticated example can be found at Digital Thoreau (https://digitalthoreau.org/). This includes Walden: A Fluid Text Edition, which, using the Versioning Machine tool (http://v-machine.org/), enables comparison of seven drafts and a published edition of Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 book (all encoded in the Text Encoding Initiative’s XML-based markup). Digital Thoreau also includes The Readers’ Thoreau, an online edition of Walden that enables users to socially annotate the text at the paragraph level, using a WordPress plug-in, CommentPress. These two editions of Walden perhaps go some way to respond to Joris van Zundert’s 2016 call on digital editors and editions to “implement a form of hypertext that truly represents textual fluidity and text relations in a scholarly viable and computational tractable manner.” Van Zundert’s concern is that the digital scholarly edition will otherwise amount to little more than “a mere medium shift” that will “limit [the digital scholarly edition’s] expressiveness to that of print text, and…fail to explore the computational potential for digital text representation, analysis and interaction.” 

Yet van Zundert’s seemingly radical call, which expresses the desire to move away from the structures and logics of print, still closely adheres to a print-delimited idea of text (“hypertext,” “textual fluidity and text relations,” “digital text representation, analysis and interaction”). Does van Zundert’s conception fully exploit “the computational potential” of digital editing/editions? In "Gaming the Humanities: Digital Humanities, New Media, and Practice-Based Research" (2014), Patrick Jagoda claims that digital gaming “is increasingly becoming a key problematic of—that is, in different ways, a problem and possibility for—the digital humanities" (194), of which digital editing is a dominating practice. This paper will suggest that the twenty-first century is the moment for the ludic edition, which extends the digital edition through the digital or video game. Three examples of what might be considered a ludic edition will be considered: Walden, a game (USC Game Innovation Lab, 2017), Elsinore (Golden Glitch, 2019), and 80 Days (Inkle Studios, 2014). These each can be understood as a critical digital edition that makes use of the rich textual, extra-textual, procedural, interactive, and meaning-making affordances of the video game. In doing so, these ludic editions robustly explore “the computational potential” for the digital edition and present a radical challenge to and expansion of the idea of digital editing. The paper will take up editorial ideas around ‘the text,’ editions as interpretations, and readerly activity and consider them in connection with game design ideas around simulation, open world exploration, and player agency. By so doing, the paper aims to foreground how the ludic edition functions as, to use Jagoda’s term, a “problematic” for the future of digital scholarly editing.