by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
Designing the Future = Gaming the Future?
“Art is often discussed as a form of play – and yet that playfulness, that sense of delight, is frequently absent from the discussions of the writing process, and of what we tend to call the work. But even T.S. `You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy’ Eliot was a fan of the Marx Brothers.“
One of my favorite places on Georgetown’s main campus is the New Acquisitions area in Lauinger Library – a dozen shelves just to the left of the entrance, a site whose prominence suggests the value the university places on the acquisition of books and the sponsorship of fresh scholarship.
Last week A Muse and a Maze was there, and I checked it out right away. It’s a new book about writing by Peter Turchi, author of Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer. That book invites the reader – the writer – to see the writing process in terms of metaphors connected with mapping and mapmaking, and it’s a classic as much as The Elements of Style (a book to which it is set in opposition) for writers of a certain kind.
In the new book – subtitled “Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic” – Turchi invites us to see writing as a complex form of play, akin to puzzle-making or the construction of labyrinths:
The composition of a story is a puzzle for the writer, whose job is to decide what to include, what to exclude, and how to organize the parts. The problem is compounded by the fact that, as fiction writers, we begin to write without knowing precisely what we’re trying to create.
It’s striking to me that Turchi’s language betrays the point he is making three times in those two sentences: all of a sudden the writer’s task or ambition is called a “job,” and all of a sudden the act of puzzle-making is a “problem … compounded” – and already the point has been narrowed to the writing of fiction when there’s no reason it shouldn’t describe nonfiction, poetry, and drama, too. But all that slippage suggests just how dug in we are in our habit of characterizing writing as work rather than as art or making.
One of Turchi’s great fellow travelers in the pursuit of higher play is Mimi Ito of Cal-Irvine. Her title is Professor in Residence and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Chair in Digital Media and Learning – but she’s known in the education world as the creator of Camp Minecraft, which uses techniques drawn from online gaming to involve middle-schoolers in time-honored educational pursuits in new ways.
Prof. Ito was in conversation Monday afternoon with Georgetown’s president, John J. DeGioia, in the university’s Designing the Future(s) of the University Series – which “aims to engage the university community in an exploration of issues facing academia and to experiment with new ways of delivering Georgetown’s signature education.”
Those issues are complicated – but I’d bet a good time was had by all. Call it Winter Camp.
