As soon as I heard about this group project, I knew that Borges would be a good target, because his stories already exist in a literary gray space that subvert expectations for a straightforward narrative and beg to be played with. To really understand Borges’ stories you have to dive deeper than what the words are telling you the narrative is; you have to interact with the structure of the text. So, in terms of adapting a Borges story, I didn’t feel like we needed to strictly recreate a narrative. As a video game consumer, I am much more drawn to games based on their usable systems rather than their narrative. With this and with Borges in mind, I felt much more inclined to create a playable game that emulated the structure and themes of a text rather than the narrative.
A Pierre Menard game could have consisted of a playable version of Pierre Menard, his friends as a cast of characters, his writing as some kind of mini game. In a way, such a game would get you closer to the actual narrative of Pierre Menard, but it would also get you further away from the themes. Instead of keeping this barrier between reader and themes in the form of a main character, why not thrust the user into the primary role of author. Rather than use this game to learn about Pierre Menard as a story, you can use this game to do what Pierre Menard did, and thus get closer to what Borges was really talking about.
Pierre Menard says so many different things on the topic of authorship, the nebulous definition of being an author, what an author brings to a work besides just the words. When you turn something into a game and thus introduce a user, you are similarly blurring the definition of author. In keeping with the theme of authorship, Don Quiquote positions the user as the author of a new Don Quixote. The text you manage to match from Don Quixote creates a strange new version of Don Quixote that is (at least partially) textually identical to the original but also created uniquely by you.
I was the project leader as well as the main coder for Don Quiquote. I will admit that Don Quiquote turned out almost exactly like I originally dreamt it up and pitched to the class. We did, however, do a lot of brainstorming as a team about other avenues this game could have taken while still capturing the themes of the story, as well as how such a game could be fleshed out into a larger project that is more satisfying to interact with for the user. Ultimately, our product is largely a result of what I could get Python to easily do. We also did a lot of collaborative thinking about the themes of Pierre Menard so that we would have a well thought out presentation connecting our game to the source text. After our collaborative brainstorming, I distributed and assigned the work load.
