The first time I tried to read Tristram Shandy, I couldn’t get into it. I’d never even heard of it until I saw A Cock and Bull Story—the 2006 film adaptation. I went to the theater having no idea what it was about, but I loved it, and the next day went to the library to check the book out. But while the movie delighted, the book felt like such a slog! It was long-winded, and winding, and how could you be telling a story about your life and still not be born in it? Laurence Sterne was setting up quite challenge for his reader, and I just wasn’t ready for it then.

So when it was suggested in class for this project, I knew I wanted try again. Certainly it was motivating to finish the first book knowing that I had to. It also helped that we agreed to collectively annotate Book 1 with Hypothesis, so I could see as we were all reading along together the things that we were all being drawn, and seeing things my teammates were catching that I had missed.

Through group discussions inside and outside of class, we figured out what we were most drawn to in the story, and ways in which those would inform what a playable version of Tristram could look like. Dashes were one of the first things to come up—there are so many of them, and dashes within dashes within dashes. Punctuation and symbols in general are so visually prominent in the text. We also agreed it would be an interesting place to begin for two reasons: 1) Tristram is a story told through a more is more approach, so could we start from the least amount of the story and still be able to understand any of it? And 2) when you do text analysis one of the first steps is cleaning the text, which means removing punctuation, so we wanted to turn that expectation on its head.

We initially got caught up in trying to turn Tristram into an actual game, and we couldn’t quite figure what the premise or the goals would be, or how a player would win. But then we realized the challenge wasn’t to make a game, exactly, it was just to make the text playable. Which is when we started thinking about how to capture our experience of reading Tristram—equal parts thrilling and frustrating—and how we could help our player share in that experience.

We figured one reason someone might want to play Tristram would be to get through the story faster than just doing a straight read, so we leaned into the idea of trying to see what the least amount of the story is that we could give to players and still have them be able to understand the story. Is it the characters? Are there a few words in the story that are the most important? Is it the parts where the story talks about itself as a story? Or the parts where it commands the reader to do something?

Each time you click around, the amount of story that we give you expands, but the margins also expand, so the space for the text shrinks, and you have to work harder to scroll through to read the story. You have to be willing to work harder and stick around longer, which we thought captured the essence of Sterne’s many digressions. The story is one that resists coming to a point, or even coming to an end, and this is what we’re doing by increasing the margins each time we reveal more of the text. The digressions are the point, so stay awhile and get lost in them with us.

This was a very collaborative effort on the part of our team—Patricia, Maria, Kai, and myself. The user experience came about through our many conversations together, and we all QA’ed it and gave feedback at every step. For my own part, I created the “TLDR”/erasure poems for each chapter. I was inspired by Chapter 15, in which just a few words within the contract appear in bold. It felt like a funny little erasure poem. And then Sterne followed it with a summary “in three words” that was still longer than three words, so I thought, what if I made an erasure poem of each chapter of just “three” words. It was honestly a lot of fun, and it made me reflect one what I thought were the most interesting aspects of each chapter. I also had the idea that we create a long, digressive experience for the player before we even let them play the game. Maria and I worked on tweaking the dedication text that Sterne wrote together, and then we collaboratively wrote the introduction/instructions page together. At times we were writing in the Google doc at the same time, and we really played off of one another and were inspired by one another with our many different digressions along the way. In the end I think we wrote something here Sterne himself would be very proud of. And finally, I presented our project for the class.

This project overall was a lot of fun to work on, and I believe I speak for all of us when I say that it really enhanced our experience and appreciation of reading Tristram Shandy, and we think it will do so for our players as well.

Project link: https://patriciabelen.github.io/tristram-shady/web/00.html