Playing with difficult readings

PHATIKS LAB

The six current games are the ones we that work. In the Lab they just have to fun, interesting, possibly brilliant: can we cross a literary and an arcade classic? You don't know 'til you try. So we might see what happens if we drop some more coins in the slot and give Macbeth a couple more lives, or gobble our way through a paragraph of Dickens, or wonder how the old game Pong might help teach poetry or prose. Then hope the prototypes grow up into full, effective Phatiks games.

How the Lab works

Reimagining the reading process

A Lab prototype starts by thinking differently about reading: what specific aspect of that complex process are we aiming to capture? Is it mechanical or cognitive? And which aspect of either?

Making the process visible

We then ask: what might this reader response look like if you could see it? Can we do that literally or metaphorically? Then we try it, and try it again, until we have something that makes us laugh, or think, or start all over again.

Keeping it all in perspective

We have high hopes but hope we go easy on the big claims. And while we don't limit our imaginations, we live by the limits our safeguards set. We don't collect pupil data, and nothing our users type will find its way to a hungry AI.

FIRST OUT OF THE LAB

AFFECTONAUT

af·fec·to·naut n. /əˈfɛk·tə·nɔːt/ a voyager through affect, the emotional intensity a poem stirs in its reader, the atmosphere of the text, as opposed to its intellectual meaning. From affect + Greek nautēs, a sailor.

Fly through a poem as scrolls towards you, moving as the poem moves you: Your position is your response. When you're through you can look at your flightpath, and compare your readings with experts or others or even your own re-readings.

Two flights, two questions

First pass: As each lines comes, you veer right when the poem lifts you; right when it darkens. Second pass: drift one way when you feel the speaker's feeling, another if you think they're thinking.

The flight map

Study your flightpath each time you fly, compare with other reader responses, or with your own responses to different poems. And every move is a chance to argue, reflect, and return to the text itself.

Expert guidelines

Readers can follow an expert reading from a teacher or a critic. Appearing as a guideline or ghost while you fly, it's a live teaching tool. Divergence means discussion and re-reading.

Fly Affectonaut Tryable now: William Blake, 'The Sick Rose' · Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnet 43