“Critical Interactives”

In June 2010, the University of South Carolina hosted a NEH-funded Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities focused on serious games in the humanities. The three-week summer intensive proved pivotal. It established an interdisciplinary team that has [or who have] obtained subsequent NEH funding for the development of a social history game, Desperate Fishwives (DF), inspired by HGI participant Dr. Ruth McClelland-Nugent (Augusta State University, GA). A functioning prototype of DF will be play-tested in McClelland-Nugent’s classes in Spring 2012. Work on DF has proceeded in tandem with a cross-College team-taught course called “Gaming the Humanities,” and a second project, called “Ghosts of South Carolina College” (GSCC), has emerged from this pedagogical experiment. The authors present the worked example of DF and GSCC as distinct moments in a process that has led to rethinking “serious games” in terms of “critical interactives.”