Project Information
Overview
The Game and Interactive Narrative Lab is a humanities-based lab at DKU that brings a humanistic perspective to games and game narratives in particular. It is animated by a central question: what changes when a story becomes something you operate rather than something you receive?
When we play rather than read or watch, interpretation becomes participation; a worldview becomes a system we inhabit and act inside; and judging a moral situation becomes making a choice and living with its consequences. The lab approaches games as a working laboratory for questions about identity, agency, history, relation, moral responsibility, and cultural values.
The lab brings together analysis and creation across humanities disciplines, including history, philosophy, religious studies, environmental humanities, and gender studies.
Themes
In its first year, the lab focuses on three thematic lenses:
- Mythology and folklore
- Gender and class
- Environment and nonhuman
These themes serve not only as topics to illustrate, but as lenses that shape what we experience in games and what we can build into one. They open questions about how myth and folklore are reauthored as playable systems, how games model ecological and nonhuman time and agency, and how gender and class are encoded in interactive structure and choice.
Method
The lab pairs analysis with creation.
On the analytic side, participants read a game as both a text and a system, attending to its writing, characters, dialogue, events, environmental storytelling, and the rules and processes that organize play. Particular attention is given to the interplay of narrative and mechanics, including moments of ludonarrative dissonance, where a game’s ethics, ideology, and worldview often become most legible.
On the creative side, participants develop interactive narratives, treating making as a form of research rather than production. Criticality and creativity form a loop: what we read shapes what we make, and making returns us to reading with better questions.
Activities & Outcomes
The lab runs on a recurring cycle of playing, discussing, writing, making, and sharing. Activities include a student-led critical playing group, writing and worldbuilding workshops, game jams, and regular feedback and revision of creative and critical work. The lab is also public-facing by design, with an annual symposium and digital exhibition that bring students into dialogue with scholars, writers, designers, and DKU and Duke colleagues. Each activity contributes to the lab’s shared archive, allowing its work to accumulate over time.
The lab produces a growing body of creative, scholarly, and collaborative work. Outcomes include a collaborative digital archive of critical analyses, reflections, discussion logs, and event documentation; interactive narratives, small narrative games, and related projects; papers, articles, and student Signature Work research; and an annual symposium and digital exhibition. Over time, the lab also aims to build a lasting community of students, faculty, and guests interested in interactive narrative as an art form, a field of research, a career, and a space for experimentation.
