I enjoyed marking up texts with TEI, and I think the two assignments we had (the Poe text and the Declaration of Independence exercise) indeed demonstrated how TEI can help us with texts in different but equally strong ways.

For the Poe assignment we focused mainly in semantic mark-up, which I think is a powerful way to analyze and deconstruct the text. Since I’m an English and CH major student, I do a lot with close reading. Usually when I read a text or write an analytical paper, I will at first look for patterns and motifs that appear multiple times. My Poe text is not a conventional murder/detective/crime story, and at least in my part, there are not many exciting plots. However, it is still a classical Poe text for its dark, mysterious atmosphere. Therefore, it occurred to me that it will be great if I can find out patterns that make the text Gothic, and this is exactly something TEI can do. So, I mainly focused on the colors in the text (black, white, blood-red etc.), the emotional feelings (such as fear, aghast, agony etc.) and physical feelings (trembling, thrill, slumber etc). They are important not only due to their repeated appearances but also because that according to the narrator, there are two categories of feelings: emotional and physical. Therefore, the markup of emotions and sensations in the text echoes how Poe manipulates feelings to depict terror. In addition, there are also many words associated with death, and even the word “death” has appeared in the text for several times. I don’t know which tag should I put death into, so I temporarily left death alone. However, I marked up places like “tomb” and “grave,” and also marked up the mythological place such as “Hades.” The associations and significations around these patterns are definitely worth investigating.

The most frequent tag/label I used for Poe text is “state” and “trait” because I didn’t see many places nor characters. This particular text seems to be focused on the individual emotions and sensations, and the paragraphs are mostly descriptions of the state of the narrator. Therefore, I didn’t employ many name tags or place tags in this assignment.

On the other hand, the Declaration of Independence assignment provides a window of how TEI can contribute to (meta)data management. When I read the assignment for the first time, I immediately thought how it could be used to manage the data for my research project. For this assignment, I basically elaborated the biography and paid particular attention to his network. It will be interesting to see how he was connected to different people and how his network, potentially, affected his political stand etc. Since Edward Rutledge did not move around that often, so I didn’t pay much attention to the place, or it will be really interesting to investigate his path and events. Therefore, the tag I used/liked most in this assignment is <listRelation> which can identify different types of relations and can include different people in the relations. One thing I don’t know how to manage is to add more detailed description of the related people. For example, Edward Rutledge’s father is a colonist of Scots-Irish descents which may have direct influence over Edward Rutledge. However, I don’t know how to indicate it in my TEI code.

The project we are working on is a room escape game. The protagonist is trapped in a cabin in the woods and he/she will wake up in a coffin with his/her hands chained by a hand cuff. There will be five chances to obtain hints. Before the game starts, the player will be required to enter 5 names of his/her friends, and there will be a timer when the game begins. After 10 minutes, if the player can’t find all the hints to escape, he/she will see or hear that their friends are dying. After 25 minutes, if the player is still in the cabin, a fierce dragon will come in and eat the player. So, better to escape the mysterious room quickly!

The similarity between this text-based game and traditional fiction is that the author/designers decide the main plot of the text. Unlike the interactive or collective fiction that participants can make up their own stories, the players can’t change the clues. For example, the player can’t rewrite the plot and add meanings to a vase in the room – which is not part of the keys. However, like Rettburg suggests in his essay, this room escape game is similar to other MOOs in that it “is only a potential story until readers respond to and perform within the text” (Rettburg, 192). It will only be a list of descriptions and remain static if there is no interaction between the text and players. The player also has the freedom to decide how long it takes to get out of the room (and darkly, how many the player’s friends will die). Though some of the puzzles have to be solved in certain order, the player can decide the sequence of obtaining certain tools.

It is great to have a team of three so that we can corporate together and with each other’s strength, we can build the game collectively. Yash is a computer science engineering major student, and he is more familiar with programming. Therefore, he is helpful to evaluate the plausibility of our ideas and help to improve the design of the game with CS logical ways of thinking. As a student majoring in English and Comparative Humanities, I’m interested in writing plot and setting up puzzles for players. In addition, Julia is important in the way that she will review the pros and cons of our idea from the perspective of the players. In other words, if we compare our team to the forum of fan-fiction, Yash is the website that makes it possible, I’m the “author” who writes the story, and Julia provides reviews and gives suggestions on how to update the game. All of us are indispensable in this project.

The inspiration of this game comes from many similar games online and on smart phones. There are also many horror and suspension movies about the idea of “escaping.” The plot of having people dying one by one is inspired by the great novel And There Were None (and there is a new BBC adaption, watch the trailer here). Another movie that has similar themes is The Exam. If possible, we want to insert background music in this game, and we find some instrumental music play like this.