Cardplay, a New Textual Instrument

W e are exploring what it means to 'play' textual literature. We don't mean, by this, playing games that incorporate textual material within their structure but rather textual and literary structures for which play is a primary means of interaction. We are conducting our exploration both as creators and scholars of digital media. This paper discusses a number of related issues — including the notion of "instrumental texts" discussed by electronic literature authors, the critical games proposed by Jerome McGann and Johanna Drucker, and what Markku Eskelinen has characterized as the challenge of ludology (the study of games) to traditional literary study. This discussion then becomes the background for describing a system we are building — Cardplay — its design goals, our authoring work within it, and its relationship to prior work in the hypertext and artificial intelligence communities.