Chants of Sennaar
Game
Documents about Chants of Sennaar
Whitepaper12 pages
From Hopscotch to Digital Games: The Pleasure and Dilemma of Interactivity
Huajing Pan's paper uses Julio Cortázar's gamified novel Hopscotch as a lens for examining the tension between author and reader in interactive narratives, reading the work through a post-structuralist framework and extending its insights to digital games.
- The paper's central thesis is that interactivity creates both pleasure and a structural dilemma: authorial power is genuinely redistributed to readers and players, but only within bounds, generating lasting anxiety for novelists and designers about how authorship should be shared.
- Pan treats this author-reader tension not as a failure to be resolved but as a productive condition that refines interactive design over time.
- Using Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch as its primary case, the paper examines its three-part structure of 155 chapters offering multiple reading paths, and frames the shift from reader-as-audience to reader-as-player as the novel's defining innovation.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper8 pages
Modeling Language Acquisition in Commercial Off-the-Shelf Games: A Multiple Case Study
This paper examines how two commercial games, Heaven's Vault (2019) and Chants of Sennaar (2023), use artificial language learning as their core mechanic, and what educational game designers can learn from them.
- Heaven's Vault (2019) and Chants of Sennaar (2023) use artificial language learning as their core mechanic, and the study uses them to derive design lessons for educational language games.
- The author argues that many language-learning serious games lack commercial-grade immersion, engagement, and player-tailored feedback, which commercial titles handle well.
- Heaven's Vault supports vocabulary acquisition through puzzles requiring negotiation of meaning, aided by consistent grammar and a 'related words' feature that enables retrieval, with narrative contextualizing learning.
European Conference on Games Based Learning (ECGBL)Sep 2025