Endure

This is more of a toy and tinkering experiment than a narrative fiction--there are no puzzles or story which you as a character get involved in--but it's worth experiencing either way. It really highlights something Texture excels at: recontextualizing existing on-screen text.

That's ultimately the whole point of this piece--the fun of engaging with Endure is that you a) can choose from amongst a number of different -ways- of recontextualising text ((Spoiler - click to show)from strict translation, to making a joke of it, and others) and b) unless you can (Spoiler - click to show)read ancient greek, the starting text is totally opaque, which -forces- you to recontextualise the text in order to play. Neat!

(I included spoilers of things you immediately see upon starting play because part of the fun is realizing what it wants you to do. Just try it, it'll take maybe five minutes!)

Endure is an unusual and fascinating application for IF. Emily Short uses the Texture platform to allow the player to try out several translational strategies on a sample of text from Homer's The Odyssey. Since the vast majority of us only experience ancient literature in translation, it is a powerful reminder that we are always experiencing these works as mediated by someone (or someones) as translator that makes a wide range of choices in putting classical literature into English.

The game offers you the ability to render sections of the text into a faithful translation, a free translation, a contextual version, and a more jokey rendering, all of which people have used to translate Homer. The Texture interface lends itself well to this approach, as it lets you feel like you are manipulating and controlling text.

I'm an academic, so of course, I like this for its value in the classroom and what it has to say about translation, but it is neverless quite fun to shift styles and see what version of the text the game gives you. It is also a worthwhile experiment that shows that games can be tools to better understand literature and how we continue to re-make the past.