In modern literary criticism, stance is all. The beauty of that ‘stance’ is that it encourages us to do what Nick Sousanis calls ‘unflattening’. Sousanis in his unparalleled graphic comic of the same name defines this term thus,

Unflattening is a simultaneous engagement of multiple vantage points from which to engender new ways of seeing.(32)

In other words unflattening is a seeing machine, a way of generating a new way of seeing.

This week we are looking at a new way of seeing in #CLMOOC ‘s third week.  It’s called gaming.  When you unflatten you have to take one view and add another in order to the get the ‘parallax’ so essential to seeing something anew and with depth. Sousanis devotes a whole chapter to this so I devoutly hope you go buy his book and read more there. Suffice to say, whatever your vantage point you can combine it with ‘gaming’ to “level up”.

I have been trying to figure out how our Make Cycle compadres want us to do this.  There were so many calls to action in the newsletter I felt compelled to tease them all out in order to see with this gaming eye. In fact,  I am making a game of it.  In fact, I am inviting everyone to make a game of it. The Hackpad below has all the particulars which is to say few rules, few boundaries, much openness and an invitation to use the Creative Commons Piratical License (well, not so much a license as a guideline–do what thou wilt.)

I wonder if our facilitators realize that they created a proto-crypto-pseudogame in their own newsletter.  Now that would be a great game:  discover the game within the newsletter about the game.

“Come Watson, come! The game is afoot! Not a word! Into your clothes and come!”