Marugoto as a Writing Tool

The game Feeling the Past was written using Marugoto, the engine underlying every storyline in Lives in Transit. While for this project, I used it to construct a narrative with a pedagogical goal, the question arises if there are other applications in historical research. In this section I will first talk about how Marugoto performed for Feeling the Past and then discuss other possible ways of using the tool.

Marugoto and Feeling the Past

Marugoto proved to be a good authoring tool for creating a piece of interactive fiction with an educational intent like Feeling the Past. Similar to uAdventure by Pérez-Colado et al. (2019), it allowed someone without a lot of technical experience to create a fully functional game by mainly using examples and a manual to learn, without a great amount of specific training. During the last session of DigiZeit I was asked if I had preferred something more complex like a 3D based engine. In my opinion this would have caused the game to be more focused on the experience of being in the museum instead of the exercises and what can be learned by them. The workload of creating a 3D game—even with an existing engine and presets—would have meant less freedom and less time to conceptually work on the game. Using a text-based engine and static pages allows the player to focus more on the tasks, which for me were the most important part. My familiarity with Lives in Transit and its limits and possibilities before beginning the project helped me to plan the contents of the game at an early stage of the project time frame. There is a fair bit of functionality of Marugoto I did not explore in my game. The main reason for this is the lack of time. The learning curve of Marugoto was steep, having to understand both how the folder hierarchy relates to the different pages displayed and what each variable controls. Once understood though, the work becomes fluent, as the knowledge of one functionality facilitates the learning of the next. I think a person without much technical experience will be able to pick it up in a few days of focused work, even more so now that there exists a tutorial and a documentation.

Looking at the trend of upskilling in the humanities and especially in the digital humanities, Marugoto could thereby allow scholars unfamiliar with coding and software development a view behind the front end curtains. This can be an opportunity to lay the groundwork for learning other digital skills, similar to what the goal of DigiZeit was for the students of History of the Contemporary World / Zeitgeschichte. While using Marugoto will not teach how to code, it can illustrate the mechanics and connections between key elements of programming like different data types, the effect of various variables, and digital project development. These insights can then be further be evolved into more specific skillsets like how to prepare XML files for a submission to a digital journal like Digital Humanities Quarterly.

Using Marugoto to publish a historical piece

At the time of writing (October 2020), the only other storyline in Lives in Transit, Martin Dusinberre's Plantation Lives, also takes the approach to create a piece of interactive fiction. The question therefore arises: Can Marugoto be used to produce something other than interactive fiction? In my opinion it can, which I will illustrate by describing the theoretical advantages and disadvantages of publishing a piece of historical research using Marugoto.

Ignoring the current process of publishing something using Marugoto and focusing only on the writing aspect, one can see that Marugoto offers a variety of advantageous tools which cannot be found in conventional digital publishing. For one the author has more control over the structure of the reading, meaning that by using pageTransitions the writer can guide the reader through a piece in a particular way, for example having them choose between one or another way through the text. While hindering the conventional reading flow, this offers new opportunities for authors interested in methods like juxtaposition, e.g. leading the reader back to the same piece of text or source at different stages of reading the piece. Here another function of Marugoto becomes clear: being able to include multimedia sources inside the text. Authors can easily expose their readers to audio-visual sources and for example allow them to interact with sources like enlarging a picture. This inclusion of sources could strengthen an argument while at the same time constructing a story which feels more alive. Marugoto can also facilitate the communication between author and reader by using the notebook function. Not only can the readers add notes to specific pages themselves, but the author can predetermine certain multimedia elements and text sections which will appear in the notebook. After finishing the piece the reader then can download a PDF of the notebook containing both sources and text sections which the author deems most important while also having their own thoughts throughout the piece documented. This could then make using the piece in their own research easier.

The disadvantages are clear: There is an initial effort needed to learn how to use Marugoto. Like I described above, I think that anyone should be able to pick it up in a few days, but people will only try if the benefits are great enough in comparison with conventional and other digital publishing. Time, tying in to the previous point, is another factor which has to be considered. Creating something in Marugoto takes more time than simply editing a text file and runs the risk of not working because of coding mistakes. Another important aspect is that the abovementioned advantages are only productive if used correctly. They bear the risk of obstructing the content or the argument of the piece by distracting the reader. Marugoto should therefore not be seen as a one-size-fits-all solution, but rather as one possibility of many to publish a historical piece digitally. I could also imagine publishing a Marugoto piece in tandem with a conventional paper which interact with each other, even though time constrictions will probably force an author to choose one of the options rather than both.