Game theorists imitates Jorge Luis Borges!

Who says theory is boring? In Jorge Luis Borges’ famous & funny short story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, the writer Pierre Menard sets out to write a novel identical to Cervantes’ Don Quixote; not another Don Quixote, but the Don Quixote. He succeeds admirably, actually producing an all-new word-for-word copy of Don Quixote:

It is a revelation to compare the Don Quixote of Pierre Menard with that of Miguel de Cervantes. Cervantes, for examples, wrote the following (Part I, Chapter IX):

… truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

This catalog of attributes, written in the seventeenth century, and written by the “ingenious layman” Miguel de Cervantes, is mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

… truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

History, the mother of truth! – the idea is staggering. Menard, contemporary of William James, defines history not as a delving into reality but as the very fount of reality. Historical truth, for Menard, is not “what happened”; it is what we believe happened.

Now, game studies is finally catching up, compare a quote from this 2002 article:

Activity Theory offers a theoretical framework with strong intuitive appeal for researchers examining educational games. Growing out of Vgotsky?s discussion of the mediating role of artifacts in cognition (1978), Activity Theory provides a theoretical language for looking at how an educational game or resource mediates players? understandings of other phenomena while acknowledging the social and cultural contexts in which game play is situated.

… with a quote from this new, 2003 article by a different author:

Activity Theory offers a theoretical framework with strong intuitive appeal for researchers examining educational games. Growing out of Vgotsky?s discussion of the mediating role of artifacts in cognition (1978), Activity Theory provides a theoretical language for looking at how an educational game or resource mediates players? understandings of other phenomena while acknowledging the social and cultural contexts in which game play is situated.

… and draw your own conclusions.