close reading

Date: 2026-02-09

Close Reading and Digital Texts

Victory Garden

Moulthrop, Stuart: Victory Garden, 1991, North Garden, disk, Eastgate Systems, Inc. (illustration: CD-ROM version for Intel Mac).

Read Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden (2022 edition), an example of one of the earliest forms of hypertext novels. It is set in 1991 during the Gulf War, and jumps between the main character Emily Runbird and her network. There are multiple ways to navigate the story, and thousands of links.

Another starting point: the Hypertext website from 2003

NeoHabitat

Focus on NeoHabitat

Habitat, the first ever graphical massively multiplayer online game, emerged on the Commodore 64 home micro computer in 1986. Because the game was the first of its kind, its developers tried a number of odd experiments that would never be repeated in the online games of today. The game shut down after only two years, but it survived for a time in the offshoot game Club Caribe.–Preserving Worlds

• user maps of Habitat
• The Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat - from The First Annual International Conference on Cyberspace in 1990
• NeoHabitat Discord channel
• Habitat Inspector Art Catalog
• NeoHabitat Wikipedia page
• Social Dimensions of Habitat’s Citizenry written by F. Randall Farmer in
• A review of Lucasfilm’s Habitat Reboot by The MADE and The Neohabitat Restoration Team: My Personal Experience with It
• Stream: The First Night of the NeoHabitat (Club Caribe) revival!

Assignment overview

Practice close reading with media texts—film scenes, advertisements, social media posts, or artworks. Pay attention to details you’d normally overlook. Try different analytical frameworks (semiotics, narrative analysis, visual rhetoric) and see which reveals something interesting about your chosen text.

Readings

• Janet Murray, selections from Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997) - narrative in digital environments. (Read online via Purchase College Library)
• Ian Bogost, The Rhetoric of Video Games - procedural rhetoric CC BY-NC-ND (a physical book is available in the stacks in the Purchase College Library)
• Lev Manovich, selections from The Language of New Media (2001)
• Practice readings: Choose a digital artifact (a game, virtual world screenshots, social media thread) for close analysis

Writing Prompt: Formal Analysis Exercise (3-4 pages)

Choose a specific digital artifact to analyze closely. This could be:

• A level or scene from a game
• A particular social media interface (TikTok’s FYP, Instagram Stories, Discord server)
• A virtual world space (even just from screenshots)
• A website captured in the Wayback Machine
• A meme format or viral moment

Describe it in extreme detail first—interface elements, visual design, interactive possibilities, temporal structures. Then analyze: What assumptions about users/players are built into the design? What behaviors does it encourage or discourage? What narratives or ideologies are embedded in its formal structures? What would someone from 1995 or 2045 make of this?

Don’t aim for a thesis-driven argument. Instead, use close reading as a method of discovery—what becomes visible when you slow down and pay attention?