(Digitally) Transforming the Discipline: Reading games as (authorless) literature

The videogame L.A. Noire was released for Playstation 3 and XBOX 360 in May 2011.
The diegesis is set in 1947, and the game appropriates conventions from American film noir texts of the 1940s and 1950s, as well as later texts such as Alphaville (Godard, 1965) and L.A. Confidential (Hanson, 1997). The novels of Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy also contribute to this 'sphere' of influence.
Unlike these novels and films, this videogame is an author / auteur-less digital text which is pre-designed but 'written', in narrative terms, only when read (played). However, its highly 'LITERARY' and 'FILMIC' nature would seem to be 'useful' for teaching / learning in the English Literature curriculum.
As a research subject, L.A. Noire offers an opportunity to revisit ideas of adaptation and appropriation in the context of this 'DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION' of the 'hard-boiled detective novel', and to further examine the relationship of exchange that exists between linear and digital texts. Videogames are still largely ignored in education as 'textual subjects' but L.A. Noire is potentially transgressive, in terms of its potential to be taught / studied as a book (novel) in its digitally transformed state.
This project will explore the ways in which gamer-students and teachers might work with L.A. Noire to reconfigure dynamics of expertise, begin a remediation of the English Literature curriculum and respond to the digital transformation of what we think it means to 'read' in order to think differently about the function of books and the nature of textual authority in the digital age.

The research outcomes will be disseminated broadly through three routes to maximise the value of the findings and informing future practice. Peer reviewed journal articles and conference papers will be supported and extended by online materials and teaching materials exemplifying the 'pedagogy of the inexpert' approach, refined by the findings arising from its implementation in the research activity. In this way, the research will reach the research community and educational practitioners whose approaches may need to respond to digital transformations in textual practices. The project does not aim to simply 'test' the use of videogames in English Literature teaching but rather to explore the 'conditions of possibility' for a reframing of the curriculum to incorporate new forms of text with new arrangements of, and understandings of, textual authority and power.