Explication Essay

The plague, in general, is an endemic disease caused by interactions with sick

animals as invaders from other areas. However, the Egyptians in the Ottoman Empire

had an entirely different thought on the happening of the plague. The peer-reviewed

article named "The Nature of Plague in Late Eighteenth-Century Egypt" is written by

Alan Mikhail, a professor of history from Yale University. 1 In this multi-discipline

article, analyzing plagues based on environmental factors, history timeline, and basic

concepts of pathology, Alan argues that because of “intimate temporal and geographic

coincidences of plague and natural disaster,” 2 Egyptians treated plagues as a part of

the environment and also their lives. What If I pursue to dig out the whole story rather

than by reading a journal, is there any other way to explore those complex interactions

and hidden mysteries? Discovering them in the form of a video game, in an

entertaining way, is a feasible strategy. Therefore, the genre I translated to is a video

game design document (GDD). Without being a professional video game player, the

genre is new to me. This assignment guides me to understand that writing an

unfamiliar genre "requires some critical imagination and research on your parts." 3

After analyzing the game design document of GTA, the abbreviation of Grand Theft

Auto4, and The Doom Bible5, the fundamental framework of the genre of a GDD is

gradually clear. A GDD is a writing pattern that faces to the game’s producers with a

summary of a creative concept, which means this genre requires writing to be holistic

1
“Alan Mikhail”, accessed April 26,2020, https://history.yale.edu/people/alan-mikhail.
2
Alan Mikhail, “The Nature”, pp. 249.
3
Lisa Bickmore, "Genre in the Wild: Understanding Genre Within Rhetorical (Eco)systems."
Pressbooks.
4
K.R.Hamilton, “Race’n’Chase Game design”, Version:1.05 (March 22, 1995)
5
Tom Hall, “Doom Bible”, Version:0.02 (December 28, 1992)
and concise in a limited length. To get an effective translation, considering the distinct

rhetorical situations, I changed the structure of the peer-reviewed article, reconsidered

restrictions, and converted content to be an accessible and interactive form.

With the aim of adjusting the new exigence, I rebuilt the original structure and

uncomplicate terminology for the sake of comprehensibility. The purpose of the

historical article is to explain the reason of plagues rooted deeply in Egyptian nature

and its accordance with the reoccurrence of natural calamities. Differently, a GDD

serves the exigence as a way to present a game’s concept. The concept needs a

straightforward arrangement and concise sentences. By reviewing examples of GTA

and the Doom Bible, I concluded that the typical framework is divided into three vital

parts: Introduction, Specification, and Gameplay. According to Irvin Lennie, a writing

professor, the analysis includes a step of "identifying the meaningful parts of the

subject. "6 Determining parts that I am interested in and want to translate is my first

step. The translation focuses on the impacts of the flood and the famine, and how they

interact with the plague. By taking an instance of the plague in 1791, the paper uses

the timeline to uncover the connections. My GDD maintains the convention of

supplying a timeline to develop the game's plot, but the way to demonstrate it is

different. Instead of splitting into sections, the GDD portrays a story in the form of

episodes, requiring players to move on after passing the previous one. Moreover, in

the article, there are many quotes from scholars of the same fields and detailed

descriptions of past records, which provide more professional understandings for

6
L. Lennie Irvin, “What is academic ‘academic’ writing?” In Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing,
Volume 1 (Parlor Price)
other scholars. In this case, abstracting each selected section into an episode and using

simple sentences to express will reach the goal of terseness. In addition to utilizing the

modified format of telling the story, GDD comprises a Gameplay part that shows

characters and landscapes that are mentioned throughout the whole journal in a

shorten length. This convention effectively provides imaginable scenes of a written

game and treats it as an assistance to present the game's concept.

So as to meet an altered group of audiences, the translation, to a certain extent,

changes the jargon, reworks parts of professional discussion, and transforms the

technique of expression. As Alan Mikhail introduces the distinction between bubonic

and pneumonic plague, this implies that the majority of audiences of this article are

researchers with fundamental expertise in medicine. A GDD has two layers of

audiences: the first layer is people who work in a game development company; the

second layer is a group of game players. While the journal conveys intricate

relationships among the flood, the plague, and the famine with the perspective of a

scholar, I alternatively use a gamers' standpoint in translation by showing the tasks

that gamers need to complete. I abstracted description of scenes of each episode

within several sentences due to the fact that both players and staff in companies only

focus on how the game's mechanism works. Furthermore, video games are always a

top discussion topic among juveniles. This game is also designed to bring players into

a city full of disasters, learning to be a leader, exercising decision-making ability, and

enjoying the exotic culture. The majority of young people are not familiar with

medical jargon. The information of pathology is excluded in the GDD to adapt this
difference.

Lastly, on the basis of distinguishing constraints of two genres, I incorporated

translation with imaginative elements and eliminated unnecessary details. As a

historical journal, its primary sources, including "works of Egyptian chroniclers,

archival materials, secondary studies, and traveler accounts," are limited. 7 All the

statements have to follow the pre-existed evidence instead of doing experiments. In

comparison, a GDD is used to create an interactive and meaningful game for

entertainment, thus the contexts are not strictly limited to the recorded history. A

historical research paper has a conclusion that not only emphasizes the central idea

but also introduces the following research direction. At the end of this journal, the

author intrigues readers to consider that “plague, in other words, existed not only in

Egyptian nature, but also in Egyptian society.” 8 Conversely, the ending is complete

meaning less here. Players could make any decisions to change the environmental,

economic and medical factors even these are unrealistic at that period. In this case, the

GDD I translated only mentions the default conditions, and the following stories or

results are totally dependent on the players’ options. The game presented in GDD is a

role-playing game, and the only occupation here is the ruler. This setting has a

restriction that players have a single view through the whole story. Accordingly,

problems that gamers have to overcome are basically at the national level. Unlike the

historical paper, its descriptions reach out to a citizen, a noble, and a merchant for

giving an across-the-broad analysis. To conform to this context, I austerely selected

7
Alan Mikhail, “The Nature”, pp. 249.
8
Alan Mikhail, “The Nature”, pp. 275.
and summarized the suitable portrayal from the article.

At this special time, Coronavirus let us experience an exceptional, inconvenient,

or unfavorable lifestyle. It is hard to imagine that the plague "was a regular and

expected part of life in Egypt."9 Through the translation process of a historical peer-

reviewed article to a GDD, I learned how to revise context, reconstruct framework,

and examine conventions to meet a now rhetorical situation. Taking a technical

journal as a reference, a GDD, a written game, provides a possible idea that a game

can take people into an immersive journey through time and space back to late

Eighteen-Century Egypt.

9
Alan Mikhail, “The Nature”, pp. 275.
 Bibliography

Bickmore, Lisa. "Genre in the Wild: Understanding Genre Within Rhetorical

(Eco)systems." Pressbooks.

https://openenglishatslcc.pressbooks.com/chapter/genre-in-the-wild-

understanding-genre-within-rhetorical-ecosystems/

Hall, Tom. “Doom Bible”, Version:0.02 (December 28, 1992)

 http://gamedevs.org/uploads/grand-theft-auto.pdf

Hamilton, K.R. “Race’n’Chase Game design”, Version:1.05 (March 22, 1995)

 http://5years.doomworld.com/doombible/doombible.pdf

Irvin, L. Lennie. “What is academic ‘academic’ writing?” In Writing Spaces:

Readings

on Writing, Volume 1, edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, Parlor

Price

Mikhail, Alan. “The Nature of Plague in Late Eighteen-Century Egypt,” Bulletin of

the

History of Medicine 82, no.2 (summer 2008): 249-275

https://www.jstor.org/stable/44448549

Yale University. “Alan Mikhail.” Accessed April 26, 2021.

https://history.yale.edu/people/alan-mikhail