Playing the Monograph: Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Interactive Ethnography

Games are rarely used to engage with complex ethnographic texts, limiting how broader audiences encounter foundational works in anthropology. This work introduces our game Malinowski’s Lens, an AI-native educational game that reimagines Bronisław Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) as an interactive fieldwork experience. Indigenous characters are rendered as silhouettes while Malinowski appears in detail, prompting reflection on longstanding issues of authorship and cultural representation in ethnographic practice. By tightly coupling generative AI and curated retrieval, our work investigates how AI-native game design can transform dense academic texts into accessible interactive experiences, encouraging players to develop curiosity about the specific monograph, its local histories, and the discipline of anthropology more broadly. We contribute design insights for using retrieval-augmented generative AI to transform dense anthropological texts into exploratory, ethically reflective interactive systems, highlighting how AI-native game mechanics can support interpretive learning without replacing scholarly reading.