Mortal Intertextuality: Orientation By Use of the Four-Dimensional Reading Game

by JC Camelio, Cohort ’24

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The IDSVA program is meticulous and extraordinary in its scope, depth, and rigor, and it asks its candidates to trust the process. Tools and rubrics are provided in the curriculum to ensure success, including the IDSVA Writing Guide, and each step builds to the next. Yet I often wonder how everyone else manages to keep up with and track dense theoretical texts, unfamiliar disciplines, or unfamiliar objects of study. Despite the excellent aids that help candidates get through, it is easy to oscillate between two unproductive extremes: skimming for what can be “used,” or slowing down so much that orientation can get lost. What is sometimes missing for me is a method for entering unfamiliar or new thinkers, texts, or objects.

  In the seminar, Trans-Continental Entanglements, I was introduced to “The Four-Dimensional Reading Game,” developed by Professor Dejan Lukić. The game provides a system to orient oneself at the outset of inquiry. It does not aim at conclusions; instead, it clarifies how any text or object may be approached on its own terms. I would not characterize the Four-Dimensional Reading Game as a lens; rather, it is an approach and a tool, like a compass and a map for someone planning a trek or hike in the forest. When I tramp through the woods, I tend to stick to established trails, paths, and roads to avoid getting lost, but not always. A landscape or terrain may spark curiosity, and bushwhacking provides discovery and learning along the way. Orienting a map, setting a bearing and moving to coordinates is analogous to how I have come to use the game.

The Reading Game proposes that any serious text or, more broadly, any meaningful object of attention can be approached through four interrelated dimensions. Professor Lukić states, “The dimensions are not always visible on the surface; they may be latent, fragmented, or deliberately obscured. Part of the method is learning how to detect them” (Lukić 1). He enumerates them thus:

1. the animating question or problem; 
2. the central concept and its supporting sub-concepts; 
3. the contexts in which the work emerges; 
4. the methodology by which it proceeds. 

These dimensions are not presented as a checklist to be completed, nor as steps to be followed in a rigid order. The dimensions in the game serve as coordinates for situating one’s thinking within a field of inquiry, or a good place to enter. Using the Four-Dimensional Reading Game has provided me with unique formulations for each source within a common structure that I can use to evaluate or simply remember in relation to the constellation of everything else we encounter. What I have found most valuable about this approach is its flexibility. Although the Reading Game draws on textual analysis, it encourages and rewards exploration. The four dimensions function more like orienting questions than analytical tools. 

Rather than approaching a text primarily to support a preexisting argument, the method encourages sustained engagement with a single work long enough to understand how its questions, concepts, and methods unfold internally. In practice, this means resisting the impulse to compare too quickly or to extract isolated insights. The game offers a way to slow down without becoming inert, and to organize thinking without excluding interpretation.

Although the language of the Four-Dimensional Reading Game is drawn from textual analysis, its scope is intentionally flexible. The dimensions function more as orienting questions than as analytical instruments, adaptable across different disciplines and materials. One example in the game’s description clarifies this flexibility, particularly regarding context. As Lukić notes, “a single dimension may split into layers: for example, a context may include not only history but geology or cosmology, as in Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble, where storytelling fuses with evolutionary biology; or in Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, where messianic time interrupts linear historiography” (Lukić 3). So that context is not only a backdrop but a fluid force shaping what can be thought and said, determining which assumptions remain operative or at play within a given work. The example illustrates how the Game encourages attention to context as something that actively participates in meaning rather than working as a passive background. 

Another strength of the Four-Dimensional Reading Game is that it acknowledges the provisional nature of interpretation. The dimensions do not resolve into a final synthesis; instead, they remain in dynamic relation. A text’s guiding question may shift as its context becomes clearer; a methodology may only become visible after sustained engagement. The game’s framework accommodates this movement. In that sense, it mirrors how understanding often unfolds in practice, recursively and through revision.

From my experience, the Four-Dimensional Reading Game has helped me situate where I begin; it is like taking a bearing. It has helped me approach unfamiliar material with curiosity rather than anxiety, and it has provided a structure that supports critique without predetermining its outcome. At times, this process leads to deeper appreciation; at other times, it clarifies the limits or tensions within a work. Both outcomes are productive and reinforce the game’s capacity to foster sustained, critical engagement across multiple contexts of inquiry.

Works Cited:

Lukić, Dejan. The Four-Dimensional Reading Game. PDF. 2025.