First Person
current editor/sEd Finn
number of texts208
last activity07-26-2005
current editor/s05-03-2004
last activityNoah Wardrip-Fruin, Pat Harrigan
THREAD EDITOR'S STATEMENT:
The First Person thread began as a collaboration among electronic book review , MIT Press, and editors Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. Since 2003 it has explored a new model for connection between online publishing and traditional edited books in which printed works are not only reproduced electronically but also substantially expanded via responses to the collection (ripostes) and enriched by incorporation into the ebr database. This thread engages and reproduces much of the contents of a trilogy of edited collections published by the MIT Press: First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media, and Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives. The ebr version is a continuation, and an occasional critique of the essays that appeared in the book series. And the scope itself will widen beyond the topics raised in the MIT print volumes to include emerging forms of fictional and playable experiences, along with new protocols, new interfaces, and possibly even new ways of drawing the boundaries between text and code, digital gaming and textual narrative.
top 2011
10-12-2011
mammoth
See the Strings: Watchmen and the Under-Language of Media

Engaged in his own kind of structured play, Stuart Moulthrop uses the concept of "under-language" to explore the boundaries, gutters, masked intentions, and hidden meanings of Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen while he simultaneously uses the graphic novel to provide an equally complex, over-determined rendering of the term.
10-04-2011
decodedintro
Critical Code Studies Conference - Week Four Introduction

Reviewing the week's discussion of Programmed Visions, Sarah Zurhellen finds a pleasurable respite that, necessarily, generated as many questions as answers.
10-03-2011
decoded
Critical Code Studies Conference - Week Four Discussion

In Week 4, Critical Code Studies contributors kept the magic alive as they discussed Wendy Hui Kyong Chun's "On Sourcery and Source Codes," the first chapter of her forthcoming Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. Informed by Chun's psychoanalytic reading and her awareness of the materiality of code work, the conversation deals with fetishism, gender, genetics, and performativity in ways both abstract and tangible.
05-31-2011
colossalintro
Critical Code Studies Conference - Week Three Introduction

How do you annotate an experience? Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux grapple with competing logics of computer code at the intersection of Adventure, nostalgia and new media scholarship.
05-25-2011
colossal
Critical Code Studies Conference - Week Three Discussion

In Week 3 of a six-part series, Critical Code Studies contributors spelunk the mysteries of Colossal Cave Adventure, a seminal text adventure game. Delving into close readings of the original FORTRAN code, the group plots the twisty passages linking media theory, deconstruction and philosophies of programming.
05-01-2011
serialrip
From Genre to Form: A Response to Jason Mittell on The Wire

Caroline Levine argues that Jason Mittell's attempts to classify The Wire by genre results in "some slippery logic, some fruitful and provocative but not altogether persuasive argumentative moves in Mittell's own game." She suggests that examining the show through the lens of form - not genre - clarifies why it warrants comparisons with texts like Bleak House: both works attempt to represent the distinctly networked quality of urban social life.
04-30-2011
delineated
Critical Code Studies Conference - Week Two Introduction

Can Critical Code Studies overcome the divide between technology workers and technocultural theorists?
04-14-2011
recoded
Critical Code Studies Conference - Week Two Discussion

In the second installment of a six-week discussion, contributors search for examples of Critical Code Studies "in the wild." Instead of asking how code can be read critically, they examine how code is already being created and disputed by lawyers, programmers, and the general public.
03-22-2011
long-term
Lost and Long-Term Television Narrative

David Lavery ponders the "neo-baroque" tap-dancing of TV's most playful and commercially successful serial drama.
03-18-2011
serial
All in the Game: The Wire, Serial Storytelling, and Procedural Logic

Jason Mittell calls David Simon's bluff: to what degree is The Wire really like a "televised novel"? To what degree is it more like a video game? Why not classify it as what it really is - a genre-spawning "masterpiece" in the medium of television.
top 2010
09-15-2010
ningislanded
Critical Code Studies and the electronic book review: An Introduction

Mark C. Marino explains the rationale for the Critical Code Studies Working Group, a six-week experiment in using social media for collaborative academic production. Marino also analyzes the first week's discussion, which focused on debates about what it means to read "code as text."
08-29-2010
coded
Critical Code Studies Conference - Week One Discussion

What does it mean to apply a "critical" lens to programming code? Members of the CCS Working Group grapple with this and other foundational questions, hashing out the methods, boundaries, and stakes of a new academic field. This essay is part of a series on Critical Code Studies distilled from a six week online discussion.
07-31-2010
deadwoodrip
HBO's Deadwood and Serial Necessity: A Response to Sean O'Sullivan's "Reconnoitering the Rim: Thoughts on Deadwood and Third Seasons"

Daniel Worden's riposte to Sean O'Sullivan's piece on Deadwood argues that O'Sullivan's "formalist account does not acknowledge... Deadwood's connection to a kind of historical necessity that governs not just the show's characters but also the very structure of the show as a historical drama about the West on late twentieth-century cable."
07-30-2010
deadwood
Reconnoitering the Rim: Thoughts on Deadwood and Third Seasons

Sean O'Sullivan explores numerous aspects of narrative and seriality in his examination of the HBO series Deadwood, created by David Milch. O'Sullivan argues that Deadwood often resists seriality's dictates and conventions by adhering to, amongst other structures, Aristotlelian dramatic principles that are by nature at odds with seriality's essence. This is but one example of the existence of an "internal constriction" that "pushes against some of the conventions of television serials by denying the very principle of expansiveness, of stretching out, inherently endorsed by a narrative that cannot be contained, whose sum exceeds our capacity to remember it."
06-04-2010
intrinsically
Multiculturalism in World of Warcraft

Christopher Douglas argues that within the fictional world of the popular online game World of Warcraft, race is not understood as being socially constructed, but rather as a biological fact, "composed of inherited, immutable, essential differences," and thus perpetuates the old-fashioned "notion that the outward packaging signifies an inner reality, where the differences are."
top 2008
10-02-2008
ops
The Unit Is in the Eye of the Beholder

Emily Short interrogates Ian Bogost's Unit Operations and finds his approach to videogame criticism too capacious in its attempt to account for a variety of expressive media, and too narrow in its focus on low-order choices in videogames.
06-19-2008
codereadrip
Everyday Procedural Literacy vs. Computational Procedural Literacy

Through a mini-experiment Robert Lecusay explores the differences between gamers' and non-gamers' interactions with non-player characters in Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern's Façade.
06-17-2008
curtainedrip
[META] The Designer-Academic Problem

Christy Dena considers the unique version of subject-object relations confronted by people who straddle the line between game-designer and academic.
05-01-2008
foreal
Editors' Introduction to "Real Worlds"

Editors Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin introduce a group of essays on games that exceed the bounds of the tabletop playing session, the game console, or the computer screen - games that emerge out of, take place in, or encroach on, the real world.
04-23-2008
agrarian
Santaman's Harvest Yields Questions, or Does a Performance Happen if it Exists in a Virtual Forest?

Adriene Jenik describes a project of virtual performances via avatars in online chat spaces.
04-23-2008
diligent
Finding the Game in Improvised Theater

Tim Uren argues that each improvisational theater scene functions as a game that generates its own rules within a few seconds of its inception, rules based on each performer's observation of the audience and/or other actors.
04-22-2008
identarian
Communities of Play: The Social Construction of Identity in Persistent Online Game Worlds

Celia Pearce applies the logics of identity politics, diaspora studies, and cultural studies to an online gaming community.
04-20-2008
sincere
Me, the Other

Torill Elvira Mortensen explains the joys of the role-playing high, in which the player no longer has to contemplate how her character might act in a given situation; instead the player simply reacts as the character. Mortensen develops the case to argue that role-playing experience can lead to a cynicism about the sincerity of people's out-of-character (or real-world) personae.
04-20-2008
questing
A Network of Quests in World of Warcraft

Jill Walker argues that although the quests in World of Warcraft lack the narrative or linguistic sophistication that we expect from literary texts, the sustained attention that players give to games equates with the attentiveness that readers give novels (or at least that readers once gave novels - back when novels had readers).
04-18-2008
mobbed
On Adventures in Mating

Joe Scrimshaw describes his interactive stage drama, which with the exception of the technologies it employs, operates much like the computer-based interactive fiction Facade (discussed elsewhere in this thread). Rather than using code to select the proper reaction to user input as in Facade, the audience of Adventures in Mating votes on the choices the characters make, a la a Choose Your Own Adventure novel.
04-18-2008
therapeutic
Eliza Redux

Adrianne Wortzel explains a revisioning of the 1960s computer-based therapist simulator, which moves beyond the original's text-only interface to include graphics, robotics, and an ever-expanding vocabulary.
04-09-2008
elective
Video Games Go to Washington: The Story Behind The Howard Dean for Iowa Game

Ian Bogost and Gonzalo Frasca explain a new genre: persuasive games, and delve into the development and emerging legacy of The Howard Dean for Iowa Game, "the first official video game ever commissioned in the history of U.S. presidential elections." This new genre provides an opportunity to rethink the cultural status of games. If games are normally judged by how entertaining they are, persuasive games must be released from this criterion and assessed on how well they convey their message.
04-08-2008
regular
On unexceptional.net

Robert Nideffer describes a multi-modal game in which the player will be more impressed with the number of media the game engages than with its (unexceptional) main character.
03-30-2008
curtained
The Puppet Master Problem: Design for Real-World, Mission-Based Gaming

Jane McGonigal argues that pervasive games - which involve electronic and 'real world' missions - reverse the traditional conception of the power dynamics of gaming, which has understood gamers as free agents. In contrast, according to McGonigal, designers of pervasive games exercise power over players, though their control is ultimately compromised by players' interpretive agency.
03-30-2008
gated
On A Measure for Marriage

Nick Fortugno describes a live-action role-playing game with a real-world consequence - a marriage proposal.
03-28-2008
located
On Itinerant

Teri Rueb describes Itinerant and quotes excerpts from the project's vocal track. The installation-style piece uses a GPS system and a headseat. As the participant walks through the allotted space, the GPS cues various recordings. Rueb claims to want "to implicate the participant as a charged body in public space whose movement and presence become critical agents in structuring the meaning of the work."
03-27-2008
edutaining
On John Tynes's Puppetland

Sean Thorne explains how he uses Puppetland to help children improve their writing. The RPG allows the students to develop characters, and to participate in the construction of stories so that they're imaginatively invested in what they write.
03-27-2008
grassy
Political Activism: Bending the Rules

Kevin Whelan argues that there's not much difference between role-playing games and grass-roots political activism.
03-26-2008
relevant
Prismatic Play: Games as Windows on the Real World

John Tynes argues that it took the novel two hundred years to gain cultural capital; film, forty years; rock and roll, fifteen. Given this increasing velocity and the fact that it's been three decades since Colossal Cave Adventure, interactive storytelling should have gained a much higher level of respect than it has. Tynes argues that games should eschew escapist fantasy for more timely "engagist" settings that would allow the player to reflect on contemporary life and politics.
03-19-2008
genericrip
Why Make Games That Make Stories?

Jesper Juul argues that James Wallis's focus on definitions in his intervention into the story/game debate doesn't give the experience of story - or game - its due.
03-19-2008
atmosphererip
Every Game a Story

Corvus Elrod extends Bruno Faidutti's claim that all games tell stories by making the counter-intuitive argument that board games like Chess and Go are more effective story vehicles than RPGs.
03-19-2008
terminalrip
Pax and the Literary in the Digital Age

David Parry argues that Pax occupies a position between literature and games - that it "glorifies play while undermining games," and that it's "not so much literature as it is literary."
03-18-2008
storyishrip
Beyond the String of Beads: More Systems for Game Narrative

Monica Evans extends Costikyan's analysis of the narrative/game debate, but ultimately concludes that battles over genre categorization miss the point of electronic media, and that we cannot yet accurately assess how the tension between story and play works out because digital games are "products of a technology still in its infancy."
03-18-2008
poprip
Error, Interface, and the Myth of Immersion

Jason Rhody argues that Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time attains the status of a game fiction by leveraging "narrative tragedy" to enhance "ludic complexity" - creating a game in which narrative and play, far from being opposed, as in most assessments, enhance one another.
03-15-2008
mechanistic
Editors' Introduction to "Computational Fictions"

Editors Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin introduce the essays of the "Computational Fictions" section of Second Person, focusing on the conversion of human ludic interaction into computational processes - a necessary condition for computer games.
03-11-2008
timely
On Twelve Easy Lessons to Better Time Travel

Mark Marino explains Twelve Easy Lessons to Better Time Travel as an allegory of electronic writing, featuring characters that represent salient figures from Alan Turing to Shelley Jackson.
03-10-2008
juvenile
On Juvenate

Marie-Laure Ryan describes Juvenate as an audiovisual hypertext that can be navigated via a provided map or wandered through like a maze, evoking the question of whether the text is best understood as a narrative or a game.
03-04-2008
emo-robo
The Creation of Floyd the Robot in Planetfall

Steve Meretzky reflects on one of the earliest (1982) NPCs (non-player characters) to evoke an emotional investment from videogame players. Meretzky draws attention to the fact that character development - integral to fiction and film - is not often emphasized in game design.
03-04-2008
magical
On Savoir-Faire

Emily Short explains that one of the goals of Savoir-Faire is to teach the player to become a magician. This pedagogical orientation means that - in contrast to interactive fictions that allow only a severely limited range of player input - Short's game rewards undirected play because the player is not only solving puzzles, but also learning.
03-04-2008
'tisn't
RE: Authoring Magritte: The Brotherhood of Bent Billiard

Talan Memmott describes The Brotherhood of Bent Billiard as "a narrative hack of Magritte's symbolic calculus"; it allows the reader to negotiate a number of clickable Magritte-inspired screens, which provide the reader a forum for thinking through the questions of representation immanent in the painter's work.
03-04-2008
cine-o-matic
On Soft Cinema: Mission to Earth

Lev Manovich describes a filmic methodology for the information age: narratives structured on the logic of databases. The delegation of a large part of the editing Mission to Earth to a computer results in a product that is "between narrative and a search engine."
03-02-2008
lonliest
On Solitaire

Helen Thorington describes Solitaire, a program for generating fiction in the same line as the projects explained by Chris Crawford and D. Fox Harrell elsewhere in this thread.
02-29-2008
terminal
Pax, Writing, and Change

Stuart Moulthrop argues that Pax answers John Cayley's question, "What would textual instruments look like?" Moulthrop maintains that one plays this electronic text (in the manner of a musical instrument) as much as one reads it.
02-27-2008
steerage
Fretting the Player Character

Nick Montfort argues that the contentious notion of the "player character" usefully constrains and makes possible the player's interaction with the gameworld. He considers the possibility that in interactive fiction one plays the character (like an actor plays a role) rather than playing the game.
02-26-2008
glassdark
Enlightening Interactive Fiction: Andrew Plotkin's Shade

Jeremy Douglass evaluates Shade within the history of interactive fiction, and considers how light is represented in the code structure of scene descriptions, arguing that "[w]ithout vision there is no agency."
02-26-2008
glassdarkrip
Patterns and Shade

Carl McKinney argues that Jeremy Douglass's analysis of Shade suggests a presence/absence dynamic useful for understanding interactive fiction in general.
02-25-2008
democratic
On The Archer's Flight

Mark Keavney describes his process in composing a story in which the readers voted on plot points as he was writing, resulting in a truly interactive fiction - a narrative in which, as Keavney puts it, "[n]either the players nor I owned the story completely."
02-24-2008
emotional
Jeff Tidball Responds to the Second Person Collection as a Whole

Jeff Tidball contends that the Second Person collection makes too much of the narrative vs. play debate, and pays attention to the mechanics of narrative and play over their affective capabilities.
02-23-2008
originalrip
Dungeons, Dragons & Numerals: Jan Van Looy's Riposte to Erik Mona

Jan Van Looy criticizes Erik Mona's history of Dungeons & Dragons as overly descriptive, and Van Looy critiques the game's quantification of the qualitative, i.e., personal characteristics and magic - which were hitherto considered unquantifiable.
02-22-2008
coderead
Writing Façade: A Case Study in Procedural Authorship

Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern argue that new media practitioners and scholars should be literate in the code that underlies their objects of creation and study. To this end, they explain how they structured the code of their computer-based interactive drama Façade, which capitalizes on the procedural nature of computers to create a forum for participatory drama that negotiates players' local and global agency within the game world.
02-22-2008
pop-friendly
The Sands of Time: Crafting a Video Game Story

Jordan Mechner explains how the team developing of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time incorporated a number of cinematic techniques such as flashback and voice over (which do not usually figure into video games) while also working within the practical restrictions of a commercial production schedule.
02-21-2008
categorical
On The Breakup Conversation

Robert Zubek describes how his program takes advantage of the tropes of breakup conversations. These generic norms allow The Breakup Conversation to assess players' textual entries categorically rather than semantically and thereby convincingly simulates an IM-based interaction.
02-20-2008
algorhythmic
Deikto: A Language for Interactive Storytelling

Chris Crawford walks through Deikto, an interactive storytelling language that "reduce[s] artistic fundamentals to even smaller fundamentals, those of the computer: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division."
02-19-2008
generational
GRIOT's Tales of Haints and Seraphs: A Computational Narrative Generation System

D. Fox Harrell considers what is computational about composition, and describes the GRIOT system for generating literary texts.
02-18-2008
elevensies
On And Then There Were None

Lee Sheldon describes his playable adaptation of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, which relies on his invention of a "suspicion meter" to quantify and track the player's interaction with - and assessments of - NPCs (non-player characters).
01-31-2008
traditional
Between Acting and Narrating: Editors' Introduction to "Tabletop Systems"

The electronic release of Second Person starts with a number of essays on tabletop role-playing. Most of these consider the entanglement of play and narrative in a variety of game systems, from the highly controlled to the largely open-ended.
01-27-2008
adaptable
Design Decisions and Concepts in Licensed Collectible Card Games

Eric Lang (with Pat Harrigan) explains the advantages writers have in crafting adaptations of literary franchises into collectible card games. Lang maintains that, while attempting to remain true to the original, when turning narratives into games, one must "respect the medium."
01-27-2008
doomed
One Story, Many Media

Kevin Wilson describes his methodology of boiling a franchise down to its core elements and weighing the differences among media when translating games from medium to medium.
01-25-2008
atmospheric
On Mystery of the Abbey

Bruno Faidutti begins with the controversial premise that "[e]very game tells a story," in his description of how he uses literary techniques to enhance gameplay - even in non-RPG systems such as board games, which don't traditionally include a story.
01-22-2008
edenic
Creating a Meaning-Machine: The Deck of Stories Called Life in the Garden

Eric Zimmerman describes his interactive paper book as "an inverted exquisite corpse," and although a digital version of the book would be easy to produce, he argues that an electronic edition would not produce as meaningful an experience as the printed volume.
01-20-2008
forking
On Life's Lottery

Kim Newman describes various methods of approaching his choose-your-own-adventure-style novel, which can be read or played because, like a role-playing game, "you are at once a reader and the main character."
01-20-2008
borntobewyld
Structure and Meaning in Role-Playing Game Design

Using Exalted as her text, Rebecca Borgstrom begins with the premises that every role-playing game requires a setting, and that to establish a fictional world players work within a mutually agreed upon structure to construct meaning.
01-19-2008
generic
Making Games That Make Stories

James Wallis uses genre as the fulcrum for balancing game rules and narrative structure in story-telling games, which he differentiates from RPGs through their emphasis on the creation of narrative over character development.
01-03-2008
thirsty
Storytelling Games as a Creative Medium

Will Hindmarch contests Greg Costikyan's challenge to the idea that "games have something to do with stories" by contending that "storytelling games reconcile the theoretically antithetical relationship between their two halves - story and game."
top 2007
12-29-2007
playable
It's All About You, Isn't It? Editors' Introduction to Second Person

Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin justify their focus on the experience of play over theory in their assemblage of the essays by game designers, players, and critics featured in Second Person - the book.
12-29-2007
emotion
Emotion Engine, Take 2. Jeff Tidball Responds to the Second Person Collection as a Whole

Jeff Tidball contends that the Second Person collection deals too much with the mechanics of narrative and too little with the emotion it can evoke.
12-28-2007
storyish
Games, Storytelling, and Breaking the String

Greg Costikyan revisits the narrative versus game-play debate that continues to be a staple of both Game Studies and Game Design. He presents a spectrum that ranges from game-focused forms to narrative-centric models, and suggests that free-form role-playing may be the most desireable marriage of narrative and game-play.
12-27-2007
original
From the Basement to the Basic Set: The Early Years of Dungeons & Dragons

Erik Mona takes a first step toward measuring the cultural impact of Gygax and Arneson's Dungeons & Dragons by providing a pocket history of the game's generation and evolution. Mona explains the addition of character development as a game goal - the innovation that distinguishes D&D from its predecessors, and started the role-playing revolution.
12-26-2007
adventurous
Narrative Structure and Creative Tension in Call of Cthulhu

Kenneth Hite argues that the long-running, H.P. Lovecraft-inspired Call of Cthulhu franchise differs from traditional tabletop role-playing in its focus on suspense rather than character growth. Hite's analysis suggests that in its origins and emphasis on narrative structure Cthulhu is a highly literary game.
12-25-2007
adventrousrip
Playing with the Mythos

Van Leavenworth, in his response to Hite, delves more deeply into Cthulhu's literariness, in particular the "large adventure book 'footprint'" of the series. He contends that the Lovecraft mythos provides a framework for the generation of narratives that - unlike many RPG stories - hold up beyond the game-play session.
12-24-2007
creative
On Character Creation in Everway

Jonathan Tweet explains how, unlike highly narratively structured games such as The Call of Cthulhu, the free-form, character-focused Everway includes a matrix that allows for the creation of coherent characters and productively constrains the otherwise open-ended game-play.
12-24-2007
haunted
On "The Haunted House"

Keith Herber discusses how in his "Haunted House" scenario for Call of Cthulhu, characters are driven insane by their attempt to unravel the game's mysteries. Herber's explanation distinguishes his work from many other role-playing games in which the goal is to develop characters and acquire power and/or wealth. In contrast, characters in Herber's scenario are rewarded with mental instability.
12-24-2007
hauntedrip
Limiting the Creative Agenda: Restrictive Assumptions In Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu

David Alger responds to Herber by disagreeing with the latter's claim that narrative trumps game-play in the Cthulhu "Haunted House" scenario, stressing that even the most narratively driven games still must be playable in order to be games.
10-13-2007
protagonism
My Life with Master: The Architecture of Protagonism

Paul Czege explains that he aimed for My Life with Master to be an engine for story creation rather than just another variation on the traditional role-playing game system.
top 2005
11-05-2005
databased
Privileging Language: The Text in Electronic Writing

Now that the First Person essay collection is complete and the case has been made for computer games as a form of narrative, Brian Kim Stefans asks the fundamental questions - concerning what can be read as literature, and what really cannot.
11-05-2005
traverse
First Person, Games, and the Place of Electronic Literature

Scott Rettberg, responding to "The Pixel/The Line" (section 4 of First Person) wonders whether electronic writing isn't evolving into a subspecies of electronic art, one that uses words as material, 'just as sculptors use clay.'
05-21-2005
manovichian
John Cayley's response

"Playing with play," John Cayley sets ludology on an even playing field with literature, but without literary scholarship's over-reliance on 'story,' 'closure,' and 'pleasure.'
04-20-2005
x=reader
New Readings

The reader steps to the fore in the final section of First Person, reconfigured and ready for interaction.
04-19-2005
creole
Metaphoric Networks in Lexia to Perplexia

Reading subjectivity into the software interface, N. Katherine Hayles offers a compelling case for computational authorship.
04-18-2005
signed-up
How I Was Played by Online Caroline

Jill Walker's encounter with a participatory, and vaguely sinister, online narrative.
04-17-2005
fictive
Interactive Fiction

Which alias best fits interactive fiction? The nominees are: "Story," "Game," "Storygame," "Novel," "World," "Literature," "Puzzle," "Problem," "Riddle," and "Machine." Read, and decide.
03-08-2005
beyondchat
Beyond Chat

The subject of conversation enters the conversation that is First Person, here in section seven.
03-07-2005
scalene
What Does a Very Large-Scale Conversation Look Like?

Warren Sack uses The Conversation Map, a "graphical interface" that analyzes newsgroups and listservs, to analyze the possibilities of discourse analysis itself.
03-06-2005
meme
Community of People with No Time

"Collaboration shifts": Victoria Vesna investigates the digital/physical limn, the compression of spacetime, and the condition of tensegrity in projects such as n0time and Datamining Bodies.
03-05-2005
voicechip
If Things Can Talk, What Do They Say? If We Can Talk to Things, What Do We Say?

The subtitle - "Using Voice Chips and Speech Recognition Chips to Explore Structures of Participation in Sociotechnical Scripts" - tells the story, partly. But there's more in store.
top 2004
11-30-2004
unpaginational
The Pixel/The Line

For all the talk of cyber-difference, screens still behave like pages. The contributors in section six have developed, in response, a digital aesthetics unlike that of print.
11-29-2004
programmatology
Literal Art

John Cayley dadas up the digital, revealing similarities of type across two normally separate, unequal categories: image and text. "Neither lines nor pixels but letters," finally, unite.
11-28-2004
multitiered
Unusual Positions

Camille Utterback exposits "embodied interaction with symbolic spaces" - the body and language of digital art.
11-27-2004
languagevehicle
Approaches to Interactive Text and Recombinant Poetics

In this series of "media-element field explorations," Bill Seaman suggests configurations for the shape of the virtual artist-author to come.
11-07-2004
beatmanager
Andrew Stern's response (excerpt)

Andrew Stern contrasts the "drama" of Façade against cognitive realism.
11-07-2004
princely
Mark Bernstein and Diane Greco respond in turn

Mark Bernstein and Diane Greco address "the utility question."
11-07-2004
outgrowth
Hypertexts and Interactives

The parallels (and oppositions) between hypertext and AI are brought out in section five.
11-06-2004
chiseled
Ken Perlin's response

Ken Perlin finds hypertext templates useful as they are used, not in tool form.
11-06-2004
hyperbaton
Card Shark and Thespis

Eastgate Systems alumns Diane Greco and Mark Bernstein explain two "exotic tools for hypertext narrative."
11-05-2004
stenographied
Stephanie Strickland responds in turn

Stephanie Strickland makes marks an intervention across the "I."
11-05-2004
somatic
Rita Raley’s response (excerpt)

Rita Raley praises twin interactivities.
11-05-2004
pathpicking
Camille Utterback's response

Camille Utterback figures the mouse click as weakly interactive.
11-05-2004
stenorthographic
Moving Through Me as I Move

Techno-poet Stephanie Strickland surveys the digital artistic practices of her peers and presents a "paradigm for interaction."
11-04-2004
doubled
Richard Schechner's response (excerpt)

Are actors really acting when they're characters? How about characters - can they really act? Richard Schechner asks twice.
11-04-2004
antibinary
Douglas and Hargadon respond in turn

Choosing between James Joyce and Stephen King means choosing between engagement and immersion. Or does it?
11-04-2004
popularity
Henry Jenkins responds

Who says hypertext readers have more brains than gamers? Not Henry Jenkins.
11-04-2004
avecplaisir
The Pleasures of Immersion and Interaction

J. Yellowlees Douglas and Andrew Hargadon on the affective side of hypertexts via "schemas, scripts, and the fifth business."
10-19-2004
newfield
Markku Eskelinen's response to Julian Raul Kucklich

Markku Eskelinen reiterates the bounds of ludology.
08-27-2004
newsflash
Notes Toward a Proleptic History of Electronic Reading

Matthew Kirschenbaum rethinks the final section of First Person in light of "five basic strategies for furthering the history of reading."
08-10-2004
aeffect
Adrian Miles responds to Hypertexts and Interactives

Miles Adrian on themes of print vs. digital, engagement vs. immersion, easy vs. difficult, and affect vs. effect, as they appear in section five of First Person.
07-11-2004
introduced
Game Theories

It's "Game Time." Here in section four we see what the dynamics of time and space have to do with the games people play.
07-10-2004
lazzi-fair
Game Design as Narrative Architecture

Henry Jenkins uses narrative space to distinguish between different tale-ends.
07-09-2004
teleport
Introduction to Game Time

Jesper Juul maps the "flow" state of gameplay onto innerspace and elsewhere.
07-08-2004
tamagotchi
Towards a Game Theory of Game

Applying games to games, Celia Pearce uses The Sims to showcase six keywords.
07-07-2004
ludican-do
Narrative, Interactivity, Play, and Games

Eric Zimmerman whips "four naughty concepts" into disciplinary shape.
06-28-2004
GPS
Notes Toward a More Pervasive Cyberdramaturgy

Jane McGonigal goes mobile with a "transformational agenda" shift for Cyberdrama.
06-27-2004
introducing
Critical Simulation

Theories of performance, training, and psychology explain simulation - or do they? - in the third section of First Person.
06-27-2004
enaction
Penny responds in turn

Simon Penny re-collects the dimensions of simulation-as-training in martial arts, football, and ballet (not to mention computer games).
06-27-2004
subjunctive
Ian Bogost's response to Critical Simulation

Ian Bogost, the co-designer of The Howard Dean for Iowa Game (along with First Person contributor Gonzalo Frasca), deconstructs section three.
06-26-2004
machanimate
Representation, Enaction, and the Ethics of Simulation

Do violent games train us for violence? Drawing on social psychology and cognitive science, Simon Penny examines the "ethics of simulation."
06-26-2004
introject
Jan Van Looy responds to Penny

An Internet response to Simon Penny that separates the transfer of gaming skills from ethics.
06-24-2004
Boalian
Videogames of the Oppressed

Gonzalo Frasca's proposal for videogames that address "critical thinking, education, tolerance, and other trivial issues."
06-24-2004
nonconformalist
Julian Raul Kucklich responds

Julian Raul Kucklich points out the virtues of interdisciplinarity cooperation for ludologists.
06-24-2004
transient
Academic Intent

Mark Barret cautions against reinventing the wheel in this riposte to Cyberdrama and to Janet Murray's essay.
06-23-2004
schintelligensia
Schizophrenia and Narrative in Artificial Agents

Phoebe Sengers discusses the Expressivator and socially situated AI.
05-23-2004
gamespecific
Ludology

First Person, second section: What is Ludology? Editors Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin see a disciplinary shift away from ill-advised analogies toward analyses of the gaming situation itself.
05-23-2004
brusque
Eskelinen responds in turn

Eskelinen can't be bothered to answer his critics.
05-22-2004
biodervish
Diane Gromala’s response (excerpt)

Cyberpractitioner Diane Gromala celebrates virtual immersion's unsteady body-knowledge.
05-22-2004
anticolonial
Towards Computer Game Studies

Literature scholars eager to understand gaming have made early inroads. Markku Eskelinen sets up serious checkpoints.
05-22-2004
cyberpragmatic
Moulthrop responds in turn

U.S. cybernetic pragmatisim and practical Net expertise interest Moulthrop (and his auditors) on "second thought."
05-22-2004
fandango
J. Yellowlees Douglas responds

J. Yellowlees Douglas adds more titles to Eskelinen's catalog of limnal games.
05-21-2004
lawful
Chris Crawford's response (excerpt)

Chris Crawford adduces the algorithms of games against dramatic conventions.
05-21-2004
vigilant
Genre Trouble

"Where is the text in chess?" asks Espen Aarseth. Rules, play, and semiosis are the (un)common ground between games and stories in "interactive narrativism" and the art of simulation.
05-21-2004
algorithmic
Espen Aarseth responds in turn

Espen Aarseth holds that gameplay, not Lara Croft?s physique, should command the attention of an evolving game studies.
05-20-2004
molecular
From Work to Play

Stuart Moulthrop (re)mediates the interpretation (narrativists) vs. configuration (ludologists) debate by going macropolitical.
05-19-2004
aside
Towards Computer Game Studies (sidebar)

Sidebar images, "From Work to Play: Molecular Culture in the Time of Deadly Games."
05-19-2004
aarsethaside
Genre Trouble (sidebar)

Sidebar images from "Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation."
05-19-2004
moulthropaside
From Work to Play (sidebar)

Sidebar images, "From Work to Play: Molecular Culture in the Time of Deadly Games."
05-02-2004
rewired
First Person: Introduction

Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin introduce First Person, an interactive, multi-player collaboration between ebr and the MIT Press.
05-02-2004
botanical
Ken Perlin responds in turn

Insisting on the centrality of character (in literature no less than gaming) Ken Perlin responds to Victoria Vesna and Will Wright.
05-02-2004
artifactual
Janet Murray responds in turn

Animals and invaders populate the space of Janet Murray's counter-response.
05-02-2004
bestyled
Michael Mateas responds in turn

Narrativists vs. ludologists, material vs. formal constraints: Michael Mateas replies by identifying actors' roles in each division.
05-01-2004
unsmitten
Brenda Laurel responds (excerpt)

The importance of consequences plots Brenda Laurel's response to Michael Mateas.
05-01-2004
simmering
Will Wright’s response (excerpt)

The man behind The Sims, Will Wright, places narrative controls back in the hands of gamers.
05-01-2004
formal
Between a Game and a Story?

Ken Perlin on a game-narrative difference that makes a difference: does agency, rather than identifiction, make characters in a game seem more real than those in novels or films?
05-01-2004
cornucopia
Espen Aarseth responds

Espen Aarseth foresees the quick end of Murray's "story-game hybrid" and suggests instead a "critical theory of games."
05-01-2004
compressed
Bryan Loyall’s response (excerpt)

Bryan Loyall cites expertly paced penguins in this response to Janet Murray.
05-01-2004
textattentive
Victoria Vesna responds

In response to Perlin, Victoria Vesna reiterates the unique realism of games.
05-01-2004
salutory
Gonzalo Frasca's response

Secret agency is at issue in Frasca's response, which denies the application of Aristotle to the open-ended interactivity of gaming.
05-01-2004
aristotelean
A Preliminary Poetics

The builder of Façade, an "interactive story world," Michael Mateas offers both a poetics and a neo-Aristotelian project (for interactive drama and games).
05-01-2004
expressive
Cyberdrama

Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin introduce Cyberdrama, the first section of First Person.
05-01-2004
sidelong
Between a Game and a Story? (Sidebar)

Illustrating Perlin's "Can There Be a Form between a Game and a Story?"
05-01-2004
venndiagrammatic
From Game-Story to Cyberdrama (Sidebar)

Game-Story set theory.
05-01-2004
autodramatic
From Game-Story to Cyberdrama

Moving from the holodeck to the game board, Janet Murray explains why we make dramas of digital simulations.
04-03-2004
walkersidebar
How I Was Played by Online Caroline (sidebar)

Sidebar images from "How I Was Played by Online Caroline."
04-03-2004
haylessidebar
Metaphoric Networks in Lexia to Perplexia (sidebar)

Sidebar images from "Metaphoric Networks in Lexia to Perplexia."
04-02-2004
as-is
Nick Montfort responds in turn

Nick Montfort reiterates the value of multiple perspectives on, and in, New Media.
04-02-2004
playpattern
Brenda Laurel's response (excerpt)

Brenda Laurel takes a turn at the rules of operation for Interactive Fiction.
04-02-2004
homonym
Janet Murray's response

Janet Murray unriddles the verbal and procedural mix of Interactive Fiction.
04-02-2004
situationist
Jill Walker responds in turn

"Thinking around the responses," Jill Walker reconsiders how gender and identity influence the reader-reading-the-reader in Online Caroline.
04-02-2004
treed
Adrianne Wortzel's response (excerpt)

A thirst for interaction fuels Adrianne Wortzel's response.
04-02-2004
uheimlich
Warren Sack's response

Warren Sack sheds some psychosocial light on readings, like Jill Walker's, of the uncanny.
04-02-2004
materialmetaphor
N. Katherine Hayles responds in turn

A response that bridges things, as metaphors do.
04-02-2004
fleshcode
Eugene Thacker's response (excerpt)

Eugene Thacker's question: "To what degree does language account for the markers and meanings of embodied difference?"
04-02-2004
enfolding
Bill Seaman's response

Bill Seaman hyphenates the "hybrid-languages" of Lexia to Perplexia.
04-01-2004
tele-operation
Natalie Jeremijenko responds in turn

Natalie Jeremijenko asserts that machine speech should re-awaken us to "the peculiar structure of participation that we take for granted."
04-01-2004
sociomaterial
Lucy Suchman’s response (excerpt)

Lucy Suchman's directive for talking things: "the creative elaboration of the particular indexical affordances of machine 'speech.'"
04-01-2004
piezo
Simon Penny's response

Simon Penny adds object-context to the talking machines of Natalie Jeremijenko's essay.
03-30-2004
bioidea
Victoria Vesna responds in turn

"Connect the n space to the 0 and understand that the lack of time due to information overflow is an illusion," writes Victoria Vesna.
03-30-2004
polyhedra
Stephanie Strickland's response

Stephanie Strickland calibrates n0time.
03-28-2004
sacksidebar
What Does a Very Large-Scale Conversation Look Like? (sidebar)

Text and full-size sidebar images from "What Does a Very Large-Scale Conversation Look Like?"
03-28-2004
postprolog
Warren Sack responds in turn

An autobiographical reflection by Warren Sack, prompted by two particular questions.
03-28-2004
sub-way
Rebecca Ross responds (excerpt)

Rebecca Ross asks how observing a conversation might change it.
03-28-2004
fellowship
Phoebe Sengers responds

Phoebe Sengers praises the optimistic, self-aware conversation mapped by Warren Sack and First Person.
03-24-2004
seamansidebar
Approaches to Interactive Text and Recombinant Poetics (sidebar)

Sidebar images from "Approaches to Interactive Text and Recombinant Poetics - Media-Element Field Explorations."
03-23-2004
rerecombinant
Bill Seaman responds in turn

Body politics and mouse use scroll through the scene.
03-23-2004
vertsuming
Diane Gromala’s response (excerpt)

Derrida's territory - "discontinuities, contradictions, ambiguities, materiality, silence, space, conflict, margins, and figures" - is Bill Seaman's, as Diane Gromala notes.
03-23-2004
vuser
Jill Walker's response

Jill Walker questions who (or what) sets the rules for interaction.
03-22-2004
tabular
Camille Utterback responds in turn

Camille Utterback's physical poetics, re-symbolized.
03-22-2004
aintmisbehavin
Matt Gorbet’s response (excerpt)

Matt Gorbet maintains that interactive texts remain overfamiliar to bodies trained on snowflakes and rain.
03-22-2004
superwoman
Adrianne Wortzel's response

Praise for the body art of Camille Utterback, and commentary on controls.
03-21-2004
compiler
John Cayley responds in turn

John Cayley replays what is literal and literary in the digital.
03-21-2004
disambiguating
Johanna Drucker’s response (excerpt)

Johanna Drucker counters hands-off poetics with practice.
03-19-2004
swoosh
Nick Montfort responds

Computers abstract from true/false to host letters, pixels, and Nick Montfort's riposte.
03-18-2004
cayleysidebar
Literal Art (sidebar)

Sidebar images from "Literal Art: Neither Lines nor Pixels but Letters."
01-11-2004
grandiology
Eric Zimmerman responds in turn

A reply from game designer Eric Zimmerman that is receptive to multiple viewpoints, non-design or otherwise.
01-11-2004
eschewy
Chris Crawford’s response (excerpt)

Chris Crawford considers Zimmerman's definitions.
01-11-2004
frameway
Jesper Juul's response

Jesper Juul suspects that things will remain unruly: big-budget, "cinematic" games will nose out experimental ones.
01-11-2004
metric
Celia Pearce responds in turn

Celia Pearce's position - anti-isolationist, but also anti-colonialist - derives from her understanding of "the unique properties of games themselves."
01-11-2004
destined
Mary Flanagan’s response (excerpt)

A recommendation for participatory, interdisciplinary articulations of action and perception from Mary Flanagan.
01-10-2004
possible
Mark Bernstein's response

Mark Bernstein explains that games have many lessons to learn from other artforms that speak to, and teach us, what it means to be human.
01-10-2004
setpacer
Jesper Juul responds in turn

Jesper Juul takes time to complicate the real in different types of games.
01-10-2004
tempo-real
Mizuko Ito’s response (excerpt)

Asymmetries between event time and play time interest Mizuko Ito, who asks "How do you answer the door to get a pizza to nourish your flesh-and-blood body when you are in the middle of life and death online combat?"
01-10-2004
game-time
Celia Pearce responds

Celia Pearce hits SAVE and preserves most of Jesper Juul's essay. But then "non-computer contexts" hit the screen.
01-09-2004
well-syuzheted
Henry Jenkins responds in turn

Casting the ludology vs. narratology debate as a game in itself, Henry Jenkins brings Bible gardens and the duck-billed platypus into this defense of hybridity.
01-09-2004
astragalian
Markku Eskelinen's response

Even orienteering is of greater use to game designers than narratology, claims Marrku Eskelinen, heading towards an area free from stories once more.
01-09-2004
noagon
Jon McKenzie’s response (excerpt)

An appreciative reply that measures the incline of Henry Jenkins' middle ground.
01-09-2004
patient
Phoebe Sengers responds in turn

Whether CTPs should walk on three legs or two; how the robotic artwork Petit Mal is "interpretationally plastic;" what cultural assumptions we build into machines: just some of the response-topics here.
01-09-2004
metaphragile
Lucy Suchman responds (excerpt)

The tenuous dynamics of Phoebe Senger's split story lead Lucy Suchman to ponder "methods and madness" in the metaphors we live by.
01-09-2004
e-AI
Michael Mateas responds

As alternatives to agency-obsession, "critical technical practices" that connect art and technology are front and center in the work of Michael Mateas.
01-08-2004
litphysical
Simon Penny responds in turn

Simon Penny recalls that the origins of the human-computer interface, politicized by a military heritage, are now explored by artist-enigineers who chaperone fragmentation and dissent.
01-08-2004
mod
Gonzalo Frasca responds in turn

"Critical videogames": moving beyond the non sequiter of now, Gonzalo Frasca projects a future in which the phrase would make sense.
01-08-2004
comiket
Mizuko Ito’s response (excerpt)

Mizuko Ito recounts her experience at an unusual gaming convention in Japan, and posits fan culture as a way to understand software.
01-08-2004
machinima
Eric Zimmerman's response

Eric Zimmerman modifies Gonzalo Frasca's game strategy with a strategic patch.
01-08-2004
enviroethical
Eugene Thacker’s response (excerpt)

Eugene Thacker sees ethical acting as a potential stumbling block, one that trips up technological complicity.
01-08-2004
intereactive
N. Katherine Hayles responds

The "cognitive entailments" of a reader, or "interactor," are where Katherine Hayles redirects the new aesthetics of electronic textuality.
top 2003
11-29-2003
starry
Richard Schechner’s response (excerpt)

Richard Schechner remembers the real-life side of interaction.
05-21-2003
insurgent
Stuart Moulthrop's response

Stuart Moulthrop complicates the idea of self-contained games.