Pat Harrigan

Reading a book about digital media from 2004 is a weird time capsule, because of course the range of digital media has changed an incredible amount in the last two decades, and I often had reactions reading this book along the lines of, "Man, I bet these people wish they knew about Facebook or ChatGPT."

Even aside from that, though, I didn't find much of interest in this book, perhaps due to my bias as a literary scholar—most of the contributors seem to be coming more out of the gaming show more studies space, which isn't a criticism of them, but does mean that the critical conversations they care about are not the critical conversations that I care about. There's a lot of very formalist stuff; including a diagram with arrows in it in your critical essay is a surefire way to get me to tune out. I did occasionally find stuff of interest, but that was rare. I did really enjoy "How I Was Played by Online Caroline" by Jill Walker, about an "online drama" that unfolds in real time over weeks via a blog site.

The book also suffers from being overdesigned. Each of the regular critical essays has a response essay; this essay runs along the bottom of the pages of the regular essay, which means when you finish an essay, you then need to flip backwards to read the response. But then each essay also has an online response, which you can read in full on the book's web site, but is excerpted here, and then the author of the original essay responds to the responses; again, you get an excerpt here from a longer piece on the site. I am not sure why all of this is needed. I certainly never bothered to go to the site and read a piece in full! Some of the response essays are kind of embarrassing and I can't believe they got printed; Markku Eskelinen's response to Henry Jenkins's "Game Design as Narrative Architecture" misreads Jenkins so badly that Jenkins's response to the response begins, "I feel a bit like Travis Bickle when I ask Eskelinen, 'Are you talking to me?'" (Eskelinen's own essay is also pretty bad, to be honest, claiming that narrative has nothing to do with videogames at all. I can buy a claim that literary scholars focus too much on narrative in videogames, but to claim they are not stories is patently absurd.)

The book garnered two sequels, duly titled Second Person (2007) and Third Person (2009), but I don't have any interest in tracking them down. If you do game studies or "new media" (they must call it something else these days, right? it's not really "new" anymore), I suppose this book might appeal to you, but probably also I'd imagine it's been largely superseded. show less

It took a long time to finish this massive (over 800 pages and more than 50 chapters) and important work. For people who are involved in wargames, be they hobbyist, professional military, game designer, or merely curious, this is a fascinating look at the theory, history, and design aspects of wargames. It discusses both computer wargames (traditional videogames) and physical (hex and counter) wargames. Both popular (for consumers) and military (pretty much classified) are covered. It show more touches on reenactment and first person shooter games as well.

The chapters tend to be dense as there is a lot of information presented. Furthermore, that information made me think about it and the ramifications, so it is not a quick read. There are major names in wargame theory and design who have contributed. I wish the table of contents listed the contributors with their chapters, but if you expand the book description, you can find a list. Tetsuya Nakamura, Peter P. Perla, Thomas C. Schelling, Laurent Closier, and Philip Sabin are ones who wrote passages that I particularly enjoyed.

While I enjoyed the chapters on traditional wargames (as opposed to video/computer versions) the most, I can easily understand the ones on electronic versions. My friends who play such games tell me that those chapters are pretty standard in outlook. I found the outlook of some of the academics who study the people who play electronic wargames (as opposed to playing the games themselves for pleasure) to be predictable responses. However, the more theoretical chapters about design and theory of wargames more than made up for those less interesting to me. Also interesting were the ideas about using them in classrooms and how to market them to non-wargamers.

Who would like it? Anyone who enjoys wargames and the theory behind them. Game designers. Military wargamers. Historians who might be interested in military history. People who are involved in marketing wargames. It is well worth the time and effort to read it. It is a book I will long remember. show less

This book's title isn't as precise as it might be. A more accurate title would be The Art of Cthulhu-Themed Games. And specifically, this collection is drawn all from the "heavy" end of the Cthulhu gaming pool. It doesn't cover lighter, comical fare (such as Cthulhu Gloom, Munchkin Cthulhu, The Stars Are Right, Cthulhu Fluxx, etc.). Instead, it is all taken from the games published by Chaosium (The Call of Cthulhu RPG) and Fantasy Flight Games (Arkham Horror, Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game, show more Elder Sign, etc.), where the horror atmosphere is maintained.

Although there are a fair number of illustrations focused on actual Lovecraft stories (particularly "The Call of Cthulhu" itself), most of the art here is only tied to the "mythos" -- not a label promoted by Lovecraft, but rather by his estate's literary executor August Derleth -- in a rough thematic fashion. Moreover, there are additional themes tangent to Lovecraft's story settings, such as the Prohibition-era underworld, and they are represented here relative to their salience in the games rather than the original literature.

All of which is just to say, that if you're looking for a volume that gathers a wide range of different artistic approaches to Lovecraft's literary oeuvre, this large book isn't it. But it is a nice collection of art around the themes of occult horror and Yog-Sothothery, with a reasonable variety of artistic styles. As someone accustomed to seeing many of these images among the game materials, it is interesting for me to be able to see larger works that the game publishers had used in fragmentary details (like Thomas Jedruszek's "Free-for-All," 66-7) , and to see art that was reproduced on small cards now realized in the more generous scale of this large book (like Matt Dixon's "Innsmouth Troublemaker," 48).

Pat Harrigan's one-page introduction to the book is basically a concession to the format with little to offer the reader, and his single-paragraph chapter headings are merely what card game designers call "flavor text." There's no real value to be had in any of the prose in this book; it's just about the pictures. There is an appendix with useful artist bios for several dozen of the contributors.

The art all appears to have been produced as work-for-hire, because each picture's caption gives title, artist, and then a copyright attribution to either Chaosium or Fantasy Flight Games. Frankly, it would have been more attractive (and just as effective for intellectual property purposes) to have supplied the copyright notices in a credits page in the front matter or end matter of the book. The material quality of the book is high, with good reproductions on heavy stock, and a dust jacket over a printed paper hardcover that shows the cover art sans title text. show less

As the title suggests, this is the third piece in the series of anthologies started with First Person and Second Person. It addresses narrative strategies in what the editors call vast narratives, which amounts to extensive narrative worlds with long-term continuity, often spanning several media channels including TV and literature as well as online games and works of art and fiction. As in the previous books, the list of contributors is rich and spans the gamut from scholarly analysis to show more artistic reflection. The essays are divided into two parts -- authoring and exploring -- and cover a range of salient topics including fan fiction, intertwined narratives, cross-media aspects and spatial experience. Anthologies are by necessity more piecemeal than monographs, which can be a mixed blessing: The may seem incoherent, but on the other hand the multiplicity of perspectives guarantees that any interaction designer interested in the medialization of their profession will find something relevant. show less