Noah Wardrip-Fruin

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

A broad collection of essays, ranging from the anecdotal to the rigorous. The common focus of all the contributions is on the relation between role-playing and story. This is examined throughout many forms of play, including board games, interactive fiction, political simulations, augmented reality games, table-top and live-action role-playing games, and more. The book carries on the theme from First Person but usefully narrows it to forms where the played and the told are necessarily show more combined. My feeling is that what I learn from the book extends outside the realms of game design and art-aspiring fiction, and into any interaction design situation where ludic and narrative elements are involved. Such situations seem to be growing increasingly common. show less

The New Media Reader is a massive collection of papers, articles and book excerts anticipating or contributing to the emerging digital medium. It includes most of the significant work from the 1940s onwards, thus in a way sketching a cultural history of "new media."
The first section addresses the complexity and combinatorial possibilities of digital media, including the earliest precursor of what eventually became hypertext and the www: Bush, Engelbart, Nelson and other computing pioneers show more along with prescient artists such as Ascott and Oulipo. In the second section, the social nature of the new media is explored in an equally appropriate selection ranging from McLuhan to Baudrillard and Deleuze/Guattari. The third section is slightly more loosely connected around activity and action, including work by Papert, Turkle, Stallman, Winograd/Flores and others. In the fourth and final section, countercultural and revolutionary themes are explored in writings of Suchman, Ehn/Kyng, Bolter, Moulthrop, Agre, CAE, Berners-Lee and others. The supplementary CD contains several hard-to-find examples, including a few seminal games and artworks and a generous video excerpt of Engelbart's 1968 demo of the NLS system.
As the selection of names above illustrates, the New Media Reader is an impressive attempt to map the cultural history of the digital medium. It should be required reading for any interaction design student. Even though the history of our field is short, it is substantial and the perspective on digital artifacts as media is growing steadily in importance in the foreseeable future. show less

A collection of selected essays, carefully structured and augmented with expert commentary. The focus is squarely on new media artifacts (rather than on the communication being mediated or the actors communicating) and the key topic is the ongoing debate on story vs. game: Are new media artifacts best understood narratologically or ludologically? The collection serves as a very useful introduction to new media topics in game studies and digital arts.