First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game
by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Pat Harrigan (Editor)
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Electronic games have established a huge international market, significantly outselling non-digital games; people spend more money on The Sims than on "Monopoly" or even on "Magic: the Gathering." Yet it is widely believed that the market for electronic literature -- predicted by some to be the future of the written word -- languishes. Even bestselling author Stephen King achieved disappointing results with his online publication of "Riding the Bullet" and "The Plant."Isn't it possible, show more though, that many hugely successful computer games -- those that depend on or at least utilize storytelling conventions of narrative, character, and theme -- can be seen as examples of electronic literature? And isn't it likely that the truly significant new forms of electronic literature will prove to be (like games) so deeply interactive and procedural that it would be impossible to present them as paper-like "e-books"? The editors of First Person have gathered a remarkably diverse group of new media theorists and practitioners to consider the relationship between "story" and "game," as well as the new kinds of artistic creation (literary, performative, playful) that have become possible in the digital environment. This landmark collection is organized as a series of discussions among creators and theorists; each section includes three presentations, with each presentation followed by two responses. Topics considered range from "Cyberdrama" to "Ludology" (the study of games), to "The Pixel/The Line" to "Beyond Chat." The conversational structure inspired contributors to revise, update, and expand their presentations as they prepared them for the book, and the panel discussions have overflowed into a First Person web site. show lessTags
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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 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 show more 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
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 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 show more 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 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.
Dense, but made me realize a few things.
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- Nonfiction, General Nonfiction, Technology, Literature Studies and Criticism
- DDC/MDS
- 794.8 — Arts & recreation Recreation, sports, and performing arts Indoor games of skill Electronic games
- LCC
- GV1469.17 .S63 .F57 — Geography, Anthropology and Recreation Recreation. Leisure Recreation. Leisure Games and amusements Indoor games and amusements Computer games. Video games. Fantasy games
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