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Reviewed by:
  • First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, and: Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media, and: Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives
  • Margaret Noori
Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, eds. First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Cambridge: MIT P, 2004.
Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, eds. Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media. Cambridge: MIT P, 2007.
Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, eds. Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives. Cambridge: MIT P, 2009.

Why pay attention to games, game theory, and the technology that surrounds both today? One incredibly good reason is the reframing of literary ideas that can be found in such surprising arenas. The three volumes edited by Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin acknowledge the newness of the field of gaming, but they also serve to connect it to literature and the way in which it is produced. New media, role-playing, and vast narratives involve the same texts, words, and characters that have always been a part of storytelling. Every discipline has ideas that overlap with others. While scholars of American Indian literature debate nationalism, identity, and cultural heritage, game theorists argue about “ludology” versus “narratology.” Much like literary critics, digital media experts are concerned about the difference between structure versus story. Literary metaphors and quotes begin to overlap when ludology is compared to Wallace Stevens’s precise “mind of winter,” while narratology in gaming looks more like Harold Bloom’s “maps of misreading” which [End Page 91] focus on content. Balance and imbalance are forward forces in many disciplines, and occasionally it is refreshing to look beyond our own borders, to explore other worlds. Conversations about socially constructed identities, interactive narratives, and virtual worlds align with the concerns of American Indian literature in very interesting ways. As more stories are created in digital environments, it is worth exploring narrative from another angle, one so far-flung into the future that it in just might be less linear, more interactive, and more familiar to Indigenous practitioners of ancient literary arts.

Published in 2004, 2007, and 2009, the edited volumes, First Person, Second Person, and Third Person, include the voices of more than one hundred authors working in the field. Contributions range across subjects and are often juxtaposed to create dialogues between voices. For scholars in the field they are quickly dated, but serve as an intellectual archive. For readers from other disciplines, these volumes are an excellent introduction to how gaming and literature collide. Their clever titles reference more than pronouns and are actually intended to bring readers into the game environment by asking readers to think first as the player, then as the partner or opponent, and finally as one or more of the “others” who serve as audience, background members, and sometime collaborators.

First Person focuses on the primary actor or main themes of stories embedded in games. The collection brings together essays on cyberdramas, critical simulation, game theories, hypertexts, and other media and formats. It is an introduction to and exploration of the field. Several authors do the work of making interdisciplinary connections. Brenda Laurel and Michael Mateas place interactive drama in an Aristotelian context. Espen Arseth considers narratology and genre. One of the most interesting essays is Janet Murray’s brief description of the landscape of cybernarrative, in which she notes that “the human brain, the map of the earth, the protocols of human relationships, are all elements in an improvised collective story-game, an aggregation of overlapping, conflicting, constantly morphing structures that make up the rules by which we act and interpret our experiences” (3). With this, she slides into ethnography, anthropology, and other areas that work to describe human [End Page 92] behavior and culture. Her conclusion, however, is highly specific about the fact that “the digital medium is the appropriate locus for enacting and exploring the contests and puzzles of the new global community and the postmodern inner life” (3).

Second Person considers the task of authorship more closely. It also looks at the history of games and how they create fictions through play. Several authors discuss the intermingling...

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