Originally published: 2007. Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents:
Eliza Redux / Games, storytelling, and breaking the string / Adrianne Wortzel. On the Wild Card series / George R. R. Martin -- From the basement to the basic set : the early years of Dungeons and Dragons / Erik Mona -- Narrative structure and creative tension in Call of Cthulhu / Kenneth Hite -- On "The Haunted House" / Keith Herber -- On character creation in Everway / Jonathan Tweet -- Storytelling games as a creative medium / Will Hindmarch -- Structure and meaning in role-playing game design / Rebecca Borgstrom -- My Life with Master : the architecture of protagonism / Paul Czege -- Making games that make stories / James Wallis -- Creating a meaning-machine : the deck of stories called Life in the Garden / Eric Zimmerman -- Designing decisions and concepts in licensed collectible card games / Eric Lang (with Pat Harrigan) -- One story, many media / Kevin Wilson -- On Mystery in the Abbey / Bruno Faidutti -- On Life's Lottery / Kim Newman -- Computational fictions. Sands of Time : crafting a video game story / Jordan Mechner -- On And Then There Were None / Lee Sheldon -- On Solitaire / Helen Thorington -- Enlightening interactive fiction : Andrew Plotkin's Shade / Jeremy Douglass -- Creation of Floyd the robot in Planetfall / Steve Meretzky -- Fretting the player character / Nick Montfort -- On Savoir-Faire / Emily Short -- Pax, writing, and change / Stuart Moulthrop -- RE: authoring Magritte : The Brotherhood of Bent Billiard / Talan Memmott -- On soft cinema : Mission to Earth / Lev Manovich -- On Juvenate / Maríe-Laure Ryan -- On Twelve Easy Lessons to Better Time Travel / Mark C. Marino -- Deikto : a language for interactive storytelling / Chris Crawford -- GRIOT's tales of haints and seraphs : a computational narrative generation system / D. Fox Harrell -- Writing Façade : a case study in procedural authorship / Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern -- On The Breakup Conversation / Robert Zubek -- On The Archer's Flight / Mark Keavney -- Real worlds. Prismatic play : games as windows on the real world / John Tynes -- On John Tynes's Puppetland / Sean Thorne -- Video games go to Washington : the story behind The Howard Dean for Iowa Game / Ian Bogost and Gonzalo Frasca -- Political activism : bending the rules / Kevin Whelan -- Puppet master problem : design for real-world, mission-based gaming / Jane McGonigal -- On A Measure for Marriage / Nick Fortugno -- On unexceptional.net / Robert Nideffer -- On Itinerant / Teri Rueb -- Finding the game in improvised theater / Tim Uren -- On Adventures in Mating / Joe Scrimshaw -- Santaman's Harvest yields questions, or does a performance happen if it exists in a virtual forest? / Adriene Jenik -- Me, the other / Torill Elvira Mortensen -- Network of quests in World of Warcraft / Jill Walker -- Communities of play : the social construction of identity in persistent online game worlds / Celia Pearce and Artemesia -- Eliza Redux / Adrianne Wortzel.
Summary:
Games and other playable forms, from interactive fictions to improvisational theater, involve role playing and story--something played and something told. In Second Person, game designers, authors, artists, and scholars examine the different ways in which these two elements work together in tabletop role-playing games (RPGs), computer games, board games, card games, electronic literature, political simulations, locative media, massively multiplayer games, and other forms that invite and structure play.Second Person--so called because in these games and playable media it is "you" who plays the roles, "you" for whom the story is being told--first considers tabletop games ranging from Dungeons & Dragons and other RPGs with an explicit social component to Kim Newman's Choose Your Own Adventure-style novel Life's Lottery and its more traditional author-reader interaction. Contributors then examine computer-based playable structures that are designed for solo interaction--for the singular "you"--including the mainstream hit Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and the genre-defining independent production Façade. Finally, contributors look at the intersection of the social spaces of play and the real world, considering, among other topics, the virtual communities of such Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) as World of Warcraft and the political uses of digital gaming and role-playing techniques (as in The Howard Dean for Iowa Game, the first U.S. presidential campaign game).In engaging essays that range in tone from the informal to the technical, these writers offer a variety of approaches for the examination of an emerging field that includes works as diverse as George R.R. Martin's Wild Cards series and the classic Infocom game Planetfall. Appendixes contain three fully-playable tabletop RPGs that demonstrate some of the variations possible in the form.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.