first person
On Solitaire
Helen Thorington describes Solitaire, a program for generating fiction in the same line as the projects explained by Chris Crawford and D. Fox Harrell elsewhere in this thread.
Pax, Writing, and Change
Stuart Moulthrop argues that Pax answers John Cayley's question, "What would textual instruments look like?" Moulthrop maintains that one plays this electronic text (in the manner of a musical instrument) as much as one reads it.
Fretting the Player Character
Nick Montfort argues that the contentious notion of the "player character" usefully constrains and makes possible the player's interaction with the gameworld. He considers the possibility that in interactive fiction one plays the character (like an actor plays a role) rather than playing the game.
Enlightening Interactive Fiction: Andrew Plotkin’s Shade
Jeremy Douglass evaluates Shade within the history of interactive fiction, and considers how light is represented in the code structure of scene descriptions, arguing that "[w]ithout vision there is no agency."
Patterns and Shade
Carl McKinney argues that Jeremy Douglass's analysis of Shade suggests a presence/absence dynamic useful for understanding interactive fiction in general.
On The Archer’s Flight
Mark Keavney describes his process in composing a story in which the readers voted on plot points as he was writing, resulting in a truly interactive fiction - a narrative in which, as Keavney puts it, "[n]either the players nor I owned the story completely."
The Sands of Time: Crafting a Video Game Story
Jordan Mechner explains how the team developing of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time incorporated a number of cinematic techniques such as flashback and voice over (which do not usually figure into video games) while also working within the practical restrictions of a commercial production schedule.
Writing Façade: A Case Study in Procedural Authorship
Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern argue that new media practitioners and scholars should be literate in the code that underlies their objects of creation and study. To this end, they explain how they structured the code of their computer-based interactive drama Façade, which capitalizes on the procedural nature of computers to create a forum for participatory drama that negotiates players' local and global agency within the game world.
Deikto: A Language for Interactive Storytelling
Chris Crawford walks through Deikto, an interactive storytelling language that "reduce[s] artistic fundamentals to even smaller fundamentals, those of the computer: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division."
GRIOT’s Tales of Haints and Seraphs: A Computational Narrative Generation System
D. Fox Harrell considers what is computational about composition, and describes the GRIOT system for generating literary texts.