Middle Spaces: Media and the Ethics of Infinitely Demanding
Daniel PundaySimon Critchley's study of ethics has been prominently reviewed by literary and cultural theorists, though most treatments accept the premise that ethical relations are primarily among people, that ethics depends mainly on intersubjective relations. This review by Daniel Punday resituates "Infinitely Demanding" in a networked context, one that is constructed by "media, by global flows, and by the larger network swarms which themselves take on an identity." For Punday, an ethics for our time is best found, not by the study of identities and localities, but rather by authors of contemporary fiction such as Jonathan Letham, Susan Daitch, Ishmael Reed, and Toni Cade Bambara.
Every Game a Story
Corvus ElrodCorvus Elrod extends Bruno Faidutti's claim that all games tell stories by making the counter-intuitive argument that board games like Chess and Go are more effective story vehicles than RPGs.
Pax and the Literary in the Digital Age
David ParryDavid Parry argues that Pax occupies a position between literature and games - that it "glorifies play while undermining games," and that it's "not so much literature as it is literary."
Utopia’s Doubles
Nicholas SpencerNichoas Spencer argues for the importance of "anarchistic and spatial factors" in twentieth-century utopian thought despite the resistance to them in the Marxist texts under review by Brown, DeKoven, Jameson, and Puchner.
Why Make Games That Make Stories?
Jesper JuulJesper Juul argues that James Wallis's focus on definitions in his intervention into the story/game debate doesn't give the experience of story - or game - its due.
Error, Interface, and the Myth of Immersion
Jason Rhody
Jason Rhody argues that Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time attains the status of a game fiction by leveraging "narrative tragedy" to enhance "ludic complexity" - creating a game in which narrative and play, far from being opposed, as in most assessments, enhance one another.
Beyond the String of Beads: More Systems for Game Narrative
Monica EvansMonica Evans extends Costikyan's analysis of the narrative/game debate, but ultimately concludes that battles over genre categorization miss the point of electronic media, and that we cannot yet accurately assess how the tension between story and play works out because digital games are "products of a technology still in its infancy."
On Twelve Easy Lessons to Better Time Travel
Mark C. Marino
Mark Marino explains Twelve Easy Lessons to Better Time Travel as an allegory of electronic writing, featuring characters that represent salient figures from Alan Turing to Shelley Jackson.
On Juvenate
Marie-Laure Ryan
Marie-Laure Ryan describes Juvenate as an audiovisual hypertext that can be navigated via a provided map or wandered through like a maze, evoking the question of whether the text is best understood as a narrative or a game.
Home: A Conversation with Richard Powers and Tom LeClair
Scott HermansonScott Hermanson presents a dialogue he conducted with novelists Richard Powers and Tom LeClair, at the University of Cincinnati in 2005. Moderated by Hermanson, the novelists discuss the intricacies of writing about nature, the role of history in the novel, and their fictions' use of imitative form.
Parasitic Fiction
Stephen J. BurnStephen Burn considers Tom LeClair's recent novel through the lens of the latter's own critical work on postmodern fiction, while also excavating the novel's relation to Faulkner's tale of racial empire building, Absalom, Absalom!
Electronic Media, Identity Politics, and the Rhetoric of Obsolescence
Anthony EnnsAnthony Enns questions Kathleen Fitzpatrick's link between an anxiety about the displacement of male privilige and the fear of new media technology in postmodern fiction.
Nothing Lasts
Stephen SchryerIn "Nothing Lasts," Stephen Schryer considers Tom LeClair's Passing On and The Liquidators as paired novels, one immersing the reader in the maelstrom of the social and economic systems that shape contemporary life, the other shielding the reader from those systems. Unlike the massive novels from the seventies that fascinated LeClair the critic, Schryer finds the novelist a "literary miniaturist," seeking "concise synecdoches for the larger systems" his books evoke.