Espen Aarseth holds that gameplay, not Lara Croft?s physique, should command the attention of an evolving game studies.

"Where is the text in chess?" asks Espen Aarseth. Rules, play, and semiosis are the (un)common ground between games and stories in "interactive narrativism" and the art of simulation.

Stuart Moulthrop (re)mediates the interpretation (narrativists) vs. configuration (ludologists) debate by going macropolitical.

Sidebar images, "From Work to Play: Molecular Culture in the Time of Deadly Games."

Sidebar images from "Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation."

Sidebar images, "From Work to Play: Molecular Culture in the Time of Deadly Games."

Insisting on the centrality of character (in literature no less than gaming) Ken Perlin responds to Victoria Vesna and Will Wright.

Narrativists vs. ludologists, material vs. formal constraints: Michael Mateas replies by identifying actors' roles in each division.

Davis Schneiderman reviews two works on Burroughs - a writer who is both there and not there, who exemplifies and escapes post-structuralist readings and postmodernist celebrations.

Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin introduce First Person, an interactive, multi-player collaboration between ebr and the MIT Press.

Alex Reid examines a cross-section of essays in Prefiguring Cyberculture, a work that historicizes the future as neither alarmist nor utopian.

Animals and invaders populate the space of Janet Murray's counter-response.

The importance of consequences plots Brenda Laurel's response to Michael Mateas.

Ken Perlin on a game-narrative difference that makes a difference: does agency, rather than identifiction, make characters in a game seem more real than those in novels or films?