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?

Espen Aarseth foresees the quick end of Murray's "story-game hybrid" and suggests instead a "critical theory of games."

In response to Perlin, Victoria Vesna reiterates the unique realism of games.

Secret agency is at issue in Frasca's response, which denies the application of Aristotle to the open-ended interactivity of gaming.

Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin introduce Cyberdrama, the first section of First Person.

Moving from the holodeck to the game board, Janet Murray explains why we make dramas of digital simulations.

Illustrating Perlin's "Can There Be a Form between a Game and a Story?"