Phoebe Sengers discusses the Expressivator and socially situated AI.

Late Breaking: William Gillespie, Scott Rettberg, and Rob Wittig post from Notre Dame University on the &Now festival of writers and writing.

Larry McCaffery reframes his 1989 essay on the "postmodern turn" in rock'n'roll music.

Eskelinen can't be bothered to answer his critics.

First Person, second section: What is Ludology? Editors Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin see a disciplinary shift away from ill-advised analogies toward analyses of the gaming situation itself.

Cyberpractitioner Diane Gromala celebrates virtual immersion's unsteady body-knowledge.

J. Yellowlees Douglas adds more titles to Eskelinen's catalog of limnal games.

U.S. cybernetic pragmatisim and practical Net expertise interest Moulthrop (and his auditors) on "second thought."

Literature scholars eager to understand gaming have made early inroads. Markku Eskelinen sets up serious checkpoints.

Chris Crawford adduces the algorithms of games against dramatic conventions.

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.

A Response to Rone Shavers and impromptu review of Harold Jaffe's latest book, 15 Serial Killers, latest entry in the "literature of witness."

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."

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.

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

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