cybertext

What binds literature, electronic literature and games is "the shaping and networking of the imagination." Drawing on the ideas of Damasio, Walton and Sartre, Gordon Calleja looks at the synthesizing role of the imagination in narrative indie games.

Entering the cyberdebates, Scott Rettberg moves beyond technique and proposes a more generative approach to hypertext, in which an author's intention and poetic purpose have a role.

Scott Rettberg introduces 'New Media Studies': a cluster of reviews, and a term (similar in its emergence to the term 'Postmodernism').

A book about books conscious of their materiality, N. Katherine Hayles' Writing Machines draws praise from Raine Koskimaa for its own media consciousness, and blame for embodied emphasis.

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

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.