tomb raider

An essay by Tara McPherson (and a conversation with Anne-Marie Schleiner) concerning patch mutations, opensorcery, and other explainable gaming offshoots.

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?

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

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

"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 complicates the idea of self-contained games.

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

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.