tomb raider

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.

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.