The First Person thread began as a collaboration among electronic book review, MIT Press, and editors Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. Since 2003 it has explored a new model for connection between online publishing and traditional edited books in which printed works are not only reproduced electronically but also substantially expanded via responses to the collection (ripostes) and enriched by incorporation into the ebr database. This thread engages and reproduces much of the contents of a trilogy of edited collections published by the MIT Press: First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media, and Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives. The ebr version is a continuation, and an occasional critique of the essays that appeared in the book series. And the scope itself will widen beyond the topics raised in the MIT print volumes to include emerging forms of fictional and playable experiences, along with new protocols, new interfaces, and possibly even new ways of drawing the boundaries between text and code, digital gaming and textual narrative.
first person
May 3, 2004