Kevin Whelan argues that there's not much difference between role-playing games and grass-roots political activism.

John Tynes argues that it took the novel two hundred years to gain cultural capital; film, forty years; rock and roll, fifteen. Given this increasing velocity and the fact that it's been three decades since Colossal Cave Adventure, interactive storytelling should have gained a much higher level of respect than it has. Tynes argues that games should eschew escapist fantasy for more timely "engagist" settings that would allow the player to reflect on contemporary life and politics.

Corvus Elrod extends Bruno Faidutti's claim that all games tell stories by making the counter-intuitive argument that board games like Chess and Go are more effective story vehicles than RPGs.

David Parry argues that Pax occupies a position between literature and games - that it "glorifies play while undermining games," and that it's "not so much literature as it is literary."

Jesper Juul argues that James Wallis's focus on definitions in his intervention into the story/game debate doesn't give the experience of story - or game - its due.

Monica Evans extends Costikyan's analysis of the narrative/game debate, but ultimately concludes that battles over genre categorization miss the point of electronic media, and that we cannot yet accurately assess how the tension between story and play works out because digital games are "products of a technology still in its infancy."

Mark Marino explains Twelve Easy Lessons to Better Time Travel as an allegory of electronic writing, featuring characters that represent salient figures from Alan Turing to Shelley Jackson.

Marie-Laure Ryan describes Juvenate as an audiovisual hypertext that can be navigated via a provided map or wandered through like a maze, evoking the question of whether the text is best understood as a narrative or a game.

Emily Short explains that one of the goals of Savoir-Faire is to teach the player to become a magician. This pedagogical orientation means that - in contrast to interactive fictions that allow only a severely limited range of player input - Short's game rewards undirected play because the player is not only solving puzzles, but also learning.

Steve Meretzky reflects on one of the earliest (1982) NPCs (non-player characters) to evoke an emotional investment from videogame players. Meretzky draws attention to the fact that character development - integral to fiction and film - is not often emphasized in game design.

Jeremy Douglass evaluates Shade within the history of interactive fiction, and considers how light is represented in the code structure of scene descriptions, arguing that "[w]ithout vision there is no agency."

Jordan Mechner explains how the team developing of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time incorporated a number of cinematic techniques such as flashback and voice over (which do not usually figure into video games) while also working within the practical restrictions of a commercial production schedule.

Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern argue that new media practitioners and scholars should be literate in the code that underlies their objects of creation and study. To this end, they explain how they structured the code of their computer-based interactive drama Façade, which capitalizes on the procedural nature of computers to create a forum for participatory drama that negotiates players' local and global agency within the game world.

Robert Zubek describes how his program takes advantage of the tropes of breakup conversations. These generic norms allow The Breakup Conversation to assess players' textual entries categorically rather than semantically and thereby convincingly simulates an IM-based interaction.

Chris Crawford walks through Deikto, an interactive storytelling language that "reduce[s] artistic fundamentals to even smaller fundamentals, those of the computer: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division."

D. Fox Harrell considers what is computational about composition, and describes the GRIOT system for generating literary texts.

Lee Sheldon describes his playable adaptation of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, which relies on his invention of a "suspicion meter" to quantify and track the player's interaction with - and assessments of - NPCs (non-player characters).

The electronic release of Second Person starts with a number of essays on tabletop role-playing. Most of these consider the entanglement of play and narrative in a variety of game systems, from the highly controlled to the largely open-ended.

Kevin Wilson describes his methodology of boiling a franchise down to its core elements and weighing the differences among media when translating games from medium to medium.

Bruno Faidutti begins with the controversial premise that "[e]very game tells a story," in his description of how he uses literary techniques to enhance gameplay - even in non-RPG systems such as board games, which don't traditionally include a story.