Kim Newman describes various methods of approaching his choose-your-own-adventure-style novel, which can be read or played because, like a role-playing game, "you are at once a reader and the main character."

Using Exalted as her text, Rebecca Borgstrom begins with the premises that every role-playing game requires a setting, and that to establish a fictional world players work within a mutually agreed upon structure to construct meaning.

James Wallis uses genre as the fulcrum for balancing game rules and narrative structure in story-telling games, which he differentiates from RPGs through their emphasis on the creation of narrative over character development.

Jon Adams rifles through the instrument cabinet of the man upstairs by way of William J. Jackson's Heaven's Fractal Net. Adams finds more problems than solutions in Jackson's position that fractals are a fundamental and universal structure of life - a position Jackson stakes out by vacillating between scholarly proof and speculative guruism.

Amy J. Elias reviews Madhu Dubey's second book Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism and gauges the argument that we can locate within literary history a distinctive African American strain of postmodernism.

Will Hindmarch contests Greg Costikyan's challenge to the idea that "games have something to do with stories" by contending that "storytelling games reconcile the theoretically antithetical relationship between their two halves - story and game."

Greg Costikyan revisits the narrative versus game-play debate that continues to be a staple of both Game Studies and Game Design. He presents a spectrum that ranges from game-focused forms to narrative-centric models, and suggests that free-form role-playing may be the most desireable marriage of narrative and game-play.

Erik Mona takes a first step toward measuring the cultural impact of Gygax and Arneson's Dungeons & Dragons by providing a pocket history of the game's generation and evolution. Mona explains the addition of character development as a game goal - the innovation that distinguishes D&D from its predecessors, and started the role-playing revolution.

Kenneth Hite argues that the long-running, H.P. Lovecraft-inspired Call of Cthulhu franchise differs from traditional tabletop role-playing in its focus on suspense rather than character growth. Hite's analysis suggests that in its origins and emphasis on narrative structure Cthulhu is a highly literary game.

Van Leavenworth, in his response to Hite, delves more deeply into Cthulhu's literariness, in particular the "large adventure book 'footprint'" of the series. He contends that the Lovecraft mythos provides a framework for the generation of narratives that - unlike many RPG stories - hold up beyond the game-play session.

Jonathan Tweet explains how, unlike highly narratively structured games such as The Call of Cthulhu, the free-form, character-focused Everway includes a matrix that allows for the creation of coherent characters and productively constrains the otherwise open-ended game-play.

Keith Herber discusses how in his "Haunted House" scenario for Call of Cthulhu, characters are driven insane by their attempt to unravel the game's mysteries. Herber's explanation distinguishes his work from many other role-playing games in which the goal is to develop characters and acquire power and/or wealth. In contrast, characters in Herber's scenario are rewarded with mental instability.

David Alger responds to Herber by disagreeing with the latter's claim that narrative trumps game-play in the Cthulhu "Haunted House" scenario, stressing that even the most narratively driven games still must be playable in order to be games.