Joe Scrimshaw describes his interactive stage drama, which with the exception of the technologies it employs, operates much like the computer-based interactive fiction Facade (discussed elsewhere in this thread). Rather than using code to select the proper reaction to user input as in Facade, the audience of Adventures in Mating votes on the choices the characters make, a la a Choose Your Own Adventure novel.

Ian Bogost and Gonzalo Frasca explain a new genre: persuasive games, and delve into the development and emerging legacy of The Howard Dean for Iowa Game, "the first official video game ever commissioned in the history of U.S. presidential elections." This new genre provides an opportunity to rethink the cultural status of games. If games are normally judged by how entertaining they are, persuasive games must be released from this criterion and assessed on how well they convey their message.

Robert Nideffer describes a multi-modal game in which the player will be more impressed with the number of media the game engages than with its (unexceptional) main character.

Nick Fortugno describes a live-action role-playing game with a real-world consequence - a marriage proposal.

Jane McGonigal argues that pervasive games - which involve electronic and 'real world' missions - reverse the traditional conception of the power dynamics of gaming, which has understood gamers as free agents. In contrast, according to McGonigal, designers of pervasive games exercise power over players, though their control is ultimately compromised by players' interpretive agency.

Teri Rueb describes Itinerant and quotes excerpts from the project's vocal track. The installation-style piece uses a GPS system and a headset. As the participant walks through the allotted space, the GPS cues various recordings. Rueb claims to want "to implicate the participant as a charged body in public space whose movement and presence become critical agents in structuring the meaning of the work."

Sean Thorne explains how he uses Puppetland to help children improve their writing. The RPG allows the students to develop characters, and to participate in the construction of stories so that they're imaginatively invested in what they write.

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

Brian Willems reads a number of fictional and critical texts, from ebr essays to William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, to argue that they all point toward the dissolution of the borders among humans, animals, and machines.

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.

Simon Critchley's study of ethics has been prominently reviewed by literary and cultural theorists, though most treatments accept the premise that ethical relations are primarily among people, that ethics depends mainly on intersubjective relations. This review by Daniel Punday resituates "Infinitely Demanding" in a networked context, one that is constructed by "media, by global flows, and by the larger network swarms which themselves take on an identity." For Punday, an ethics for our time is best found, not by the study of identities and localities, but rather by authors of contemporary fiction such as Jonathan Letham, Susan Daitch, Ishmael Reed, and Toni Cade Bambara.

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."

Nichoas Spencer argues for the importance of "anarchistic and spatial factors" in twentieth-century utopian thought despite the resistance to them in the Marxist texts under review by Brown, DeKoven, Jameson, and Puchner.

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."

Jason Rhody argues that Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time attains the status of a game fiction by leveraging "narrative tragedy" to enhance "ludic complexity" - creating a game in which narrative and play, far from being opposed, as in most assessments, enhance one another.

Editors Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin introduce the essays of the "Computational Fictions" section of Second Person, focusing on the conversion of human ludic interaction into computational processes - a necessary condition for computer games.

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.