espen aarseth

Virginia Kuhn reviews an essay collection - Cybertext: Yearbook 2000 - ambivalent about its own printed status.

Which alias best fits interactive fiction?
The nominees are:
"Story," "Game," "Storygame," "Novel," "World,"
"Literature," "Puzzle," "Problem," "Riddle," and "Machine."
Read, and decide.

Moving from the holodeck to the game board, Janet Murray explains why we make dramas of digital simulations.

The builder of Façade, an "interactive story world," Michael Mateas offers both a poetics and a neo-Aristotelian project (for interactive drama and games).

Animals and invaders populate the space of Janet Murray's counter-response.

Secret agency is at issue in Frasca's response, which denies the application of Aristotle to the open-ended interactivity of gaming.

Literature scholars eager to understand gaming have made early inroads. Markku Eskelinen sets up serious checkpoints.

J. Yellowlees Douglas adds more titles to Eskelinen's catalog of limnal games.

Stuart Moulthrop complicates the idea of self-contained games.

Chris Crawford adduces the algorithms of games against dramatic conventions.