lara croft

Ken Perlin on a game-narrative difference that makes a difference: does agency, rather than identifiction, make characters in a game seem more real than those in novels or films?

Illustrating Perlin's "Can There Be a Form between a Game and a Story?"

"Where is the text in chess?" asks Espen Aarseth. Rules, play, and semiosis are the (un)common ground between games and stories in "interactive narrativism" and the art of simulation.

Stuart Moulthrop complicates the idea of self-contained games.

Espen Aarseth holds that gameplay, not Lara Croft?s physique, should command the attention of an evolving game studies.

First Person, second section: What is Ludology? Editors Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin see a disciplinary shift away from ill-advised analogies toward analyses of the gaming situation itself.

Jesper Juul maps the "flow" state of gameplay onto innerspace and elsewhere.