first person Page 5 of 11

2008

03-Jan-2008
Storytelling Games as a Creative Medium

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."

2007

29-Dec-2007
Emotion Engine, Take 2. Jeff Tidball Responds to the Second Person Collection as a Whole

Jeff Tidball contends that the Second Person collection deals too much with the mechanics of narrative and too little with the emotion it can evoke.

29-Dec-2007
It's All About You, Isn't It? Editors' Introduction to Second Person

Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin justify their focus on the experience of play over theory in their assemblage of the essays by game designers, players, and critics featured in Second Person - the book.

28-Dec-2007
Games, Storytelling, and Breaking the String

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.

27-Dec-2007
From the Basement to the Basic Set: The Early Years of Dungeons & Dragons

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.

26-Dec-2007
Narrative Structure and Creative Tension in Call of Cthulhu

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.

25-Dec-2007
Playing with the Mythos

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.

24-Dec-2007
Limiting the Creative Agenda: Restrictive Assumptions In Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu

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.

24-Dec-2007
On Character Creation in Everway

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.

24-Dec-2007
On "The Haunted House"

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.

13-Oct-2007
My Life with Master: The Architecture of Protagonism

Paul Czege explains that he aimed for My Life with Master to be an engine for story creation rather than just another variation on the traditional role-playing game system.

2005

05-Nov-2005
First Person, Games, and the Place of Electronic Literature

Scott Rettberg, responding to "The Pixel/The Line" (section 4 of First Person) wonders whether electronic writing isn't evolving into a subspecies of electronic art, one that uses words as material, 'just as sculptors use clay.'

05-Nov-2005
Privileging Language: The Text in Electronic Writing

Now that the First Person essay collection is complete and the case has been made for computer games as a form of narrative, Brian Kim Stefans asks the fundamental questions - concerning what can be read as literature, and what really cannot.

21-May-2005
John Cayley's response

"Playing with play," John Cayley sets ludology on an even playing field with literature, but without literary scholarship's over-reliance on 'story,' 'closure,' and 'pleasure.'

20-Apr-2005
New Readings

The reader steps to the fore in the final section of First Person, reconfigured and ready for interaction.

19-Apr-2005
Metaphoric Networks in Lexia to Perplexia

Reading subjectivity into the software interface, N. Katherine Hayles offers a compelling case for computational authorship.

18-Apr-2005
How I Was Played by Online Caroline

Jill Walker's encounter with a participatory, and vaguely sinister, online narrative.

17-Apr-2005
Interactive Fiction

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

08-Mar-2005
Beyond Chat

The subject of conversation enters the conversation that is First Person, here in section seven.

07-Mar-2005
What Does a Very Large-Scale Conversation Look Like?

Warren Sack uses The Conversation Map, a "graphical interface" that analyzes newsgroups and listservs, to analyze the possibilities of discourse analysis itself.