2nd Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media

Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Pat Harrigan
Games and other playable forms, from interactive fictions to improvisational theater,involve role playing and story–something played and something told. In Second Person, gamedesigners, authors, artists, and scholars examine the different ways in which these two elementswork together in tabletop role-playing games (RPGs), computer games, board games, card games,electronic literature, political simulations, locative media, massively multiplayer games, and otherforms that invite and structure play.Second Person–so called because in these games and playablemedia it is “you” who plays the roles, “you” for whom the story is being told–first considerstabletop games ranging from Dungeons & Dragons and other RPGs with an explicit social componentto Kim Newman’s Choose Your Own Adventure-style novel Life’s Lottery and its more traditionalauthor-reader interaction. Contributors then examine computer-based playable structures that aredesigned for solo interaction–for the singular “you”–including the mainstream hit Prince ofPersia: The Sands of Time and the genre-defining independent production Façade. Finally,contributors look at the intersection of the social spaces of play and the real world, considering,among other topics, the virtual communities of such Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games(MMORPGs) as World of Warcraft and the political uses of digital gaming and role-playing techniques(as in The Howard Dean for Iowa Game, the first U.S. presidential campaign game).In engaging essaysthat range in tone from the informal to the technical, these writers offer a variety of approachesfor the examination of an emerging field that includes works as diverse as George R.R. Martin’s WildCards series and the classic Infocom game Planetfall. Appendixes contain three fully-playabletabletop RPGs that demonstrate some of the variations possible in the form. Categories:
Computers – PC & Video Games
Year:
2007
Publisher:
Mit Press
Language:
english
Pages:
408
ISBN 10:
0262514184
ISBN 13:
9780262514187
File:
322 MB