Second Person

by Harrigan, Pat; Wardrip-Fruin, Noah; Crumpton, Michael (CON)

• ISBN13: 9780262083560
• ISBN10: 0262083566
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-02-28
• Publisher: Mit Pr

Summary

Shortlisted for the 2008 Diana Jones Award. and Finalist, 2007 Front Line Awards, given by Game Developer Magazine. Games and other playable forms, from interactive fictions to improvisational theater, involve role playing and story-something played and something told. In Second Person, game designers, authors, artists, and scholars examine the different ways in which these two elements work together in tabletop role-playing games (RPGs), computer games, board games, card games, electronic literature, political simulations, locative media, massively multiplayer games, and other forms that invite and structure play. Second Person-so called because in these games and playable media it is "you" who plays the roles, "you" for whom the story is being told-first considers tabletop games ranging from Dungeons & Dragonsand other RPGs with an explicit social component to Kim Newman's Choose Your Own Adventure-style novel Life's Lotteryand its more traditional author-reader interaction. Contributors then examine computer-based playable structures that are designed for solo interaction-for the singular "you"-including the mainstream hit Prince of Persia: The Sands of Timeand the genre-defining independent production Facade. 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 Warcraftand 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 essays that range in tone from the informal to the technical, these writers offer a variety of approaches for the examination of an emerging field that includes works as diverse as George R.R. Martin's Wild Cardsseries and the classic Infocom game Planetfall. Second Personfeatures three complete tabletop role-playing games that demonstrate some of the variations possible in the form: in John Tynes's Puppetland, players take on the roles of puppets in a land ruled by the villainous Punch; Greg Costikyan's Bestial Actsimports the techniques of Bertolt Brecht's theater of alienation into a dark role-playing structure; and in James Wallis's The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, the gameplay revolves around spinning elaborate tales in the style of the famous raconteur. Contributors: Ian Bogost, Rebecca Borgstrom, Greg Costikyan, Chris Crawford, Paul Czege, Jeremy Douglass, Bruno Faidutti, Nick Fortugno, Gonzalo Frasca, Fox Harrell, Pat Harrigan, Keith Herber, Will Hindmarch, Kenneth Hite, Adriene Jenik, Mark Keavney, Eric Lang, Lev Manovich, Mark Marino, George R. R. Martin, Michael Mateas, Jane McGonigal, Jordan Mechner, Talan Memmott, Steve Meretzky, Erik Mona, Nick Montfort, Torill Mortensen, Stuart Moulthrop, Kim Newman, Robert Nideffer, Celia Pearce, Teri Rueb, Marie-Laure Ryan, Joseph Scrimshaw, Lee Sheldon, Emily Short, Andrew Stern, Helen Thorington, Sean Thorne, Jonathan Tweet, John Tynes, Tim Uren, James Wallis, Jill Walker, Kevin Whelan, Kevin Wilson, Adrianne Wortzel, Eric Zimmerman, Robert Zubek

Table of Contents

Dedication and Acknowledgments	p. x
Contributors	p. xi
Introduction	p. xiii
Tabletop Systems
Games, Storytelling, and Breaking the String	p. 5
On the Wild Cards Series	p. 15
From the Basement to the Basic Set	p. 25
The Early Years of Dungeons & Dragons
Narrative Structure and Creative Tension in Call of Cthulhu	p. 31
On "The Haunted House"	p. 41
On Character Creation in Everway	p. 45
Storytelling Games as a Creative Medium	p. 47
Structure and Meaning in Role-Playing Game Design	p. 57
My Life with Master: The Architecture of Protagonism	p. 67
Making Games That Make Stories	p. 69
Creating a Meaning-Machine	p. 81
The Deck of Stories Called Life in the Garden
Design Decisions and Concepts in Licensed Collectible Card Games	p. 85
One Story, Many Media	p. 91
On Mystery of the Abbey	p. 95
On Life's Lottery	p. 99
Computational Fictions
The Sands of Time: Crafting a Video Game Story	p. 111
On And Then There Were None	p. 121
On Solitaire	p. 125
Enlightening Interactive Fiction Andrew Plotkin's Shade	p. 129
The Creation of Floyd the Robot in Planetfall	p. 137
Fretting the Player Character	p. 139
On Savoir-Faire	p. 147
Pax, Writing, and Change	p. 149
RE: Authoring Magritte:	p. 157
The Brotherhood of Bent Billiard
On Soft Cinema: Mission to Earth	p. 159
On Juvenatege	p. 163
Marie-Laure Ryan
On Twelve Easy Lessons to Better Time Travel	p. 165
Deikto: A Language for Interactive Storytelling	p. 169
GRIOT's Tales of Haints and Seraphs	p. 177
A Computational Narrative Generation System
Writing Facade: A Case Study in Procedural Authorship	p. 183
On The Breakup Conversation	p. 209
On The Archer's Flight	p. 213
Real Worlds
Prismatic Play	p. 221
Games as Windows on the Real World
On John Tynes's Puppetland	p. 229
Video Games Go to Washington	p. 233
The Story behind The Howard Dean for Iowa Game
Political Activism	p. 247
Bending the Rules
The Puppet Master Problem	p. 251
Design for Real-World, Mission-Based Gaming
On A Measure for Marriage	p. 265
On unexceptional.net	p. 269
On Itinerant	p. 273
Finding the Game in Improvised Theaters	p. 279
On Adventures in Mating	p. 285
Santaman's Harvest Yields Questions, or	p. 289
Does a Performance Happen if It Exists in a Virtual Forest?
Me, the Other	p. 297
Torill Elvira Mortensen
A Network of Quests in World of Warcraft	p. 307
Communities of Play	p. 311
The Social Construction of Identity in Persistent Online Game Worlds
Celia Pearce and Artemesia
Eliza Redux	p. 319
Appendices
Puppetland by John Tynes	p. 333
Bestial Acts by Greg Costikyan	p. 349
The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen	p. 359
Contributor Biographies	p. 383
Permissions	p. 393
Index	p. 395
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.