11 January 2008

First/Second Person: series of game theory articles

Over at Grand Text Auto there was a piece talking about these two MIT game-theory projects by Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin called First Person and Second Person.

Neat stuff. I put them both on my Amazon wishlist and I've started reading the pieces in the First Person thread. I'm creating this blog entry as a place for me to journal my responses to the articles involved. It could take some time and I'm still figuring out how to blog, but this should be a good use.


It's All About You, Isn't It? Editors' Introduction to Second Person by Pat Harrigan & Noah Wardrip-Fruin

In this piece, the editors of the project mostly map out a bit of the goal of things. The primary take-away point seems to be that you are the consumer of these media. They are first-person experiences. I found the following paragraph of particular interest because I'm deeply desirous of bringing RPG Narrativism (From the Forge) to CRPGS/MMOs:
Our hope is that this collection will appeal to a wide variety of audiences. It discusses a number of playable forms, some of which have been unfortunately ignored by the academy, and all of which are important as we seek to understand our fields' presents and futures. For example, in the last few years there has been much academic discussion of video games and other forms of digital media, but little that acknowledges in any depth the debt many of these forms owe to tabletop role-playing games. Further, it is not too much to say that where academic discussion of tabletop RPGs exists, it is largely cursory - and, not infrequently, wrong."


Between Acting and Narrating: Editors' Introduction to Tabletop Systems, Round One by Pat Harrigan & Noah Wardrip-Fruin

Through the text and one extensive side-bar this piece describes a little bit about the physical and marketting forms of table-top RPGs. I like the fact that they discuss the indie RPG movement in the context of the larger RPG industry, but it seems kind of scattered. Maybe I'd get it more if the contents of this piece and the introduction were rolled together? In any case it provides an introduction for several of the articles included.


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