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Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media
Game designers, authors, artists, and scholars discuss how roles are played and how stories are created in role-playing games, board games, computer games, interactive fictions, massively multiplayer games, improvisational theater, and other "playable media." 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 & Dragons and other RPGs with an explicit social component to Kim Newman's Choose Your Own Adventure -style novel Life's Lottery and 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 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 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 Cards series and the classic Infocom game Planetfall . Appendixes contain three fully-playable tabletop RPGs that demonstrate some of the variations possible in the form.
408 pages, Hardcover
First published January 5, 2007
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
January 17, 2016
1) [Will Hindmarch] "The goal of a storytelling game isn't to produce a good story; it's to participate in good storytelling. Storytelling games are about the challenge of conceiving and telling stories, not the enjoyment of having a story or reading one. The process is the point, not the output."
2) [Paul Czege] "Story only happens in retrospect, when you pick from all the details of the game session and organize them for yourself in service to theme, character protagonism, and the dramatic. But when you're in it, generating the non-thematic noise, and your interest is story, you're not having much fun."
3) [Kim Newman, on 'Life's Lottery'] "Certain places (such as Sutton Mallet) and events also take on multiple significances depending on the reader's choices. I was quite pleased with the way this turned out, since it was tricky to manage: the idea is that certain events or places in the novel should be mystifying or easy to overlook the first time you read about them, but increase greatly in meaning with each return."
4) [Stuart Moulthrop, on 'Pax'] "Thus, Pax is really not much like a musical instrument, but closer to a kind of 31st century dim sum joint run by a gang of vaguely malevolent robots."
5) [Talan Memmott, 'Authoring Magritte' (caption)] "Interacting with two shadowy characters on this screen initiates textual commentary and variable audio dialog between the two characters. Moving the cursor over the punctuation in the voice bubble allows the user to remix musical fragments from various Brahms pieces."
6) [Michael Mateas & Andrew Stern, on 'Facade'] "Janet Murray has identified four essential properties of the computer as a representational medium: that computers are procedural, participatory, encyclopedic, and spatial. The procedural, of course, refers to the machinic nature of computers, that they embody complex causal processes, and in fact can be made to embody any arbitrary process. The participatory refers to the interactive nature of computers, that they can dynamically respond to outside signals, and be made to respond to those signals in a way that treats those signals as having the meaning ascribed to them by people (that is, nonarbitrary response). The encyclopedic refers to the vast storage capacity of digital computers, and their ability to organize, retrieve, and index stored material, The spatial refers to the ability of digital computers to represent space, whether that is the physical space of virtual reality and games or the abstract space of networks of information."
7) [Jill Walker, 'A Network of Quests in World of Warcraft'] "Of course, we might wish for games where the individual quests were better written, but the true importance of quests in World of Warcraft is not at the level of the individual quest. There are at least two reasons we need quests. First, they function as tutorials guiding the player through learning how to play the game and expanding the game as the player progresses. Secondly, they flesh out the world, making it interesting. They do that not so much through each individual quest as through the densely storied landscape that I come to know as I work through quest after quest."
8) [Celia Pearce, on the Myst Uru diaspora] "Building on prior research in emergent narrative, I conducted an eighteen-month, in-game ethnography, using a technique of 'participant engagement,' which entailed playing with study participants as a full member of the group. In addition, I employed techniquest of visual anthropology (primarily screenshot documentation), conducted in-game interviews, and studied supplemental communications (such as forums and email lists.). The primary subject of study was a 'Neighborhood' or 'hood' (the Uru version of a guild) called 'The Gathering' that initially formed inside Uru Live, then immigrated into other virtual worlds."
9) [Greg Costikyan, on Bertolt Brecht] "Brecht's intention was to display the fundamentally evil nature of society, but his largely bourgeois audience (who else could afford the theater, after all?) merely took it as a reasonably accurate portrayal of impoverished existence, never questioning their own role in sustaining poverty, perhaps even feeling their ambivalent attitude toward the poor reinforced by the play."
2) [Paul Czege] "Story only happens in retrospect, when you pick from all the details of the game session and organize them for yourself in service to theme, character protagonism, and the dramatic. But when you're in it, generating the non-thematic noise, and your interest is story, you're not having much fun."
3) [Kim Newman, on 'Life's Lottery'] "Certain places (such as Sutton Mallet) and events also take on multiple significances depending on the reader's choices. I was quite pleased with the way this turned out, since it was tricky to manage: the idea is that certain events or places in the novel should be mystifying or easy to overlook the first time you read about them, but increase greatly in meaning with each return."
4) [Stuart Moulthrop, on 'Pax'] "Thus, Pax is really not much like a musical instrument, but closer to a kind of 31st century dim sum joint run by a gang of vaguely malevolent robots."
5) [Talan Memmott, 'Authoring Magritte' (caption)] "Interacting with two shadowy characters on this screen initiates textual commentary and variable audio dialog between the two characters. Moving the cursor over the punctuation in the voice bubble allows the user to remix musical fragments from various Brahms pieces."
6) [Michael Mateas & Andrew Stern, on 'Facade'] "Janet Murray has identified four essential properties of the computer as a representational medium: that computers are procedural, participatory, encyclopedic, and spatial. The procedural, of course, refers to the machinic nature of computers, that they embody complex causal processes, and in fact can be made to embody any arbitrary process. The participatory refers to the interactive nature of computers, that they can dynamically respond to outside signals, and be made to respond to those signals in a way that treats those signals as having the meaning ascribed to them by people (that is, nonarbitrary response). The encyclopedic refers to the vast storage capacity of digital computers, and their ability to organize, retrieve, and index stored material, The spatial refers to the ability of digital computers to represent space, whether that is the physical space of virtual reality and games or the abstract space of networks of information."
7) [Jill Walker, 'A Network of Quests in World of Warcraft'] "Of course, we might wish for games where the individual quests were better written, but the true importance of quests in World of Warcraft is not at the level of the individual quest. There are at least two reasons we need quests. First, they function as tutorials guiding the player through learning how to play the game and expanding the game as the player progresses. Secondly, they flesh out the world, making it interesting. They do that not so much through each individual quest as through the densely storied landscape that I come to know as I work through quest after quest."
8) [Celia Pearce, on the Myst Uru diaspora] "Building on prior research in emergent narrative, I conducted an eighteen-month, in-game ethnography, using a technique of 'participant engagement,' which entailed playing with study participants as a full member of the group. In addition, I employed techniquest of visual anthropology (primarily screenshot documentation), conducted in-game interviews, and studied supplemental communications (such as forums and email lists.). The primary subject of study was a 'Neighborhood' or 'hood' (the Uru version of a guild) called 'The Gathering' that initially formed inside Uru Live, then immigrated into other virtual worlds."
9) [Greg Costikyan, on Bertolt Brecht] "Brecht's intention was to display the fundamentally evil nature of society, but his largely bourgeois audience (who else could afford the theater, after all?) merely took it as a reasonably accurate portrayal of impoverished existence, never questioning their own role in sustaining poverty, perhaps even feeling their ambivalent attitude toward the poor reinforced by the play."
December 31, 2013
My rating of this may partially be influenced by my taking so long to read this, but I think that is an accurate reflection of this book. One of the problems with videogame criticism (and an area of unique possibility) is that since it is so technologically and monetarily bound, and the technology is advancing so fast, what someone says about game x is very quickly no longer relevant in a half dozen years. What this book could have done to address this problem is to speak about things either as relating to theory, or else to give very in depth discussions around process. Unfortunately, while this happens, it is rare.
A large portion of this book is devoted to giving people space to talk about their games very briefly. Unfortunately, most of this discussion is not particularly deep, interesting, unique or worthwhile. What, for instance, can someone say about the creation of a game in two or three pages? Frightfullly little. Emily Short, for instance, provides an interesting peek behind the curtain of her IF piece "Savoir-Faire," but only so much as a commercial two minute preview of a film provides a peek. We don't learn anything, really, nor do we examine it. Stuart Moulthrop attempts to go deeper in his analysis, for instance, of Pax, but most of this writing is self-aggrandizing philosophy on subjects other than his topic, mired by discursions into mediocre memoir, and others tend to say: hey, we did this. Chris Crawford begins to say something interesting when talking about Deikto, though unfortunately doesn't get into the implications other than in a self-aggrandizing way. In fact, the only essential essay in this entire collection is from Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern (which is no surprise, as they are some of the only people from academia, used to the process of strong writing that underlines important and fundamental ideas) discussing the processes of "Facade" in great detail for the point of underlining how systems can be used in such a context within games.
Most of the other discussions here are either brief introductions to a game, (many of them roleplaying games) or else are long love letters (such as GRRM's on Wildcard) that have little to say.
Which is not to say that all of this is worthless, and there are in fact interesting nuggets all the way throughout (the MMO article near the end, for instance has plenty), but they are more useful in an immediate context, as in, when things are happening, these would be useful. Unfortunately, we are a long way away from 2007 (many of these essays composed in 2006), and many of the ideas that might have been borderline radical have become traditional and expected, or else we have simply bypassed some technical limitation or another. The difference here is that unlike more scholarly analyses that analyse WHY something is hard and WHY it is worthwhile to overcome, which can be looked at historically to track philosophical/educational/ideological shifts, or to better understand the trajectory of the medium, they largely don't probe and examine. All in all, it feels like the kind of information that anyone could have gleaned from a cursory search of internet blogs at the time, only now they are removed from context and lack the subsistence to bridge that gap. My belief was that the first of these books was more interested in discussing theory with more academic writers that would age better, though I DID read that shortly after it came out, so I can't be certain: what I am certain of is that this is a book that only the devoted should read, and only then if you really have to. There is so much better, more thorough and more relevant information out there.
It's a shame, however, because there are not that many anthologies of thought collected in a nice, attractive package--I had hoped for so much more.
A large portion of this book is devoted to giving people space to talk about their games very briefly. Unfortunately, most of this discussion is not particularly deep, interesting, unique or worthwhile. What, for instance, can someone say about the creation of a game in two or three pages? Frightfullly little. Emily Short, for instance, provides an interesting peek behind the curtain of her IF piece "Savoir-Faire," but only so much as a commercial two minute preview of a film provides a peek. We don't learn anything, really, nor do we examine it. Stuart Moulthrop attempts to go deeper in his analysis, for instance, of Pax, but most of this writing is self-aggrandizing philosophy on subjects other than his topic, mired by discursions into mediocre memoir, and others tend to say: hey, we did this. Chris Crawford begins to say something interesting when talking about Deikto, though unfortunately doesn't get into the implications other than in a self-aggrandizing way. In fact, the only essential essay in this entire collection is from Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern (which is no surprise, as they are some of the only people from academia, used to the process of strong writing that underlines important and fundamental ideas) discussing the processes of "Facade" in great detail for the point of underlining how systems can be used in such a context within games.
Most of the other discussions here are either brief introductions to a game, (many of them roleplaying games) or else are long love letters (such as GRRM's on Wildcard) that have little to say.
Which is not to say that all of this is worthless, and there are in fact interesting nuggets all the way throughout (the MMO article near the end, for instance has plenty), but they are more useful in an immediate context, as in, when things are happening, these would be useful. Unfortunately, we are a long way away from 2007 (many of these essays composed in 2006), and many of the ideas that might have been borderline radical have become traditional and expected, or else we have simply bypassed some technical limitation or another. The difference here is that unlike more scholarly analyses that analyse WHY something is hard and WHY it is worthwhile to overcome, which can be looked at historically to track philosophical/educational/ideological shifts, or to better understand the trajectory of the medium, they largely don't probe and examine. All in all, it feels like the kind of information that anyone could have gleaned from a cursory search of internet blogs at the time, only now they are removed from context and lack the subsistence to bridge that gap. My belief was that the first of these books was more interested in discussing theory with more academic writers that would age better, though I DID read that shortly after it came out, so I can't be certain: what I am certain of is that this is a book that only the devoted should read, and only then if you really have to. There is so much better, more thorough and more relevant information out there.
It's a shame, however, because there are not that many anthologies of thought collected in a nice, attractive package--I had hoped for so much more.
July 21, 2022
This book had a lot of interesting analyses of narrative game craft in a variety of media, often in the form of post-mortems by game creators, sometimes in the form of philosophical musings on the powers and limits of combining narrative and gaming. Other essays are not so great: essentially ad copy by authors who seized the opportunity to wedge commercials for their products into an otherwise scholarly work.
One essay which particularly stands out to me was written by the creators of a game in which the player is the third wheel in a marital dispute. I no longer remember the name of the game, but hope to track it down in order to experience the fruits of what, at least on the page, reads as a fascinating, ambitious effort to simulate real, dynamic choice as much as possible by breaking dialogue and dramatic movements in the game into the smallest possible components while still preserving meaning in each of those components., It struck me as an almost linguistic effort: what is a gameplay phoneme?
I continue to read books like this (and play games like this) in place of embarking on my own narrative game developing journey, always hoping to finally get that critical mass of creative sawdust in my brain to start a creative campfire. The spark is out there somewhere.
One essay which particularly stands out to me was written by the creators of a game in which the player is the third wheel in a marital dispute. I no longer remember the name of the game, but hope to track it down in order to experience the fruits of what, at least on the page, reads as a fascinating, ambitious effort to simulate real, dynamic choice as much as possible by breaking dialogue and dramatic movements in the game into the smallest possible components while still preserving meaning in each of those components., It struck me as an almost linguistic effort: what is a gameplay phoneme?
I continue to read books like this (and play games like this) in place of embarking on my own narrative game developing journey, always hoping to finally get that critical mass of creative sawdust in my brain to start a creative campfire. The spark is out there somewhere.
December 28, 2009
Second Person is a collection of essays on the interface between games and stories, or in other cases between games and real life. "Games" here primarily means tabletop RPGs and video games, though several essays push these boundaries, indeed beyond what is normally thought of as a game. The essayists present several recurring problems: most fundamentally, how do we overcome the basic tension between the linear path of a story and the branching decision tree of a game? Points of view are eclectic, thought-provoking, and generally well presented -- though oddly, the essays by story-game luminaries tended to be briefer and less germane than the essays by people I'd never heard of, with the notable exception of Chris Crawford, whose self-consciously quixotic but ambitious vision made for fascinating reading. Out of the diversity of voices, though, some conclusions do emerge, particularly about the helpfulness of genre in establishing both a fun game and an engaging story.
My biggest criticism of the book as a whole was that its essays seem to have been selected rather indiscriminately; more than a few, though they may be interesting reading in their own right, bear little or no connection to the problems of game and/or story. A few others are pretentious or brought little new to the table. When on-topic, though, these essays made really fascinating reads for me with my amateur's interest in story-game design.
My biggest criticism of the book as a whole was that its essays seem to have been selected rather indiscriminately; more than a few, though they may be interesting reading in their own right, bear little or no connection to the problems of game and/or story. A few others are pretentious or brought little new to the table. When on-topic, though, these essays made really fascinating reads for me with my amateur's interest in story-game design.
April 3, 2008
Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin continue the First Person series, this time focusing on "playable media". The section on table-top RPGs gives a solid overview of this important gameform, which has been overshadowed in recent years by computerized reinventions like Everquest and World of Warcraft. The essays here are critically engaged but not so front-loaded with academic jargon that they are rendered unreadable to someone breaking the seal on game studies. I'm looking forward to seeing them finish the trilogy.
December 17, 2012
A fantastic collection of very interesting essays about games, game history, and how we approach games in life, both for entertainment and as part of other pursuits - art, etc. Not every essay is a winner, but by and large the collection itself is full of interesting ideas, and plenty of fodder to follow up particular authors on.
August 6, 2007
This book is mostly anecdotes about game creation rather than any sort of serious scholarship. It did, however, confirm my suspicions that some fantasy novels are just dressed-up transcripts of the author's long-running Saturday night Dungeons and Dragons game.
June 12, 2009
A must-read for anybody interested in the gaming subculture. Even though some of the essays are... hm, misinformed? Or misinterpreted, perhaps. On the whole, there's a lot of really interesting stuff packed into this monster of a compendium. Plus, three complete games!
May 28, 2012
Includes some interesting bits of roleplaying history but overall kind of scattered.
In one of the appendices it includes the rules for the storytelling RPG "The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen" which I would rate four stars by itself.
In one of the appendices it includes the rules for the storytelling RPG "The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen" which I would rate four stars by itself.
August 24, 2013
This is my introduction to interactive narrative theory, and it's blown my mind. Like, the questions it raises are so provocative, I'm going to have to just live with them for a while before I can start assembling answers.
May 12, 2009
Not impressed. Most of the good information in this book could have been summarized in 1-2 chapters. If someone wants my copy let me know as I'll never go back and read it again.
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