First Person:
New Media as Story, Performance and Game
by Noah Wardrip-Fruin
and Pat Harrigan, Editors
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004
331 pp., illus.
Trade, $39.95
ISBN: 0-262-23232-4.
Reviewed
by Maia Engeli
Zurich, Switzerland
maia@enge.li
In many placeseven the back
cover of the bookFirst
Person: New Media as Story, Performance
and Game is presented or reviewed
as a book on the current debate on the
emerging field of game studies. That is
how it starts, diving into the discrepancy
among ludologists and narratologists and
giving Henry Jenkins some space to introduce
games as narrative spaces, an attempt
to provide a constructive framework for
the dialogue among the extremists. After
the introductory focus on games, other
forms of media, which can be experienced
from a first person perspective, are discussed.
The boundaries between the different forms
and fields start to blur. Poetry, drama,
artificial intelligence, networks, chips
become issues and the baseline of the
discussion crystallizes into exactly what
the title implies: First Person: New
Media as Story, Performance and GameI
and the machine or the machine and I.
In First Person the sum is more
than the addition of parts. This book
is a collection of writings by a selection
of the most competent thinkers (creators,
artists, theorists, critics, researchers)
in the field of New Media. The contributions
draw an eclectic picture of the questions
raised, the state of the theory evolved,
the experiments conducted, and possible
interpretations.
Cyberdrama, Ludology, Critical Simulation,
Game Theories, Hypertexts and Interactives,
The Pixel/The Line, Beyond Chat, and New
Readings are the sections of this book,
each containing three essays. Each essay
comes with two responses, one of them
an online response from the books
dynamic website at http://www.electronicbookreview.com/,
and a further response from the author
of the essay. This enhances the books
aim to represent an ongoing discourse.
The authors of the responses add interesting
points or take the chance to utter criticism.
It can be puzzling at times, as a reader
one has to listen to almost fifty different
voices, sometimes contradicting, sometimes
focusing, sometimes expanding, and sometimes
destroying the issue at hand.
Different readers will certainly have
different favorites among the contributions
in this book, especially in regard to
the essays that represent one of the extreme
standpoints, for example, regarding games
and ludology versus narratology. I would
nonetheless like to point out some ideas
and essays I found to be particularly
substantial. Espen Aarseths essay
"Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the
Art of Simulation" addresses the
question of whether games belong to the
genre of text or not, in his words: "The
political question of genre trouble"
(p. 45). Aarseth concludes, among other
things, that "games and stories have
distinct teleologies and artistic potential,
and it is analytically useful to maintain
a conceptual terminology that distinguishes
between the two" (p. 54). Celia Pearce
slightly disagrees with this view in her
contribution "Towards a Game Theory
of Game," concluding that, "Computer
games are really the first medium that
blurs this boundary between author and
audience so completely . . . . With the
computer as a two-way, dynamic medium,
those engaged in game design are creating
an entirely and radically new ideology
about narrative" (p.153). Bill Seaman,
in his text "Interactive Text and
Recombinant Technologies," demands
that "text should be observed as
one media-element within a network of
other forms of media elements and processes"
(p. 231). He asks us to look at "the
exploration of operational neighboring
or interpenetrated configurations of time-based
language-vehicles and processes"
(p. 231) and concludes: "Central
is the exploration of a continuum that
bridges body, environment and technology"
(p.234). N. Katherine Hayles contributes
an impressive analysis of "Lexia
to Perplexia" by Talan Memmott. Using
the text as a tutor she explains
and exemplifies new processes of reading,
emergent forms of language, the shared
productive role of human and machine,
and the necessity of materiality for the
existence of works as well as bodies to
receive them. She concludes: "Scary
and exhilarating, these connections perform
human subjects who cannot be thought without
the intelligent machines that produce
us even as we produce them" (p. 300).
First Person is a rich and inspiring
book. The editors were courageous in conceptualizing
such a broad view onto the theme of first
person experiences of new media. My experience
of reading the book from page one to page
317 was comparable to a journey through
varying landscapes, where multiple aspects
add up to a final, multi-faceted impression
of a whole that cannot be depicted in
a single image.