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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 places——even the back cover of the book——First 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 Game——I 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 book’s dynamic website at
http://www.electronicbookreview.com/, and a further response from the author of the essay. This enhances the book’s 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 Aarseth’s 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.

 

 




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