First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game

by Noah Wardrop-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, Eds.
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004
350 pp. Illus. 64 b/w. $39.95
ISBN: 0-262-23232-4.

Reviewd by Jan Baetens

jan.baetens@arts.kuleuven.ac.be

First Person is not (only) a book in the traditional or narrow sense of the word: It is part of a multimedia research program that combines a hard-copy publication form (the volume I shall review here) and a website ‘in progress’ that defines itself as a ‘remediation’ of the book. This website is not run by the publisher of the book, although The MIT Press has now a solid experience in this type of bi-medial enterprises, but by the e-journal electronic book review (http://www.electronicbookreview.com/v3/), where one will find part of the editorial material of the book, a version in color of the printed b/w illustrations, and a whole series of debates, controversies and discussions that were already opened, albeit in very inchoative way, in the different sections of First Person. It is important to take into account this double structure when evaluating the form and content of First Person: first, because most of the dialectical and dialogical opportunities of the book only reach real maturity in combination with the website; second, because the structure of the book itself is in many ways an anticipation of the argumentative and scholarly network constructed by ebr.

What strikes the reader at the very first contact with the book is its wonderful balance of closure and openness. Closure, indeed, since the attempt to define and organize a new field (roughly speaking: the intersection of games and stories, of new media theory and narrative theory) is organized here around eight topics or issues, all of them obeying the same format. We find an editorial introduction of one or two pages presenting the history of the research in the field, its most important scholars and literatures, and the essential current debates; then three, exceptionally four, often very personalized essays reflecting upon the major interrogations of the field; finally a number of responses, generally one or two per essay, some of them already hinting to the ongoing discussions on the ebr site. This exemplary composition, reinforced by a very clear layout, helps readers not only to find their way in a book that might have become a labyrinth but also to familiarize themselves with a kind of intellectual map of the emerging field. One could, of course, always discuss the relevance of the structure adopted by the editors, but it would be unfair not to thank them for their distinction of the following eight fields: "cyberdrama," a section exploring in detail the implications of the ‘Aristotelian’ approach of for instance Janet Murray, marked by the importance of the notions of plot, character and catharsis; "ludology," which makes a claim for the absolute medium-specificity of gaming; "critical simulation," with more politically or cultural studies oriented texts on issues of representation; "game theories," inevitably focusing on themes such as interactivity, but also, more surprisingly, paying great attention to temporality; "hypertexts & interactives," reactivating discussions on literature online or literature on and for the web; "the pixel/the line," a chapter mainly devoted to matters of design and visual/visible literature; "beyond chat," a section gathering studies on the visual representation of online community conversations, on strategies of collaboration, and on voice chips; and finally "new readings," emphasizing the role of the interactive reader and repurposing questions of reader-response criticism.

But also openness: thanks to the presence of systematic debate although the critical aspects of many responses and replies are rather discrete: Some readers might have preferred more harsh discussions in some sections of the book. Thanks also to the rightly eclectic choice of collaborators——of course, readers will remark that one of their fetish authors is missing, but in general the range of contributors reflects nicely the status quaestionis). Thanks finally to the many cross-sectional links and discussions——and this is, of course, the merit of the editors who have managed to create a book in which the reader is eager to circulate from one text to another.

In order to evaluate the interest of a book, it is always useful to ask a preliminary question: Does the reader welcome this book as necessary? The answer to this question is here undoubtedly positive. There has recently been such an explosion of work and cultural practices——on the one hand, theory and criticism; on the other hand, on the related but not identical fields of games, gaming, narrative, performance, etc.——that the time has come now to attempt a first institutionalization. First Person does this job in a very clever way although one may regret the under-representation of some recent evolutions in narrative theory. The work by Marie-Laure Ryan, for example, is mentioned only once; David Herman’s is completely ignored. There is also a relative absence of more culturally inspired authors——I insist here on the word ‘relative’. The most important remark to make in this regard, however, is to compliment the editors for their remarkable achievement.

But what, then, is the value of the different sections and of the different contributions within each section? It will not come as a surprise that the quality of the texts is unequal. Personally, I found the section on ludology very refreshing (with the resistance of the adepts of this discipline against the colonization of their field by the well-settled disciplines of narrative, for example), just as I have read with great passion the section on pixels and lines (with their great sensibility to the literariness of writing on screen) or the section on chat (one of the parts of the book where I have learnt most, probably given the distance of this discussion to my own, literary background). The weak part of the book, regardless the sections in which it occurred, are surely the ‘responses’ to each of the texts, which many readers may consider, as I have done at several occasions, insufficiently critical or hardly relevant (not all the responding authors have done what the editors could expect from them; others, on the contrary, have written short and strong responses which may remain as examples in the genre, such as Mark Bernstein’s answer to Celia Pearce or Richard Schechner’s reply to J. Yellowlees Douglas and Andrew Hargadon: here the reader feels as if she is assisting not simply an academic game, but a real match where people want to win by making the others lose). One can only hope that on the ebr site the debates to come will be harsher than in First Person, where the authors are sometimes too kind.