From First Person to Second Person
............................................................................................................................................................
Correspondence:
Marc Ruppel
Department of Textual and Department of Textual and Digital Studies, University of Maryland,
Digital Studies, 2107
Susquehanna Hall,
USA
University of Maryland,
College Park, MD 20742,
USA.
E-mail: mruppel@umd.edu
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First Person: New Media as Story, Performance,
and Game. Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruins
(eds). Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press, 2004.
331 pp. ISBN: 0-262-23232-4. 25.95 (hardback).
Second Person: Role-playing and Story in Games
and Playable Media. Pat Harrigan and Noah
Wardrip-Fruins (eds). Cambridge, MA/London:
The MIT Press, 2007. 408 pp. ISBN: 978-0-262-
08356-0. 29.95 (hardback).
First Person: New Media as Story, Performance,
and Game (2004) and Second Person: Role-playing
and Story in Games and Playable Media (2007) are
two compelling collections of essays that seek to
examine the enormous impact that electronic,
digital, and, more broadly, interactive technologies
and practices have had on the production of literary
knowledge and narrative. Each collection manages
in its own way to provide a snapshot or, perhaps
more fittingly, a screengrab of the state of
contemporary media studies and, consequently,
each possesses distinct albeit often implicit biases
towards the means through which we begin to
situate the proliferation of new media. Having the
chance to review these texts together provides an
opportunity to address what might be a more
gripping angle of examination than a simple survey
of contentthe possibility that the movement from
First Person to Second Person represents a funda-
mental shift in our understanding of new media
and new media, story, and play, and our methods
for studying these fields.
Although there are some obvious and important
differences between these two collections, one of the
more pronounced similarities is an overarching
concern about the relationship between the
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procedural, interactive, and simulative qualities of
new media, and the related production and
incorporation of narrative content within these
objects. Obviously, since not all digital and electro-
nic media research centers around story, First Person
and Second Person are clearly targeted towards those
working in the humanities, particularly the fields of
narratology, textual studies, and digital studies. The
title First Person is, in many ways, positioned as an
indicator of the content withini.e. first person
video games, first person narration, first person
interaction, just as Second Person claims that it is all
about the YOU of these objects. Neither really get
close to examining either first or second person
perspectives, though, and these titles act as nothing
more than placeholders for the content within. First
Person and Second Person, however, are uniquely
related in that they are each meant to be read with
the Electronic Book Reviews companion website
where readers can find longer, more thoughtful
responses to the pieces in this collection. In short,
reviewing both First Person and Second Personthe
printed booksis to exclude the wide-range of
valuable and ongoing discourse that accompanies
these texts online, and omit any discussion of a
model for future academic publishing that is truly
multimedia in design. My review, however, will
unfortunately do exactly this, as there is too little
space with which to discuss the more nuanced
arguments put forth online.
In more ways than one, First Person exists as a
relic of sorts of the early years of new media studies.
Even from an organizational and material stand-
point, we can see the remnants of prior concerns.
Unlike Second Person, each essay in First Person
231
M. Ruppel
is coupled with responses from other commenta-
tors, not unlike a Weblog allows for now. In any
given chapter, then, there might be two or even
three competing opinions clamoring for ones
attention, with comments ranging from perceptive
to obstinate. Still, this attempt at remediation is
commendable (if intrusive), but in another sense, it
hints at a more pronounced problem with the
content of the book, namely the fact that there is a
real tension between the immense scope of the texts
proposed subject and the methodologies through
which these subjects is studied. Although new
media studies as they existed in 2004 and exist now
are undeniably hermeneutical in nature, too often
these hermeneutics are incomplete, providing only
an abstracted philosophical approach with little by
way of the nuts and bolts of the objects themselves,
the operating systems, hardware, software, and, in
some cases, paper that allows these media to
function. As such, First Person is undeniably fixed
in the wholly theoretical gray area that existed (and
still exists) between the study of digital/electronic
objects, their contested ability to produce, induce,
and/or reduce story and, more generally speaking,
literary meaning. Of course, speaking about the text
some 4 years removed does make this claim a bit less
forceful, but nonetheless, the essays in First Person
represent (or re-present) many of the concerns that
the field continues to grapple with. And in
significant ways, this is the both the texts biggest
strength and weakness.
Although the subtitle of First Person purports the
examination of new media as story, performance
and game, the sheer scope of the First Persons eight
sectionsCyberdrama, Ludology, Critical Simula-
tions, Game Theories, Hypertexts, and Interactives,
The Pixel/The Line, Beyond Chat, and New Read-
ingssuggests a much wider focus. Suitably begin-
ning with Janet Murrays From Game-Story to
Cyberdrama, which outlines a case for why the
digital medium is well-suited to gaming activities,
First Persons initial concerns are overwhelmingly
tailored toward exploring the dynamics of new
media game-story relationships, as well as the role of
the player in relation to the development of story in
electronic environments. Echoing Murray, Ken
Perlins Can There Be a Form Between a Game
232 Literary and Linguistic Computing, Vol. 23, No. 2, 2008
and a Story introduces the concept of personal
agency as a notion through which video games
depend and he argues that any visual narrative form,
especially games, needs a refinement of the spaces in
which agency is located. Michael Mateas A
Preliminary Poetics for Interactive Drama and
Games, meanwhile, echoes Perlins concerns, and
discusses the means through which narrative
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becomes the constraints through which agency
(formulated here as a balance between formal and
material constraints) functions and prospers.
Cyberdrama as it is defined here, then, seems to
espouse a dialectic of enactment, one that positions
the user/players actions as well as their experience
of agency both within and outside of the game space
as one of the most important elements when
discussing electronic gaming. Here, it seems, the
authors would argue that without this understand-
ing, we are discussing systems of play, of simulation,
with no human element whatsoever.
And in some sense, that is exactly what we find in
the next section, Ludology, where the shift in focus
moves from agency to the structures in games that
control and dictate it. As one of the more pro-
nounced points of contest within new media over
the past few years, the ludological debate addresses
the efficacy of studying games as narrative objects,
with proponents of ludology advocating instead that
it is the formal properties of video games (i.e. their
procedurality, rules, objectives, etc.) rather than the
story components (i.e. characters, plot, conflict)
that should dominate ones focus. Markku
Eskelinen, one of the earliest supporters of this
approach, makes the claim in his essay Towards
Computer Game Studies that a story, a backstory
or a plot is not enough (p. 37) to qualify a game as
a narrative, as games often lack the narrative
situation of having both a narrator and a narratee.
Furthering this thought, Espen Aarseth addresses
what he calls the pervading narrativism of game
studies, and attributes the difficulties to studying
games to questions pertaining to genre of the
hermeneutical paradigms of study (i.e. textual,
narratological, and semiotic) and of an electronic
games demands for a simulational hermeneutic that
addresses the unique representational properties of
digital and electronic media. In both cases, a

resistance against what Aarseth calls the theoretical
colonialism (p. 54) of the academys entrenched
positionsnarrative and visual studiesis pro-
moted, while a push towards establishing game
studies as a wholly new field of study, where the
study of the formal properties of electronic games
seem not only desirable but also necessary.
Fittingly, the next section, Critical Simulation,
makes the move towards an incorporation of both
the human and computational elements in a
discussion of socially situated gaming, and in
doing so ratifies the editors implicit agreement
with both Aarseth and Eskelinen. Calling video
games simulations, though, is not without con-
sequence. Simon Pennys essay Representation,
Enaction, and the Ethics of Simulation, for
example, argues that interactive entertainments,
as he calls them, carry the same pedagogical power
as training simulators such as those in use by the
military through their insistent implication of the
body and its reflexes in the course of gameplay.
Although Pennys argument relies too heavily on
the commentary of a retired Lieutenant-Colonel
who used to work in the desensitization of soldiers,
the essay does point towards an interesting blind-
spot in contemporary game studiesthat of the
physical ramifications of investing oneself in a
simulation, and the philosophical consequences
when divesting other means of research in favor of
a simulational approach. These consequences
extend outside of the body, and are reflected
through subsequent essays dealing with the crea-
tion of video games that reflect and tackle social,
political, and cultural ills (Frasca) as well as the
potential for research into schizophrenia occurring
through the study of AI techniques (Sengers).
Game Theories, marks the first of several puz-
zling divisions in First Person. Although the essays
present here are for the most part solid, the
designation of Game Theories as a separate section
is at first a confusing one, a gesture that posits all
that occurred before should not be considered game
theory (it is). Although my position here might
seem a bit nit-picky, it is not so much when one
remembers that every collection of this sort is, of
course, an argument, where what is not said is often
as important as what is said. Take Henry Jenkins
From First Person to Second Person
essay Game Design as Narrative Architecture,
which deftly negotiates the divide between ludology
and narratology, presenting a very persuasive case
that it is space that is tantamount in games not
only simply for simulation purposes but also
for narrative potential. From an organizational
standpoint, it makes no sense to include this piece
here, as its power is somewhat muted by its dist-
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ance from Aarseth and Eskelinens essays. Similarly,
Jesper Juuls Introduction to Game Time is a
highly ludological piece that centers on the
differentiation of time-states in games (Juul even
runs a blog called The Ludologist). Though it does
not offer an insight into its own question of what
makes a game interesting, it is clear that Juuls
concerns are somewhat in-line with earlier sections
of the text, just as Celia Pierces Towards a Game
Theory of Game positions her arguments ludolog-
ically but without explicit mention to the field. Eric
Zimmermans Narrative, Interactivity, Play and
Games, meanwhile, hits the reset button quite
literally and jettisons everything that was built
towards at this point, preferring to focus instead
on the ways in which stories can be brought about
in order to frame game experiences. Along with
Jenkins essay, Zimmermans piece offers a lucid
alternative to the strictly ludological perspectives
found to this point, even if it feels almost like a
footnote following the heavy emphasis on ludology
that came before it.
As we transition to Hypertexts and Interactives,
it becomes apparent that while the first half of the
collection was at least partially unified under the
guise of game studies, the second half is instead a
much less coherent survey with no discernable build
in argument. Here, we find essays ranging from
renowned hypertext theorist and producer Mark
Bernsteins collaboration with Diane Greco about
the creation of alternative hypertextual systems to a
later essay by J. Yellowlees Douglas and Andrew
Hargadon discussing the merits of a schema-based
approach to studying interactives, a term that
includes everything from Myst to Michael Joyces
seminal hypertext fiction Twelve Blue. Although
Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin make the point that
these essays and others in the section are united
under the subject of authorial choice and reader
Literary and Linguistic Computing, Vol. 23, No. 2, 2008 233
M. Ruppel
comprehension, it is clear that this perspective
hinders the discussion of hypertext and interactives
as much as it directs it towards a common goal.
That is, the proposed focus of this section is
theoretical, not material and, as a result, the editors
claim that hypertext perspectives lend themselves
naturally to an examination of the reading experi-
ence sits uneasily alongside the examples that are
chosen by each of the writers here. Stephanie
Stricklands Moving Through Me as I Move, for
example, discusses the nature of word/image rela-
tions, as acts as a survey of sorts of interactive
poetics. It also, however, works toward expanding
the scope of what should be considered hypertext/
interactive much in the same way that Bernstein and
Greco preface their essay with a treatise on why
many interactives should be considered hypertext,
and vise-versa. The problem here is not in their
agreement, as both make useful cases for the objects
of their studies. Instead, I think that what we see
hereand what plagues much of this collectionis
that in privileging the theoretical over the technical/
material, even with essays from the creators of such
objects, First Person opens itself up to a tangle of
mixed messages about what new media objects
should be classified as. So while Bernstein and
Grecos appraisal of their Card Shark system as
hypertext makes sense, Douglas and Hargadons
equally well-reasoned examination of interaction in
new media objects positions hypertexts next to what
we might more commonly call video games.
Perhaps the point here is to obfuscate easy
categorizations, forcing new media studies often
narrow view of hypertexts to undergo a reappraisal
and in this regard, it works. The problem is that by
the end of the section, we are no closer to
understanding what makes an object a hypertext
or interactive and another something else. Although
focusing instead on the systems that create meaning
(i.e. looking for commonalities in the software/code
that is created for these objects) could begin to
rectify this problem, we find nothing of the sort in
this text.
As a result, for much of the remainder of First
Person, we are left struggling to find the books
identity and focus. The Pixel/The Line, introduced
as an examination of the means through which old
234 Literary and Linguistic Computing, Vol. 23, No. 2, 2008
textualities of the page cannot be used to describe
the new textualities of new media, provides several
extended theoretical musings on the topics ranging
from a refutation of Kittlers position on our
relationship to text (i.e. letters/digits) in digital/
electronic environments (Cayley) to embodied
movements in electronic textual spaces
(Utterback) to the recombinant possibilities of
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interactive text in a virtual environment (Seaman).
At the risk of repeating myself, it is worth noting
that while once again each of these essays are well-
crafted contributions to the field, one cannot help
but feel that by this stage, something crucial is
missing, and that the inordinate emphasis that the
majority of these essays place on a theoretical
approach is only distancing us further in some ways
from the substrata and potentials of these new
media artifacts.
This feeling is somewhat vindicated by the
welcome intrusion of Beyond Chat, which takes a
much more materially grounded approach to the
subject matterinterdisciplinary perspectives on
electronically enabled communication and conver-
sation. Since so much of the first half of First Person
is focused on the conditions under which story and
literary production is constrained and directed
through new media, the content in this section is
jarring in a way that the rest of the book is not.
In Warren Sacks What Does a Large-Scale
Conversation Look Like?, we find not only the
theoretical dimensions of Sacks examination of
Usenet groups, but also the practical and empirical
issues he experienced in designing his Conversation
Map system, which aggregates and correlates con-
versations taken from these spaces and makes mines
them for (dis)connections. Natalie Jeremijenkos
If Things Can Talk, What Do They Say? If We
Can Talk to Things, What Do We Say?, meanwhile,
points towards a direction that new media studies
and this book seldom travel. In her essay,
Jeremijenko thoroughly outlines the numerous
potentials for research in voice chips and speech
recognition chips. Documenting the history of these
technologies as well as the technical and sociological
bases for their, Jeremijenkos piece brings a much-
needed breath of fresh air to this collection. Rather
than concerning itself with voice recognition in, say,

video games and or online fictions, Jeremijenko
instead chooses to take this discussion offline, so to
speak, away from the simulative and procedural
environments of the computer and into a territory
too often neglected by new media studies. In doing
so, she not only points toward what I believe is a
major blindspot in the field, but also in this text,
namely, its predominant focus on new media as
only existing inside the space of computer-driven
technologies. Just as Wardrip-Fruin and Harrigan
lament that hypertext is often too narrowly con-
ceived within the field, so too might we say that the
concept of new media (which, I might add, is never
truly defined in this collection) is also too narrowly
conceived in its formulations. Seldom do new
media scholars look away from the flickering signi-
fiers of their computer screens to focus instead on
other means of digital and electronic expression.
And while we may argue about whether some of
these technologies should even be considered new
media, it is undeniable that the field has already
become over fixated on a small body of concerns.
In short, First Person represents to me a reflection of
a field still working with the definitions of its
boundaries, searching for its shining examples,
muttering towards its vocabularies.
But whereas First Person feeds too often into the
narrow view of the field, Second Person corrects
this error by expanding its scope. Although the
focus of Second Person is purported to be Role-
Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media, it
is clear quite early on that the category of playable
media is really a way of moving past the
limitations that the term new media brought to
First Person. Indeed, although the objects discussed
in Second Person have roots that can be traced back
centuries (i.e. cards, books, improvised perfor-
mance), in the context of more contemporary
objects and practices they provide us with a
different means through which to view new
mediathat of the relational sense of the term,
where old media artifacts come into contact with
new modes of praxis that are influenced by, but
not necessarily materially bound to, digital and
electronic technologies. To reiterate, it helps to
remember that new media studies is not all about
digital gaming, electronic literature, and hypertext
From First Person to Second Person
links, although each of these subjects are undeni-
ably epicenters within the fields growth. Rather, I
feel that there is a very real possibility for growth
within the field tied explicitly to the rapidly
changing relationships between old media and
new. This is not simply to say that remediation is
becoming more rampant but, instead, that the
links, networks, procedurality, and structures
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provided by digital and electronic technologies
are being interpreted through more traditional
media as new means of communicating informa-
tion. This is not just old media playing catch-up,
either. It is a redefinition on every level of the
dynamics of a medial ecology. In short, then, the
shift from First Person to Second Person, a shift
from new media to playable media, represents the
profound possibilities for a partial paradigm shift
within the field, and a much-needed one at that.
Tied to the idea of a relational definition of new
media is the concept of play, of an openness of
structure that contrasts somewhat to the formal
structures of games. Play in its most general sense
is open-ended, and need not have a beginning or
end. A child at play in a sandbox is not subject to
the same rules that she might be while playing a
game of hide-and-seek. Still, the sandbox is only
so big, and it contains only so much sand. Similarly,
play within a medium can be equally as open-ended
as sandbox play, however, like limited space of
a sandbox, we cannot work outside of the mediums
material boundaries, as much as we might try.
Narrative, however, is infinite in its capacity for
space. Although a narrative functions much in the
same way as a medium doesby providing
constraints and mechanisms through which infor-
mation can be filtered and disseminatedthe
worlds created through narrative are limited only
by ones imagination. And here is where we find
one of the more interesting unspoken facets of
Second Person: the possibility that when discussing
the dynamics of playable media, role-playing,
and story, we are really discussing the dynamics
of world building. And even though not every
essay in Second Person inherently deals with this
process, the majority do and, as a result, the book
provides us with a far better understanding of
the relationships between media, story, and
Literary and Linguistic Computing, Vol. 23, No. 2, 2008 235
M. Ruppel
our role as both creators and consumers of these
objects.
Consequently, Second Person is less a theoretical
discourse on preexisting worlds (i.e. an interpretive
framework) as it is a collection of first person
accounts from authors and designers about the
struggles, triumphs, and design decisions that went
into making a particular playable object (here we
might say that Second Person is much more ground-
ed in first-person perspective than First Person is).
So why is it that a discussion of play can be so
thoroughly satisfied by a discussion of production?
Because play is open-ended; it is a dynamic, mutable,
and wholly subjective experience that can help to
create the conditions with which role-playing and,
subsequently, narrative is generated. Any discussion
of the creation of a play space, then, is a discussion
that helps us to understand the conditions through
which play functions. What we get here, then, is a far
more intimate collection that shifts our focus from
distanced description and theorization of existing
spaces and the rules defining them to an examina-
tion of the process involved in building these spaces.
First Person struggles with the question of what a
game is (at least in regards to mechanics and story)
while Second Person chooses instead to address
the question of how a game is, or came to be. The
question of How is it played? is perhaps more
fittingly repositioned for Second Person as How is
the world in which play happens built?
This is possibly best exemplified by the inclusion
in Second Person of three full role-playing or
storytelling games in the appendices of the book
itself. Rather than simply discuss play, Second Person
invites us instead to dive right in and engage in the
objects of discussion. This is a small but crucial
move here, one that takes us from passive readers of
this collection to active players and creators of the
objects of discussion. This type of intent does not
allow for traditional new media hermeneutics such
as those found in First Person. In its place, we find
something much closer to what Lev Manovich
might call a theory of the present, where process
and record is more important than theorization,
and the material object as-is is more important than
any projections we might make with regards to its
future. Only through actively understanding the
236 Literary and Linguistic Computing, Vol. 23, No. 2, 2008
process of creating a play space, can we begin to
understand the means through which meaning is
produced within it. In this regard, Second Person
gives us two access points to play: one based in
narratives of a play spaces construction, the other as
participants within this space.
As much as my criticisms about First Person
centered on its organization, it is important to note
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from the outset that Second Person avoids these
same problems by simply loosening the scope of
each section to a sufficient scale. Whereas the first
four sections of First Person might have been
combined into one coherent section called Game
Theory, Second Person contains only three thematic
divisions: Tabletop Systems, Computational
Fictions, and Real Worlds. Within each of these
sections, we also find a much more varied set of
essaysforty-seven in total as compared with the
twenty-five primary essays in First Person.
Paradoxically, this makes Second Person far more
directed than First Person, even with the somewhat
tenuous and subjective unifying element of playable
media as an organizing principle. The first section,
Tabletop Systems, focuses primarily on works
that are more typically called traditional paper-
based (in the form of books, cards, etc.) role playing
games (RPGs), although there are a variety of
perspectives here on objects that might not be
considered role-playing at all. It is worth noting that
First Persons concerns about the relationship
between games and stories are addressed here right
from the outset in Greg Costikyans Games,
Storytelling and Breaking the String, which attempts
to address the issue in the context of non-electronic
spaces, such as in Dungeons & Dragons tabletop
RPGs, Julio Cortazars Hopscotch (1966) and the
Choose Your Own Adventure books of the 1980s.
Although these examples are a somewhat standard
means of interrogating the story/game divide,
Costikyan, himself a noted RPG designer, draws
conclusions that are, for the most part, inapplicable
to digital games. In this sense, Costikyans ideas
provide a significant and necessary counterpoint to
the logic of First Person, where most essays made the
case for something being new media, and very rarely
the opposite. Immediately, after we move into a
series of unusual and stimulating essays about the

creation of particular RPG systems and narrative
worlds. In George R.R. Martins On the Wild Cards
Series, Martin details the fascinating process of
building the universe of the Wild Cards book series
in collaboration with several other authors, each
working separately within the constructs of a
loosely established storyworld. Later, in My Life
with Master: The Architecture of Protagonism,
Paul Czege, designer of the well-regarded Baron
Munchausen RPG, details the process through which
he feels story-making games function most success-
fully: simplicity of design which, in turn, provides
guidance and freedom with which to play within a
world. Breaking from RPGs, Eric Zimmermans
Creating a Meaning-Machine: The Deck of Stories
Called Life in the Garden describes the development
of his interactive paper book, stressing that a well-
established storyworld (in this case the Garden of
Eden) is necessary in order for coherent play within
story situations to be evident. In each case men-
tioned here, and many others within the chapter,
there is a defined emphasis on the plurality of
meanings resulting from structures that rise organi-
cally from a world whose design is open-ended and,
more importantly, not goal oriented in the way that
games are.
Computational Fictions, follows a similar pro-
cess, with Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin asking
What makes computer games different than other
games?. Their answer, in part, is that computer
games take on the mechanics of game states
themselves; that is, the system of computer
gamesits rules, space and goalsfunction even
without a players complete understanding of them.
Yet even so, the majority of the essays in this section
have less to do with the theoretical ramifications of
such a statement and more to do with the creation
of environments in which (game)play can happen.
Gameplay, after all, is simply play given formal goals
and state-oriented structure. What follows in this
section are first person accounts of the creation of
such spaces, ranging from Jordan Mechners
description of the hurdles encountered when
acting as lead designer of Prince of Persia for the
Playstation 2, Lee Sheldons discussion of the
process of adapting Agatha Christie as a PC game.
Nick Montforts eloquent account of creating the
From First Person to Second Person
player-character in his own interactive fiction and
Stuart Mouthrops playful description of the
motivation and creation of his Flash piece Pax,
as well as all the untidy issues of play and writing
related to creating literary meaning in an electronic
place. In some instances, such as in Michael Mateas
and Andrew Sterns Writing Facade, the process of
creating meaning within a simulated world becomes
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one where story meaning spurs game design, and
not the opposite. In short, although on the surface
these essays might seem somewhat disparate, the
flattening of the organizing elementcomputa-
tional fictionsas well as the predominantly
creator-authored nature of these pieces provides a
multiplicity of viewpoints that cohere on several
important levels, the primary being that within the
space of the computer, one of the more difficult
aims of incorporating stories and games lies not in
the programming, but instead in the reconciliation
of the boundaries of each particular world, be they
procedural or narrative.
Real Worlds shifts this discussion into a pre-
viously unchartered territory, away from our screens
and desks and into the spaces that we normally
consider unmediated. The essays here start some-
what tethered to traditional media. John Tynes,
creator of the Puppetland RPG, writes in Prismatic
Play: Games as Windows on the Real World, that
engagist media such as video games allow partici-
pants to acquire and question knowledge of the
world around them. Although Tynes case here is a
persuasive one, it is but one of many of the
definitions of real to be found here. Whereas
reality for Tynes means anything outside of a
mediated world, for Ian Bogost and Gonzalo
Frasca in Video Games Go to Washington: The
Story Behind The Howard Dean for Iowa Game it
means a symbiosis between a computer mediation
of reality and our heightened access to worlds
outside of this mediation, namely the political
process. In these essays, and in several others on
topics ranging from improvised theater (Uren) to
World of Warcraft (Mortensen; Walker), we witness
a shifting relationship to the real as well as the
forces that structure it. While Bogost and Frasca
detail how a game can restructure and impact an
election, Jill Walker argues in A Network of Quests
Literary and Linguistic Computing, Vol. 23, No. 2, 2008 237
M. Ruppel
in World of Warcraft that many games, particularly
massively multiplayer online role playing games
(MMORPGs) are already wholly structured worlds
in themselves, with complicated choices present for
the structuring of this world. The bottom line here
is that, again, play within mediated worlds is always
a construction, an arrangement of elements that
allow for user agency both within and outside of the
world of play itself. This is no more clear than in
Jane McGonigals important work in alternate
reality games (ARGs), recalled here in The Puppet
Master Problem: Design for Real-World, Mission-
Based Gaming. In the course of her essay,
McGonigal details the complex process of creating
and enacting the alternate reality game I Love Bees,
the lead-in component to the launch of Microsofts
Halo 2 for the Xbox video game system that had
players scouring the Web, which acts as a hub of
communication and narrative aggregation, for clues
and GPS locations that would direct them to parks,
phone booths, and other areas where they would be
given small snippets of narrative information that,
when assembled online in chat rooms and on
message boards, would form a coherent story.
Although we might now more casually call these
sorts of things viral marketing, their impact is
much more important than just a commercial
endeavor. In some ways, what McGonigal and
others like her are doing is redefining the limits of
what literature and narrative can be through a
digital model of distribution. In previous models,
narrative is some combination of a mediums
communicative capabilities and the imaginative
boundaries introduced in the story itself.
Now, however, with the advent of I Love Bees and
other such phenomena, we are no longer tied to
a single medium, even one as expressive as a
computer, in order to make narrative meaning. We
must then consider the possibility of a truly
multiply mediated storyworld, what I call a cross-
sited narrative, where the words on a computer
screen comingle with the smell of freshly cut grass in
the park these words direct us to. This is an
important step for the field of new media to take.
Narrative here becomes a unifying factor, not
media, not the ones and zeroes of basic binary.
Any future idealizations about the potential of
238 Literary and Linguistic Computing, Vol. 23, No. 2, 2008
digital and electronic expression needs to first begin
with these sorts of accounts.
In the introduction to The Language of New
Media, Lev Manovich (2001) laments the loss of
moments of explosive creation in new media, when
a twenty-something programmer at Netscape took
the chewing gum out of his mouth, sipped warm
Coke out of a can . . . and, finally satisfied with its
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small file size, saved a short animation of stars
moving across the night sky. (p. 7). Although there
are not any moments of this scale in Second Person
(at least that we know of yet), this general concern is
reflected throughout the volume. We might even
call it one component of the burgeoning swing
of textual/material studies that new media research
is currently undergoing. Recently, Matthew G.
Kirschenbaum published Mechanisms: New Media
and the Forensic Imagination (2008), a book which
investigates and outlines an approach to the most
basic matter of new media, from the magnetic
media of hard drives to the formal materialities of
code. Similarly, Nick Montfort and Ian Bogosts
(eds) series Platform Studies seeks to come to an
understanding of the unified role that hardware
and software design plays in creative output. At the
macro end of the spectrum, Henry Jenkins
Convergence Culture (2006) investigates new
media production from the standpoint of the
corporations, individuals, and cultural forces
responsible for transforming narrative and expres-
sion. Regardless of the orientation, it is clear that the
fields continuing maturation is a result of a much
less hermetically sealed approach to the potentially
massive effects that both baseline materialities and
cultural/economic orientations have on expressive
technologies.
In the end, it must be said that just as I have
advocated for a more open discussion of production
practices, so too must we remember that the
majority of contemporary new and new media
interaction is done without knowledge of such
things. And in this regard, both texts are essential to
the development of this rapidly growing field. In a
similar sense, the ongoing discussions facilitated by
each texts corresponding websitesdiscussions
that we, as readers, are encouraged to participate
inpoints towards what I think is the future of
 From First Person to Second Person

academic publishing. Although the monograph is References

still a valuable commodity in academia, our discuss-
Manovich, L. (2001). The Language of New Media.
ions of a given topic need not end there. Indeed,
Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press.
they should proliferate, grow, and spread through
Kirschenbaum, M. G. (2008). Mechanisms. New Media
our networks, online and off, until they no longer
and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA/London:
resemble what they once were but instead have
The MIT Press.
adapted and become reflections of an ever-changing
Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and
landscape of media, literature, and all those use
New Media Intersect. New York: NYU Press.

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them.

Literary and Linguistic Computing, Vol. 23, No. 2, 2008 239