Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media

Description

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 Persia: 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.

Second Person features three complete tabletop role-playing games that demonstrate some of the variations possible in the form: in John Tynes's Puppetland, players take on the roles of puppets in a land ruled by the villainous Punch; Greg Costikyan's Bestial Acts imports the techniques of Bertolt Brecht's theater of alienation into a dark role-playing structure; and in James Wallis's The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, the gameplay revolves around spinning elaborate tales in the style of the famous raconteur.

Pat Harrigan is a writer and author of the novel Lost Clusters.

Noah Wardrip-Fruin is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of California, San Diego.

 

Dedication and Acknowledgments x
 
 Contributors xi
 
 Introduction xiii
 
I. Tabletop Systems 
 
 Games, Storytelling, and Breaking the String
Greg Costikyan 5
 
 On the Wild Cards Series
George R. R. Martin 15
 
 From the Basement to the Basic Set
The Early Years of Dungeons & Dragons
Erik Mona 25
 
 Narrative Structure and Creative Tension in Call of Cthulhu
Kenneth Hite 31
 
 On “The Haunted House”
Keith Herber 41
 
 On Character Creation in Everway
Jonathan Tweet 45
 
 Storytelling Games as a Creative Medium
Will Hindmarch 47
 
 Structure and Meaning in Role-Playing Game Design
Rebecca Borgstrom 57
 
 My Life with Master: The Architecture of Protagonism
Paul Czege 67
 
 Making Games That Make Stories
James Wallis 69
 
 Creating a Meaning-Machine
The Deck of Stories Called Life in the Garden
Eric Zimmerman 81
 
 Design Decisions and Concepts in Licensed Collectible Card Games
Eric Lang; Assisted by Pat Harrigan 85
 
 One Story, Many Media
Kevin Wilson 91
 
 On Mystery of the Abbey
Bruno Faidutti 95
 
 On Life's Lottery
Kim Newman 99
 
II. Computational Fictions 107
 
 The Sands of Time: Crafting a Video Game Story
Jordan Mechner 111
 
 On And Then There Were None
Lee Sheldon 121
 
 On Solitaire
Helen Thorington 125
 
 Enlightening Interactive Fiction
Andrew Plotkin's Shade
Andrew Douglass 129
 
 The Creation of Floyd the Robot in Planetfall
Steve Meretzky 137
 
 Fretting the Player Character
Nick Montfort 139
 
 On Savoir-Faire
Emily Short 147
 
 Pax, Writing, and Change
Stuart Moulthrop 149
 
 RE: Authoring Magritte:
The Brotherhood of Bent Billiard
Talan Memmott 157
 
 On Soft Cinema: Mission to Earth
Lev Manovich 159
 
 On Juvenatege
Marie-Laure Ryan 163
 
 On Twelve Easy Lessons to Better Time Travel
Marc C. Marino 165
 
 Deikto: A Language for Interactive Storytelling
Chris Crawford 169
 
 GRIOT's Tales of Haints and Seraphs
A Computational Narrative Generation System
D. Fox Harrell 177
 
 Writing Façade: A Case Study in Procedural Authorship
Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern 183
 
 On The Breakup Conversation
Robert Zubek 209
 
 On The Archer’s Flight
Mark Keavney 213
 
III. Real Worlds 
 
 Prismatic Play
Games as Windows on the Real World
John Tynes 221
 
 On John Tynes's Puppetland
Sean Thorne 229
 
 Video Games Go to Washington
The Story behind The Howard Dean for Iowa Game
Ian Bogost and Gonzalo Frasca 233
 
 Political Activism
Bending the Rules
Kevin Whelan 247
 
 The Puppet Master Problem
Design for Real-World, Mission-Based Gaming
Jane McGonigal 251
 
 On A Measure for Marriage
Nick Fortugno 265
 
 On unexceptional.net
Robert Nideffer 269
 
 On Itinerant
Teri Rueb 273
 
 Finding the Game in Improvised Theaters
Tim Uren 279
 
 On Adventures in Mating
Joe Scrimshaw 285
 
 Santaman's Harvest Yields Questions, or
Does a Performance Happen if It Exists in a Virtual Forest?
Adriene Jenik 289
 
 Me, the Other
Torill Elvira Mortensen 297
 
 A Network of Quests in World of Warcraft
Jill Walker 307
 
 Communities of Play
The Social Construction of Identity in Persistent Online Game Worlds
Celia Pearce and Artemesia 311
 
 Eliza Redux
Adrianne Wortzel 319
 
IV. Appendices 331
 
 Appendix A: Puppetland by John Tynes 333
 
 Appendix B: Bestial Acts by Greg Costikyan 349
 
 Appendix C: The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen by James Wallis 359
 
 Contributor Biographies 383
 
 Permissions 393
 
 Index 395