Eduardo Navas on Thu, 9 Aug 2007 05:15:45 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> [NMF] Review: Second Person |
REVIEW: Second Person, Role Playing in Story and Playable Media, by David Cox http://newmediafix.net/daily/?p=1529 http://newmediafix.net Second Person: Role Playing in Story and Playable Media edited by Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin Publisher: The MIT Press (February 28, 2007) ISBN-10: 0262083566 ISBN-13: 978-0262083560 Review by David Cox, MA Second Person: Role Playing in Story and Playable Media elucidates many of the techniques, approaches and philosophies of role playing based games, media and art. It is a dense and well put-together compendium of working notes, essays and from-the-trenches accounts from designers and artists working in media which place the identity of the user/player/audience at the very front and center of the work. It is an amazing collection of ideas, scintillating, diverse and rich, each separate writer¹s account shedding light on what it is that makes a memorable interactive title compelling and immersive. The contributors each provide well illustrated, well written insights into exactly how games and ?playable media¹ are conceptualized. Individual case studies describe role-playing related works from academia, the publishing world, the fine arts and the normally hyper-secret inner sanctum of the games industry. Discussed in fascinating detail are such canonical genre classics as ³Dungeons and Dragons² a role-playing game whose solid emphasis upon the social interaction between players is central to the experience and enjoyment of all who take part. D&D is the ³Citizen Kane² of RPGs, and it comes as no surprise that so many incarnations both electronic and none, have emerged. The book¹s central idea in fact, is that of the ¹second person¹. This refers to that entity in a game or story which stands in, avatar-like for player herself, her identity and her agency within the myriad threads the story or gameplay might take. These ?other selves¹ can be either imaginary characters in a turn-based role playing game, a lurid animated incarnation in a massively multiplayer online world such as ³World of Warcraft² or ³Everquest² , or a simple stand-alonge player-controlled computer character, for example the prince in ³Prince of Persia². A fascinating art installation called ³Itinerant² integrates the terrain of Boston into a locative interactive narrative. The project interweaves Mary Shelley¹s ³Frankenstein² with flaneur-like drifting around urban space on the part of the participant. A section of Teri Rueb¹s artist statement reads: The participant¹s movement, tracked by GPS, triggers the payback of the sounds as she moves through parts of the city space where sounds have been ?placed¹. Indeed it comes as no surprise that locative media are finding increased expression in a world where people are in motion through dense urban centers, carrying location-sensitive media devices with them. The central idea of ?interactive cities¹ at ISEA recently proved a major showcase for such work. Also this melding of art, mapping and technology is described in detail in William Gibson¹s latest book ³Spook Country², placing it at the center of cybercultural importance. Eric Zimmerman¹s ³Life in the Garden² is another good example of pure interactive storytelling; an amazingly simple idea of utilizing individual picture-on-one-side-text-on-the-other cards intended to be read as a narrative, where the story sequence is chosen at random by the reader/player: INSTRUCTIONS: Shuffle the pages. Without looking. Select five pages and place them . Between the covers of the book. Then read the story. Conceived as ?an experience¹ as much as a published story, ³Life in the Garden², according to Zimmerman: ?emerged organically through a process of constant prototype and play testing, modifying and refining the format and writing, and later the images¹. This is a kind of media both simple and complex, where randomness, chance and other notions from the world of play and ludology have spilled into storytelling and traditional print publishing. The theorist, programmer and film maker Lev Manovich has a piece about his ¹soft cinema¹ production - a film made up of discrete fragments whose playback is generated at random from a database in work which itself about identity, self and interactivity. Pioneer of the idea of database as a structural paradigm at least as important as that of ¹story¹, Manovich¹s theories about database-versus-narrative have fuelled something of a revolution in media culture, especially the landmark book ³Language of New Media². There are many examples of team-based creative processes described; what works and does not work when figuring out the myriad and many variables which accompany the game design process, dependent as it is upon the input and feedback of so many people. This ³what-makes-a-good-game-good² stuff is hard to pin down at the best of times. Games professionals, can on day by day basis turn to online resources like the venerable Gamasutra for their dose of hot tips, industry gossip, news and trends, but a book like this as far as I am aware is among the first of its kind to represent a kind broader worldview required say, of a textbook for university courses which may or may not involve lots of actual hands-on games production, rather simply games analysis or appreciation. Games studies needs this book, indeed might not be able to do without it, and with time it could be the equivalent of ³Film Art: An Introduction² (the central text of many a film school) the mainstay of graduate and post-graduate videogame studies courses. I welcome its arrival on the scene with great enthusiasm. David Cox is a once-upon-a-time videogame producer, now filmmaker, writer and digital media artist living in San Francisco¹s Mission District. He teaches Computer Skills for Multimedia at City College in San Francisco. His blog is http://www.telescape.blogspot.com His email address is dcox@ccsf.edu # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@kein.org and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org