Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (Hardcover)

The ever-expanding capacities of computing offer new narrative possibilities for virtual worlds. Yet vast narratives--featuring an ongoing and intricately developed storyline, many characters, and multiple settings--did not originate with, and are not limited to, Massively Multiplayer Online Games. Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers, J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Marvel's Spiderman, and the complex stories of such television shows as Dr. Who, The Sopranos, and Lost all present vast fictional worlds. Third Person explores strategies of vast narrative across a variety of media, including video games, television, literature, comic books, tabletop games, and digital art. The contributors--media and television scholars, novelists, comic creators, game designers, and others--investigate such issues as continuity, canonicity, interactivity, fan fiction, technological innovation, and cross-media phenomena. Chapters examine a range of topics, including storytelling in a multiplayer environment; narrative techniques for a 3,000,000-page novel; continuity (or the impossibility of it) in Doctor Who; managing multiple intertwined narratives in superhero comics; the spatial experience of the Final Fantasy role-playing games; World of Warcraft adventure texts created by designers and fans; and the serial storytelling of The Wire. Taken together, the multidisciplinary conversations in Third Person, along with Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin's earlier collections First Person and Second Person, offer essential insights into how fictions are constructed and maintained in very different forms of media at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

計算機的不斷擴充能力為虛擬世界提供了新的敘事可能性。然而，龐大的敘事──包含持續發展的故事情節、多個角色和多個場景──並不僅限於大型多人在線遊戲。托馬斯·曼的《約瑟夫與他的兄弟們》、J·R·R·托爾金的《魔戒》、漫威的《蜘蛛人》以及電視劇《神秘博士》、《黑道家族》和《迷失》等複雜的故事都呈現了龐大的虛構世界。《第三人稱》探索了在各種媒體中進行龐大敘事的策略，包括視頻遊戲、電視、文學、漫畫、桌上遊戲和數字藝術。貢獻者──媒體和電視學者、小說家、漫畫創作者、遊戲設計師等──研究了連續性、正典性、互動性、粉絲創作、技術創新和跨媒體現象等問題。章節探討了多人環境中的故事講述；一部300萬頁小說的敘事技巧；《神秘博士》中的連續性（或其不可能性）；超級英雄漫畫中管理多個交織敘事的方法；《最終幻想》角色扮演遊戲的空間體驗；由設計師和粉絲創作的《魔獸世界》冒險文本；以及《火線》的連續故事講述。綜合起來，《第三人稱》中的跨學科對話，以及哈里根和沃德里普-弗魯因早期的兩本合集《第一人稱》和《第二人稱》，為我們在21世紀初不同形式的媒體中如何構建和維護虛構故事提供了重要的見解。