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

Shortlisted for the 2008 Diana Jones Award. and Finalist, 2007 Front Line Awards, given by Game Developer Magazine.

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.

Contributors: Ian Bogost, Rebecca Borgstrom, Greg Costikyan, Chris Crawford, Paul Czege, Jeremy Douglass, Bruno Faidutti, Nick Fortugno, Gonzalo Frasca, Fox Harrell, Pat Harrigan, Keith Herber, Will Hindmarch, Kenneth Hite, Adriene Jenik, Mark Keavney, Eric Lang, Lev Manovich, Mark Marino, George R. R. Martin, Michael Mateas, Jane McGonigal, Jordan Mechner, Talan Memmott, Steve Meretzky, Erik Mona, Nick Montfort, Torill Mortensen, Stuart Moulthrop, Kim Newman, Robert Nideffer, Celia Pearce, Teri Rueb, Marie-Laure Ryan, Joseph Scrimshaw, Lee Sheldon, Emily Short, Andrew Stern, Helen Thorington, Sean Thorne, Jonathan Tweet, John Tynes, Tim Uren, James Wallis, Jill Walker, Kevin Whelan, Kevin Wilson, Adrianne Wortzel, Eric Zimmerman, Robert Zubek

Pat Harrigan is a freelance writer and editor, most recently of Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming, coedited with Matthew Kirschenbaum (MIT Press). His work has been published widely and he is the author of a novel, Lost Clusters, and a collection of short stories, Thin Times and Thin Places.

Noah Wardrip-Fruin is Professor of Computational Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he codirects the Expressive Intelligent Studio. He is the author of Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies (MIT Press).