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Seamus Mackey's best friend has vanished, and Seamus wants to know
why. Lowlives, barflies, corporate executives, drug dealers,
cops... Somebody knows what happened to Rob Pitzer, and Seamus will
risk his life, and anyone else's, to find out.
Narrative strategies for vast fictional worlds across a variety of
media, from World of Warcraft to The Wire. 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.
Game designers, authors, artists, and scholars discuss how roles
are played and how stories are created in role-playing games, board
games, computer games, interactive fictions, massively multiplayer
games, improvisational theater, and other "playable media." 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 Facade. 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. Appendixes
contain three fully-playable tabletop RPGs that demonstrate some of
the variations possible in the form.
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