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

Pat Harrigan (Editor), Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 5, 2007

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. Appendixes contain three fully-playable tabletop RPGs that demonstrate some of the variations possible in the form.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"If you hold the traditional views that games are something you play (such as chess), role playing is something you do (such as acting), and stories are something that a writer writes and a reader reads, brace yourself--this book will turn these ideas inside out. It is a thought-provoking, intimidating, revealing, and encouraging work." J. M. Artz Computing Reviews

"The book is not 100 percent a how-to guide for designing better video games, but rather is a thought-provoker, spanning both the theoretical and the practical." Game Developer

About the Author

R.G. Davis is the founder of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and was director for the firsteight years. He is the author of "Guerrilla Theatre" (Tulane Drama Review T32) andSan Francisco Mime Troupe: The First Ten Years (Ramparts Press, 1975). In his NewYork phase he brought Dario Fo's plays to North America. An author of a number of articleson Brecht and ecology, Eisler and left music, Davis in the 1990s began to study ecologyat various universities and became an agroecological (organic farmer) activist. He has taughtat NYU, San Francisco State University, Oran University in Algiers, and workshops inCuba and Nicaragua. Currently he is finishing his second MA at SFSU.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (January 5, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262083566
• ISBN-13: 978-0262083560
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.9 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #758,555 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Plenty of replay value, March 12, 2010

By 

Michael J. Tresca "Talien" (Fairfield, CT USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (Paperback)

Where First Person was a series of essays between squabbling scholars, Second Person is a refreshingly focused review of storytelling and role-playing. Instead of authors inventing new phrases in each essay we get a real grounding in the foundation of role-playing games: their origins (Mona), theory (Costikyan), and all of these elements put into practice (George R.R. Martin, among others).

The book is divided into three sections, covering tabletop systems, computational fictions, and real worlds. Tabletop role-players will recognize the heavy hitters here: Ken Hite, the late Keith Herber, Jonathan Tweet, Rebecca Borgstrom, Nick Montfort, John Tynes, and more. Throughout are short essays detailing what worked and what didn't, from interactive fiction to Call of Cthulhu, Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) to The Howard Dean for Iowa Game (yes, really).

Second Person goes a step further in including three tabletop role-playing games: Puppetland by Tynes, Bestial Acts by Costikyan, and The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen by Wallis. It's unlikely this book will be used as an actual gaming reference, but the inclusion of these three games is enlightening as the essayists put their words into practice.

Second Person isn't afraid to stretch boundaries, sharing insights as diverse as the Prince of Persia and the adventure gamebook Life's Lottery, from Martin's collaborative Wild Cards stories to the interactive fiction Planetfall. As you read through each essay a pattern emerges, of authors trying to tell stories, frustrated by the limits of the medium, and adjusting to adapt. It's an education of showing rather than telling. Tynes' essays are particularly illuminating. His thoughts on escapism neatly sums up the plight of fantasy gaming today.

With dozens of essays on the evolution of storytelling games and three role-playing games to boot, Second Person is an important work that even has replay value. A must have for any game scholar.