Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives [Hardcover]

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

Book Description

Publication Date: March 13, 2009 | ISBN-10: 0262232634 | ISBN-13: 978-0262232630 | Edition: First.

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.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Pat Harrigan is a freelance writer and author of the novel Lost Clusters. He is also the co-editor, with Noah Wardrip-Fruin, of First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (2004) and Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (2007), both published by the MIT Press.

Noah Wardrip-Fruin is Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the coeditor of four collections published by the MIT Press: with Nick Montfort, The New Media Reader (2003); with Pat Harrigan, First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (2004), Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (2007), and Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (2009).

Product Details

• Hardcover: 496 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press; First. edition (March 13, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262232634
• ISBN-13: 978-0262232630
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 0.8 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 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: #81,254 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

0 of 15 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Quick and High Quality November 8, 2011

By rhichi

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Amazing service. I'm local to the store, but I was still pleasantly surprised in ordering this. It said it would ship in 4-14 days, and it arrived within 48 hours! The book is in perfect condition and came with a "Thank You!" note. The best part is that this is part of an ongoing surprise birthday gift for my fiance, so the note and quick arrival (he just started reading, and has fallen in love with, the prequel) is making a fun mystery game!