First
Person: New Media as Story, Performance,
and Game
by Noah
Wardrop-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, Eds.
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004
350 pp. Illus. 64 b/w. $39.95
ISBN: 0-262-23232-4.
Reviewd by Jan Baetens
jan.baetens@arts.kuleuven.ac.be
First Person is not (only) a book
in the traditional or narrow sense of
the word: It is part of a multimedia research
program that combines a hard-copy publication
form (the volume I shall review here)
and a website in progress
that defines itself as a remediation
of the book. This website is not run by
the publisher of the book, although The
MIT Press has now a solid experience in
this type of bi-medial enterprises, but
by the e-journal electronic book review
(http://www.electronicbookreview.com/v3/),
where one will find part of the editorial
material of the book, a version in color
of the printed b/w illustrations, and
a whole series of debates, controversies
and discussions that were already opened,
albeit in very inchoative way, in the
different sections of First Person.
It is important to take into account this
double structure when evaluating the form
and content of First Person: first,
because most of the dialectical and dialogical
opportunities of the book only reach real
maturity in combination with the website;
second, because the structure of the book
itself is in many ways an anticipation
of the argumentative and scholarly network
constructed by ebr.
What strikes the reader at the very first
contact with the book is its wonderful
balance of closure and openness. Closure,
indeed, since the attempt to define and
organize a new field (roughly speaking:
the intersection of games and stories,
of new media theory and narrative theory)
is organized here around eight topics
or issues, all of them obeying the same
format. We find an editorial introduction
of one or two pages presenting the history
of the research in the field, its most
important scholars and literatures, and
the essential current debates; then three,
exceptionally four, often very personalized
essays reflecting upon the major interrogations
of the field; finally a number of responses,
generally one or two per essay, some of
them already hinting to the ongoing discussions
on the ebr site. This exemplary
composition, reinforced by a very clear
layout, helps readers not only to find
their way in a book that might have become
a labyrinth but also to familiarize themselves
with a kind of intellectual map of the
emerging field. One could, of course,
always discuss the relevance of the structure
adopted by the editors, but it would be
unfair not to thank them for their distinction
of the following eight fields: "cyberdrama,"
a section exploring in detail the implications
of the Aristotelian approach
of for instance Janet Murray, marked by
the importance of the notions of plot,
character and catharsis; "ludology,"
which makes a claim for the absolute medium-specificity
of gaming; "critical simulation,"
with more politically or cultural studies
oriented texts on issues of representation;
"game theories," inevitably
focusing on themes such as interactivity,
but also, more surprisingly, paying great
attention to temporality; "hypertexts
& interactives," reactivating
discussions on literature online or literature
on and for the web; "the pixel/the
line," a chapter mainly devoted to
matters of design and visual/visible literature;
"beyond chat," a section gathering
studies on the visual representation of
online community conversations, on strategies
of collaboration, and on voice chips;
and finally "new readings,"
emphasizing the role of the interactive
reader and repurposing questions of reader-response
criticism.
But also openness: thanks to the presence
of systematic debate although the critical
aspects of many responses and replies
are rather discrete: Some readers might
have preferred more harsh discussions
in some sections of the book. Thanks also
to the rightly eclectic choice of collaboratorsof
course, readers will remark that one of
their fetish authors is missing, but in
general the range of contributors reflects
nicely the status quaestionis).
Thanks finally to the many cross-sectional
links and discussionsand this
is, of course, the merit of the editors
who have managed to create a book in which
the reader is eager to circulate from
one text to another.
In order to evaluate the interest of a
book, it is always useful to ask a preliminary
question: Does the reader welcome this
book as necessary? The answer to this
question is here undoubtedly positive.
There has recently been such an explosion
of work and cultural practiceson
the one hand, theory and criticism; on
the other hand, on the related but not
identical fields of games, gaming, narrative,
performance, etc.that the
time has come now to attempt a first institutionalization.
First Person does this job in a
very clever way although one may regret
the under-representation of some recent
evolutions in narrative theory. The work
by Marie-Laure Ryan, for example, is mentioned
only once; David Hermans is completely
ignored. There is also a relative absence
of more culturally inspired authorsI
insist here on the word relative.
The most important remark to make in this
regard, however, is to compliment the
editors for their remarkable achievement.
But what, then, is the value of the different
sections and of the different contributions
within each section? It will not come
as a surprise that the quality of the
texts is unequal. Personally, I found
the section on ludology very refreshing
(with the resistance of the adepts of
this discipline against the colonization
of their field by the well-settled disciplines
of narrative, for example), just as I
have read with great passion the section
on pixels and lines (with their great
sensibility to the literariness of writing
on screen) or the section on chat (one
of the parts of the book where I have
learnt most, probably given the distance
of this discussion to my own, literary
background). The weak part of the book,
regardless the sections in which it occurred,
are surely the responses to
each of the texts, which many readers
may consider, as I have done at several
occasions, insufficiently critical or
hardly relevant (not all the responding
authors have done what the editors could
expect from them; others, on the contrary,
have written short and strong responses
which may remain as examples in the genre,
such as Mark Bernsteins answer to
Celia Pearce or Richard Schechners
reply to J. Yellowlees Douglas and Andrew
Hargadon: here the reader feels as if
she is assisting not simply an academic
game, but a real match where people want
to win by making the others lose). One
can only hope that on the ebr site
the debates to come will be harsher than
in First Person, where the authors
are sometimes too kind.