Third Person

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.

ISBN 0262232634   Pages 496 ISBN13 9780262232630 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher MIT Press Ltd   Weight (grammes) 1112 Imprint MIT Press   Published in Cambridge, Mass. Format Hardback   Height (mm) 229 Publication date 17 Apr 2009   Width (mm) 203 Library of Congress 2008029409   Spine width (mm) 20 DEWEY 794.8   Academic level Professional / Scholarly DEWEY edition DC22

		Dedication and Acknowledgments
		Contributors
		Introduction		1
I		Authoring		11
		Truths Universally Acknowledged: How the "Rules" of Doctor Who Affect the Writing by Lance Parkin		13
		In What Universe? by Walter Jon Williams		25
		Two Interviews about Doctor Who by Paul Cornell and Kate Orman		33
		On Writing Eeteaus by Dave Sim		41
		The Archdiocese of Narrative by Rafael Alvarez		49
		Intellectual Property Development in the Adventure Games Industry: A Practitioner's View by Robin D. Laws		59
		Multicampaign Setting Design for Role-Playing Games by Kenneth Hite		67
		World without End: The Delta Green Open Campaign Setting by A. Scott Glancy		77
		La Vie d'Arthur, Conflict, and Cooperation in The Great Pendrogon Campaign by Greg Stafford		87
		The Game Master andthe Role-Playing Game Campaign by Monte Cook		97
		Alice and Dorothy Play Together by Richard A. Bartle		105
		My Story Never Ends by Ken Rolston		119
		Storytelling in a Multiplayer Environment by Matthew P. Miller		125
		A Brief History ofSpore by Chaim Gingold		131
		Spaces Between: Traveling through Bleeds, Apertures, and Wormholes inside the Database Novel by Norman M. Klein		137
		Where Stones Can Speak: Dramatic Encounters in Interactive 3-D Virtual Reality by Tamiko Thiel		153
		Moving in Place: The Question of Distributed Social Cinema by Adriene Jenik and Sarah Lewison		179
		Breeze Avenue Working Paper by Richard Grossman		193
II		Exploring
		More...

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