Twisty Little Passages
Nick Montfort’s book on interactive fiction, Twisty Little Passages, describes itself in two ways. The first description (p. 5) reads:
This book seeks to describe some of the intellectual history of the form and its relationship to other literary and gaming forms, and to computing and other computing programs, while critically examining a representative selection of important works and describing their interrelationships.
The second description (p. 14) reads:
Thus this book considers [interactive fiction] works from the standpoint of the narratives they can generate, the way they function as riddles, and their nature as computer programs.
Thus Montfort has promised to present two equally important perspectives on interactive fiction (IF), the first a critical history of the form’s origins, the second a critical analysis of the form’s operations, or to put it in even simpler terms, where IF operates and how IF operates. Given the meagre attention previously given to interactive fiction by scholars, it is this first perspective, the critical history, that is most needed, and that takes a more dominant role in the book.
Against the Flow
In Salen & Zimmerman’s Rules of Play, the authors introduce the concept of flow as a kind of pleasurable experience. Flow is the state of mind where someone achieves a high degree of focus and enjoyment, they tell us.
Shortly after finishing the book, I had a brief exchange on the suspension of disbelief [Intelligent Artifice] in which flow was mentioned. It appeared that flow is a popular idea in the study of games.
Being unfamiliar with the origins of flow, I picked up Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. (I first browsed through Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, Csikzentmihalyi’s monograph from 1975 detailing his research technique.)
2003 in Review (books)
Best read, non-fiction: The Mind’s Provisions: A Critique of Cognitivism, Vincent Descombes, Stephen Adam Schwartz (trans). A well crafted argument. More people need to read this book. Let me repeat myself: more people need to read this book. Particularly all of you aspiring computer science majors and computational linguisticists. (Amazon customers who bought this book also bought: Dude, Where’s My Country? by Michael Moore.)
Worst read, non-fiction: The Language Police, Diane Ravitch. Ravitch’s stunning conclusion about how to fix education: better educated teachers. Sounds like the chicken and the egg.
Seek Ye the Gnarl (part 3)
Final notes on Salen & Zimmerman’s Rules of Play.
Unit 4: Culture is the final section of the book, and the shortest. This is the place where, typically, the subject takes on a certain urgency, culminating in an explosion of broad conclusions and/or open-ended questions. Nothing quite so dramatic here. Instead we get this unit on culture, and a set of activites which are related to games by rather loose connections.
Seek Ye the Gnarl (part 2)
More notes on Salen & Zimmerman’s Rules of Play.
Unit 3: PLAY presents six different schemas for talking about games with respect to “play”.
Editorial notes: This unit seems to be the real core material of the author’s interests. It is better edited and provides a more thorough discussion of the areas covered. Here we get 20-30 pages on each schema, almost twice the amount of material compared to units 2 and 4. The commissioned game notes by Kira Snyder reveal more interesting detail about the design process than the previous two.
Seek Ye the Gnarl
I am working my way through Salen & Zimmerman’s Rules of Play. (I discovered this book by way of andrew’s reading list [grandtextauto].) I’ve just completed Unit 2, which puts me somewhere around the halfway mark. Some preliminary notes:
- plenty of typos (a useless thing to say, really)
- I’m not sure I like the writing style. Lots of remarks like “Do you remember when we talked about…” and “As a game designer, you need to…” I think this was a choice to give the book a focused target audience, but it could have been taken up a level. Add a little redundancy for things like key definitions, or at the very least add page number references instead of “back in Chapter 3″. These are all things I’m sure will be taken care of in the second edition.
- It’s a textbook.
Now, as far as content goes…