Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives

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

Narrative strategies for vast fictional worlds across a variety of media, from World of Warcraft to The Wire. 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.

Genres: Game Design, Games, Nonfiction, Art, Gaming

492 pages, Paperback

First published May 29, 2009

Reviews

[Alex Matzkeit]

As with every humanities anthology, your mileage may vary on the quality of the individual essays. I commend the editors for their wish to bring creators ("authoring") and scholars ("exploring") of "vast narratives" in TV, games, comics and transmedia franchises together in one volume. However, the result also proves that authors are not always interesting when they're writing about their own work.

I freely admit that I stopped reading some essays after a few paragraphs when they seemed uninteresting, skimmed others and ignored yet others altogether because of their apparent topic. So, instead of a full review, I will simply recommend some essays that I read completely and enjoyed:

- Walter Jon Williams on writing franchise novels (even though he's hampered by NDAs)
- Robin D Laws on Intellectual Property Development in RPGs
- Greg Stafford's thoughts about his Pendragon RPG
- Richard A. Bartle about the balance between sandbox games and more linear games
- Ken Rolston on the same thing
- Matthew P Miller on City of Heroes
- Robert M Price on the system of H. P. Lovecrafts Cthulhu Mythos (I recommend this one especially!)
- Henry Jenkins (interviewed) on Multiplicity in Superhero Comics
- Matthew Kirschenbaum on Board Wargames (another recommendation!)
- Jason Mittell on why The Wire is great and readings of cultural works as different media are not

[Jonathan Cassie]

Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin have outdone themselves with this volume, a masterpiece in the study of narrative, authorship and the relationships between these concepts, stories, games, television, film and other media. Drawing from a deep bench of talent, the essays in this collection are intriguingly all over the place. Perhaps having come to this book having read many books on these themes, I was able to riff on the work in a way I wouldn't have earlier in my reading, but I think this is accessible to virtually any audience. An EXTRAORDINARY chapter on Henry Darger by Michael Bonesteel is the gem of the collection, but there aren't any duds. Perhaps a bit too much Doctor Who for my tastes, but given the publication date, it doesn't surprise that Who figured larger than life.