Noah Waldrip-Fruin is embarking upon a grand experiment this week by having his latest book peer-reviewed via blog. Waldrip-Fruin, over at UC San Diego, is well known in academic gaming circles for co-editing with Pat Harrigan First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game and Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media.
As first widely reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education today by Jeff Young, Waldrip-Fruin discussed peer review of his newest book with his editor at MIT Press: Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies. What better place than Grand Text Auto, the far-reaching academic blog that Waldrip-Fruin runs along with Mary Flanagan, Michael Mateas, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, and Andrew Stern? And so it is the book will be made available on the blog, in modified format, entered as blog entries to be available for comment by readers. The first excerpt slash blog entry is here.
In related news, Julian Dibbell wrote a book some time back about a text-based online world that predated Second Life, World of Warcraft, EverQuest, Ultima Online, etc. etc. These text-based multi-user dungeons/domains remained popular into the 1990s. I recall messing around in them on mainframes back in the day (though I was more enamored with the graphical stuff Richard Garriott was producing, I must say). Rumor has it, there remains a small contingent of passionate devotees who sneer at graphical worlds in contempt. Hm.
My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World covers the world of LambdaMOO in the early 1990s. Without getting too technical, a MOO is sort of an advanced MUD, that allowed users opportunities to program the environment. Dibbell’s book delves into topics SL is now grappling with years later in more graphical environs.
This month marks the 9th anniversary of My Tiny Life’s publication. Dibbell recounts his noble idea of placing the work under creative commons licensing, since the publisher let it go out of print. Although the arrangement would mean no royalties for the author, the text might well have enjoyed a renaissance and gained a wider audience.
I was going to announce today that MY TINY LIFE had been liberated — not merely launched anew but born again under a Creative Commons “copyleft” license and thus set loose for any passing amateur to upload, remix, mashup, and otherwise repurpose in all the many fruitful ways that copyright, precisely, fails to permit.
Alas, quirks in copyright law have prevented that, so Dibbell has offered the text as a free download from Lulu.com.
So read an old gaming text for free, and help review a new one. All is possible through the power of the Internet.
January 23, 2008 at 3:45 am |
[...] Noah Waldrip-Fruin is embarking upon a grand experiment this week by having his latest book peer-reviewed via blog. Waldrip-Fruin, over at UC San Diego, is well known in academic gaming circles for co-editing with Pat Harrigan First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game and Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media. As first widely reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education today by Jeff Young, Waldrip-Fruin discussed peer review of his newest book with his editor at MIT Press: Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies. What better place than Grand Text Auto, the far-reaching academic blog that Waldrip-Fruin runs along with Mary Flanagan, Michael Mateas, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, and Andrew Stern? And so it is the book will be made available on the blog, in modified format, entered as blog entries to be available for comment by readers. The first excerpt slash blog entry is here. In related news, Julian Dibbell wrote a book some time back about a text-based online world that predated Second Life, World of Warcraft, EverQuest, Ultima Online, etc. etc. These text-based multi-user dungeons/domains remained popular into the 1990s. I recall messing around in them on mainframes back in the day (though I was more enamored with the graphical stuff Richard Garriott was producing, I must say). Rumor has it, there remains a small contingent of passionate devotees who sneer at graphical worlds in contempt. Hm. My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World covers the world of LambdaMOO in the early 1990s. Without getting too technical, a MOO is sort of an advanced MUD, that allowed users opportunities to program the environment. Dibbell’s book delves into topics SL is now grappling with years later in more graphical environs. This month marks the 9th anniversary of My […] [...]
January 23, 2008 at 5:30 am |
[...] Original post by Educational Games Research [...]
January 25, 2008 at 2:09 pm |
Thank you for the link John. I’m interested to see the type of discussion this peer review process will generate. Being able to review and see other comments could create more academic discussion on Noah’s work. And even lead to additional research by those reviewing the work.
February 16, 2008 at 11:40 am |
Thanks for sharing!
March 29, 2008 at 1:31 am |
Ineed some example of the genre.somebody help me please!!!
June 10, 2008 at 5:05 pm |
Thank you for the information!