Speakers: Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Jordan Mechner,Mark Marino, and Jeremy Douglass
Time: Wednesday, April 4, 6-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC),
Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML), Room 201
Title: Second Person: An evening on writing and gameplay
Tonight, the IMD Forum will host one of the editors and several of the authors included in Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media , a new text from MIT Press, and follow-on to their excellent and often referenced previous volume, First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game.
Jeremy Douglass
Jeremy Douglass is a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB profile). His research focuses on interactive fiction and reader response to textual new media. His research on poetry software, "Slidewords: Towards Livecomposing Animated Poetry" are forthcoming at Digital Arts and Culture 2007. Jeremy is a database and web developer for numerous projects, including the academic search engine Voice of the Shuttle, and writes for the new media blog http://writerresponsetheory.org.
In "Enlightening Interactive Fiction" Jeremy Douglass discusses the meaning of Andrew Plotkin's 'Shade' in terms of both surface signification and source code, continuing how the medium and its particular history shape the message of the individual work unfolding before the player.
Mark Marino
Mark C. Marino is a new media scholar and artist, studying chatbots, electronic literature, and games. His dissertation, I, Chatbot: The Gender and Race Performativity of Conversational Agents, integrates sociological research with critical theory. In addition to blogging for Writer Response Theory (http://writerresponsetheory.org), he is editor of Bunk Magazine (http://www.bunkmag.com). His latest analytical work launches “Critical Code Studies,” an approach to interpreting computer code. He is the author of several hypermedia works, including “a show of hands” and “12 Easy Lessons to Better Time Travel.” He currently teaches writing at the University of Southern California (link to faculty site: http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~mcmarino/).
Mark will present “12 Easy Lessons,” which is featured in Second Person.
[Also see Mark's post about this event on his WRT blog. ]
Jordan Mechner
Jordan Mechner is one of the world's best-known videogame creators. His games, including Karateka, Prince of Persia, The Last Express, and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, have sold millions of copies and received worldwide critical acclaim. He is also the director of two award-winning short films, Waiting for Dark and Chavez Ravine: A Los Angeles Story. Mechner received his BA from Yale University.
Jordan will talk about his Second Person contribution, which was about the writing and story and game design for Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.
Noah Wardrip-Fruin
Noah Wardrip-Fruin is a digital media writer, artist, and scholar. His writing/art has been presented by galleries, arts festivals, scientific conferences, DVD magazines, and the Whitney and Guggenheim museums. In addition to Second Person, he has edited First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (2004, with Pat Harrigan) and The New Media Reader (2003, with Nick Montfort), both from MIT Press. He is an Assistant Professor of Communication at UCSD, a Vice President of the Electronic Literature Organization, and a blogger at http://grandtextauto.org.
Noah will talk about the overall Second Person project.
BACKCHANNEL LOG from Presentation: Download file
