From First Person to Second Person

First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s (eds). Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press, 2004. 331 pp. ISBN: 0-262-23232-4. £25.95 (hardback). Second Person: Role-playing and Story in Games and Playable Media. Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s (eds). Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press, 2007. 408 pp. ISBN: 978-0-26208356-0. £29.95 (hardback). First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (2004) and Second Person: Role-playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (2007) are two compelling collections of essays that seek to examine the enormous impact that electronic, digital, and, more broadly, interactive technologies and practices have had on the production of literary knowledge and narrative. Each collection manages in its own way to provide a snapshot or, perhaps more fittingly, a screengrab of the state of contemporary media studies and, consequently, each possesses distinct albeit often implicit biases towards the means through which we begin to situate the proliferation of ‘new media’. Having the chance to review these texts together provides an opportunity to address what might be a more gripping angle of examination than a simple survey of content—the possibility that the movement from First Person to Second Person represents a fundamental shift in our understanding of ‘new media’ and ‘new’ media, story, and play, and our methods for studying these fields. Although there are some obvious and important differences between these two collections, one of the more pronounced similarities is an overarching concern about the relationship between the procedural, interactive, and simulative qualities of ‘new media’, and the related production and incorporation of narrative content within these objects. Obviously, since not all digital and electronic media research centers around story, First Person and Second Person are clearly targeted towards those working in the humanities, particularly the fields of narratology, textual studies, and digital studies. The title First Person is, in many ways, positioned as an indicator of the content within—i.e. first person video games, first person narration, first person interaction, just as Second Person claims that it is all about the ‘YOU’ of these objects. Neither really get close to examining either first or second person perspectives, though, and these titles act as nothing more than placeholders for the content within. First Person and Second Person, however, are uniquely related in that they are each meant to be read with the Electronic Book Review’s companion website where readers can find longer, more thoughtful responses to the pieces in this collection. In short, reviewing both First Person and Second Person—the printed books—is to exclude the wide-range of valuable and ongoing discourse that accompanies these texts online, and omit any discussion of a model for future academic publishing that is truly multimedia in design. My review, however, will unfortunately do exactly this, as there is too little space with which to discuss the more nuanced arguments put forth online. In more ways than one, First Person exists as a relic of sorts of the early years of new media studies. Even from an organizational and material standpoint, we can see the remnants of prior concerns. Unlike Second Person, each essay in First Person Correspondence: Department of Textual and Digital Studies, 2107 Susquehanna Hall, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA. E-mail: mruppel@umd.edu