It's a little odd that gamers and game journalists complain that games aren't taken seriously. In fact, games have proven to be a fertile, if still nascent, subject for Ivory Tower analysis. Ludology -- the study of games from an academic perspective, using tools from other disciplines -- is now fairly well established as serious business, even if some gamers would rather mock it than understand it.


Narrative ludology is one of the most established parts of the game studies business. Approaching games as storytelling devices has a couple of advantages over other approaches. First, the literary analysis of text, film and television (primarily storytelling mediums) is already well established, so the terminology and basic analytic concepts are in place. Second, the storytelling approach allows comparison across genres and more familiar mediums, giving the reader a hook on which to follow the analysis.


Over the last five years, Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin have edited a trilogy of anthologies devoted to narrative ludology. The final book, "Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives," was just released. The series provides an excellent opportunity for lay readers to familiarize themselves with the state-of-the-art, and see how far game studies has come in the last decade. The editors have been very involved in both game and technological media for a long time, and the series has attracted some very interesting contributors and contributions.


All three books suffer from small word counts; this is especially an issue in "Third Person." Many of the articles just begin to get interesting when the conclusion sneaks up on you. Though the variety of articles is great, each volume would be stronger with longer essays, even if this would mean chopping a few pieces.

The first book in the series is easily the weakest in the lot. 2005's "First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game" is organized as a series of brief conversations, with original articles and responses to those articles. The replies begin on the same pages as the main articles, though, so following the conversation from beginning to end is more work than it should be. A lot of the book is taken up with the question of how game narrative should be approached. Star contributors like Will Wright, Greg Costikyan, Chris Crawford and Henry Jenkins all make important points about the problems and potential of games as narrative devices, but the subject is so broad, and beginning from such a basic level, that there is little real progress in understanding the medium as a medium.


"First Person" does ask some very important questions. Some of the authors doubt the very rationale of using narrative analysis for interactive media. Some genres of games ignore story altogether, and others use it merely as a framing device for the game action. But most of "First Person" is closer to the literary theory world than it is to the game world, so there are references to things like synergistics, tensegrity structures and the difficulties of mapping large-scale conversations. Though there is much to admire in "First Person," readers would be better off starting with one of the other two books.

Notable essays:

Ken Perlin, "Can There Be a Form between a Game and a Story?"

Gonzalo Frasca, "Videogames of the Oppressed: Critical Thinking, Education, Tolerance and Other Trivial Issues"

Henry Jenkins, "Game Design as Narrative Architecture"

2007's "Second Person: Roleplaying and Story in Games and Playable Media" has a cumbersome title, but a more welcoming structure for newcomers to the discipline. The emphasis on what it means to play a role means that all gamers and most people who remember their childhood have an entr?e to the text. "Second Person" moves beyond role-playing for players, as fruitful as that topic is, to address the creation of games that ask players to assume new roles or identities, including Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) like I Love Bees and interactive fiction. The book is a 400-page series of meditations on the relationship between the designer/game master/puppet master and those who choose to play in their world.


The opening section is specifically dedicated to tabletop gaming, and "Second Person" is at its best when it makes connections between this "real-life" role-playing world and game design. The book includes three light RPGs as appendices, including a Baron Munchausen-themed game that seems designed to encourage drunkenness and broken friendships. It, too, draws on the game design world for contributions, including Jordan Mechner and Chris Crawford (again), but still has ludologists and other scholars doing the heavy lifting with in-depth game analysis.

Notable essays:

Kenneth Hite, "Narrative Structure and Creative Tension in Call of Cthulhu"

Jordan Mechner, "The Sands of Time: Crafting a Video Game Story"

Steve Meretzky, "The Creation of Floyd the Robot in Planetfall"

Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern, "Writing Fa?ade: A Case Study in Procedural Authorship"

Jane McGonigal, "The Puppet Master Problem: Design for Real World, Mission-Based Gaming"

Tim Uren, "Finding the Game in Improvised Theater"

The new volume, "Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives" moves well beyond the game world and tries to integrate some game narrative into a larger concept of "vast narrative" -- stories that are larger than your typical novel, and are typified by different media types and encouraging fan interaction with the material. This definition requires working with television and literature, as well as games, so the newer digital media is situated within a big world of nerd culture. "Third Person" has essays on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Doctor Who" as well as World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy.


Casting this wide a net has the potential to do games a disservice, since other media tell better and more varied stories in more elaborate ways. Seeing the game narrative work integrated with the more established media, however, goes a long way to putting narrative ludology firmly in the literary criticism canon. It is a little worrying that so much of the other media discussed are your typical nerd/geek fare ("Buffy," "Lost," "Watchmen," "Star Trek," "Doctor Who"), but this is emblematic of the subjects they discuss. Though "All My Children," for example, would probably qualify as a vast narrative, there is (to my knowledge) no fan fiction about it or multiple levels of meaning seen through different approaches to the story.


The other media essays do tend to drown out a lot of the game material, sadly. Over half of the articles are not about games at all, and those that are about games are, for the most part, less satisfying than the four (!) articles about "Doctor Who." With ludology in a stronger place now than it was when "First Person" came out, you can understand the editors' willingness to put games side-by-side with more mature media. But if you came to this series looking for game discussion, the essays on novelizations and series "bibles" may be unwelcome digressions.

Notable (gaming) essays:

Kenneth Hite, "Multicampaign Setting Design for Role-Playing Games"

Monte Cook, "The Game Master and the Role-Playing Game Campaign"

Chaim Gingold, "A Brief History of Spore"

Matthew Kirschenbaum, "War Stories: Board Wargames and (Vast) Procedural Narratives"

Tanya Krzywinska, "Arachne Challenges Minerva: The Spinning Out of Long Narrative in World of Warcraft and Buffy the Vampire Slayer"

As a set, the Harrigan/Wardrip-Fruin collection is essential for getting a wide-angle look at the state of academic game criticism and game studies as a scholarly discipline. The books waste no time making the case for studying games. It is simply assumed that, as cultural products, videogames are fit subjects for literary analysis. There are the usual barely beneath-the-surface debates about if, how and when games are best understood as narrative. And it is clear that ludology has not quite reached the point where it has its own analytic language. Maybe it shouldn't. But these three volumes are an excellent starter set for people curious about this topic.