First Person : New Media as Story, Performance, and Game

Rating:
Summary: Worthy sampler of an evolving area
Review: A great overview of the intersections of games, linear stories, and interactive artworks. This book almost inevitably leaves you with a richer perspective, because the range of articles (the uses of voice synthesizers to the Sims) makes it unlikely that you are familiar with all the terrain. The commentary discussions parallel to the main text give a feeling like chatting with your smart friends about some brilliant lecture you just saw. Thought provoking and fun.

Rating:
Summary: Drama and New Media Forms
Review: What has particularly excited me is the opening chapter on "Cyberdrama"... it discusses approaches to story, game play and engagement in terms that echo what we are trying to achieve in Drama education. Throughout the book (and this is from preliminary browsing) there are discussions about narrative and simulation and disticntions being drawn bewteen perceptual positions of players ... the writers that have contributed to this book have a very clear sense of the notion of "role" and I am starting to think that this book may well serve as the basis for investigation into the role of technology in Drama ( and possibly other) education for the next few years. Other promising looking chapters include such discussions as "Moving Through Me as I move: A Paradigm for Interaction", "Unusual Positions: Embodied Interactions in Symbolic Spaces", "Narrative, Interactivity, Play and Games: Four Naughty Concepts in Need of Discipline", " Videogames of the Oppressed: Critical Thinking, Education, Tolerance and other Trivial Issues", "A Preliminary Poetics for Interactive Drama and Games"

The authors contributing to this book are well known to anyone who's started looking into Drama and technology - Janet Murray , Espen Aarseth and Brenda Laurel are all there, alongside more familiar "drama' voices such as Richard Schechner...

As a high school drama teacher, I have a keen interest in new media applications in Drama education - it seems that many of our number are still focussed totally on their Drama classrooms and while they have an interest in technology are not actually making much headway with developing knowledge in the area - this retards developing discussions when there isn't a common language and some basic concepts upon which to build our discussions and investigations...

I think this book "First Person" is probably as good a starting point as is available at the moment. It provides a broad overview of the scope of "new media" interactions and there is definitely what I would call a "drama sensibility" contained within it.

The other book I've just started looking into is Marie-Laure Ryan's "Narrative as Virtual Reality"

Narrative As Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media

What looks promising here is Chapter Nine: "Participatory Interactivity from Life Situations to Drama". I've yet to properly digest the chapter - I've been intrigued by some of the statements I've encountered, for instance "For interactivity to be reconciled with immersion, it must be stripped of any self-reflexive dimension"... I'm not sure that is exactly what we are trying to do with Drama (or any form of) education - we are generally trying to become aware of the symbolic forms we are engaging with... although in a Stanislavskian sense, it might just be that this ne dimension of building belief is somehow well placed in Drama... I tend to think the Brechtian requirement for distance might be better suited... but that can be a discussion for another day... for the time being we need to start to come to grips with some key concepts in the new paradigm we have the opportunity to define...

Once again... as Drama people we know the need for social constructivist approaches... I'm hoping we can live that rather than just posit it....

We are trying to establish a special interest group called DramaPlayShop.org... you're welcome to drop in!