Noah Wardrip-Fruin

One of the pleasures of Grand Text Auto is the experimentation we undertake with the blog form. Last fall we spawned a gallery exhibition from the blog, at UC Irvine’s Beall Center for Art and Technology. Today, I’m happy to announce, we’ve begun an experiment in blog-based peer review — Expressive Processing — in collaboration with the MIT Press, the Institute for the Future of the Book, and UCSD’s Software Studies initiative. Jeff Young’s piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education does a great job of framing the questions we’re exploring.

The initial versions of the syllabi for Advanced Workshop in Communication Media (my graduate course, COGR 280) and Communicating and Computers (my undergraduate course, COMT 111a) are now online. In both course we’re taking a look at Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum’s Values at Play research project and curriculum — and at least one course (it’s not yet decided for the second) includes working with the new Metaplace tools being developed by Raph Koster’s Areae.

Back in September I posted the syllabus for my Fall 2006 graduate seminar in game studies. Now that this site is back online, here’s a link to my Spring 2007 undergrad computer game studies lecture course.

Pat Harrigan and I enjoyed editing First Person — and readers seemed to enjoy its broad view of our field. Now Pat and I are happy to announce the publication of a follow-up volume, Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media. The contributors to this book go further with some of the ideas and topics in First Person, but also take in a new set of areas. In each case — from tabletop role-playing games to improvisational theater, from political games to procedural authorship — the approach of Second Person is grounded in specific examples, drawing on the insights of a diverse set of contributors.

To learn more, check out:

• the table of contents,
• the introduction,
• Booksense’s link to a local bookstore, or
• ISBN.nu link’s to the major online retailers.