I’m happy to announce the publication of my first monograph, Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies. As the subtitle suggests, this book is a software studies take on the past and future of digital fictions and games. As of today it’s available in bookstores as well as online — and a PDF of the introduction can be downloaded from the MIT Press site.

From a games perspective, I argue that the fictions in today’s computer games tend to be shallow and brittle because of a basic imbalance in their implementations — while one can occupy many positions in the spatial world of the game, there are very few possible positions in the fictional world. Expressive Processing then examines 40 years of artificial intelligence research projects that provide an important series of lessons, and possible inspirations, as we move forward.

More broadly, the book speaks to digital media and electronic literature communities about a vein of important work — performed in research labs — which previous books have usually mentioned in passing, rather than engaged in its richness. Focusing on this work suggests a history and future for authors in crafting computational models of ideas important to the fiction, opening up spaces of interaction at levels ranging from deep interpersonal dynamics to the surface play of language.

This book also marks the launch of the new Software Studies series from MIT Press, which I’m editing with Lev Manovich and Matthew Fuller. Software studies includes a broad range of work that engages the specifics of software culturally, rather than in purely engineering terms. Expressive Processing particularly develops a software studies for digital media. It does this by interpreting the computational processes of games and fictions (the ideas they embody, their histories, their potentials and limits) and by connecting the specifics of these processes to the resulting audience experiences.

The book includes an extensive set of notes and revisions arising from community comments during the blog-based peer review the manuscript had last year on Grand Text Auto. My sincere thanks, again, to those who shared their time and expertise with me.

Finally, I’ve also put up an Expressive Processing page on this site where I’ll collect reviews, any necessary errata, and other information as time progresses.

Like Michael, I was recruited by a search committee headed by Jim Whitehead — the mastermind behind the UC system’s first computer game degree. They have also just hired Arnav Jhala, most recently of the Liquid Narrative Group at NC State, who will come to Santa Cruz after completing a one year appointment with the Center for Computer Games Research at ITU Copenhagen. As UCSC grows in this area, we’re looking forward to developing research relationships with other labs, groups, and companies, both in the SF Bay Area and beyond.

Students who’d like to work with us have three options: the previously-mentioned undergraduate degree, the Computer Science department’s graduate program, and the interdisciplinary Digital Arts and New Media MFA program (which also features such luminaries as Warren Sack, Sharon Daniel, and Margaret Morse). Part of what impressed me when visiting UCSC is how effectively they were already bringing together students from different backgrounds, pursuing different types of degrees, in an ongoing interdisciplinary conversation. I’m hoping to help expand and strengthen that.

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.

Meanwhile, I’m told that Second Person should be shipping out from MITP’s warehouse in the next few weeks, and the new year promises a few other events I hope to note in a more timely manner.