This web page is for 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. It’s available in bookstores as well as online — and a PDF of the introduction can be downloaded from the MIT Press site. I’m using this page to collect reviews, any necessary errata, and other information as time progresses.

About the book

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 their fictions, 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 specifically 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.

Endorsements

“This book feels like a major step forward towards developing a critical language and framework for understanding interactive media. By zeroing in on the relationship between what’s happening on the machine versus what’s happening in the brain, Noah brings tremendous clarity to what can seem like a daunting subject.”
—Will Wright, co-founder of Maxis, designer of SimCity, The Sims, and Spore

“Expressive Processing has the perfect combination of technical expertise, historical rigor, and dogged determination to get inside of the black box to make it a kind of primer on what Henry Lowood once called ‘the hard work of software history.’ It is, therefore, a model of a new critical approach. This is a must read for anyone working in fields such as new media, game studies, software studies, and AI. Because Wardrip-Fruin writes so confidently and clearly about complex systems, this will be a powerfully enabling book for graduate students, and advanced undergraduates as well.”
—Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Associate Professor of English, University of Maryland, author of Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination

“This book does a marvelous job of capturing the excitement of a promising infant discipline as it takes its first tentative steps. Noah Wardrip-Fruin covers a large amount of material, drawing fascinating connections between very different kinds of software projects. But this is not superficial coverage—he goes deep into a number of systems, with penetrative technical readings of the program-as-text.”
—Richard Evans, Senior AI Architect, The Sims 3 / Electronic Arts

“At last, an analysis by somebody who truly ‘gets it’! We have seen plenty of first-generation books on interactive entertainment, in which an author with expertise in another field presents a bystander’s perceptions on the subject. But this is a second-generation book, written by an author whose background is entirely within the field. Wardrip-Fruin was brought up on computer games and educated in the thoughts of the first generation thinkers. Now he has integrated them into a new perspective that builds on those ideas at higher levels of abstraction. Looking back at my own ideas from Noah’s new vantage point was an educational experience for me.”
—Chris Crawford, former head of Atari’s Games Research Group, and cofounder of Storytron