Games-Language

An interview with Noah Wardrip-Fruin

by Cicero Silva*

Noah Wardrip-Fruin is a digital media writer, artist, and scholar. His

writing/art work creates new experiences of reading through bodily
interaction, algorithmic recombination, and exploration of the potential of
the network as more than a delivery mechanism. This work has been
presented by galleries, arts festivals, scientific conferences, DVD magazines,
and the Whitney and Guggenheim museums. As a scholar he has recently
edited two books: The New Media Reader (2003, with Nick Montfort) and
First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (2004, with Pat
Harrigan), both from MIT Press. He has taught writing for digital media in
Brown University's Literary Arts program, New York University's Graduate
Film and Television program, and the Summer Literary Seminars of Saint
Petersburg, Russia. His work is discussed in Information Arts (2002), Digital
Art (2003), and Art of the Digital Age (forthcoming) - as well as in The
Guardian, The New York Times, Technology Review, BBC News, Wired
News, and U.S. public radio stories. Wardrip-Fruin grew up largely in
California, in the cities of Palo Alto and Long Beach, though his family also
spent time in Japan and Boston. He attended Long Beach Polytechnic High
School, where his contemporaries included rapper Snoop Dogg, and
graduated in 1990. After college, Wardrip-Fruin moved to New York City,
where he was an artist in residence and then a research scientist at the
New York University Center for Advanced Technology and Media
Research Laboratory (1994-2001). At NYU he collaborated with computer
graphics pioneer Ken Perlin on the design of next-generation interfaces and
received an MA from NYU's Gallatin School, 2000. After NYU he became a
professor at the University of Baltimore, where he collaborated with Stuart
Moulthrop and Nancy Kaplan on the design of the curriculum for the
newly-launched School of Information Arts and Technologies. From
Baltimore he moved to Brown University, where he works with Robert
Coover and others on exploring the literary potential of digital media
(especially the immersive virtual reality "Cave").
He is currently a Teaching Fellow at Brown University, where this
interview took place on April, 2005. We talked about Games, language,
Digital Literature and the Future of the Game theory.
Cicero Inacio da Silva: You have recently edited a book (First
Person) on new media, story and games. Why are you
interested in games?

Noah Wardrip-Fruin: For a couple reasons. I think that -- on a

fundamental level -- playing games, performing for each other, and sharing
stories and poems are deep human activities. All these activities have come
to digital media, in one way or another, and I wanted to create a book
where people who were thinking about all of these would be in one
context, and could actually respond to each other -- so we can start to,
through that dialog, think about the field in a broader way. This is part of
the motivation. But another motivation was that, although I think this is
changing, there was a sense that games were a kind of the Other, the
separate thing in digital media. Games were very successful commercially,
but very uninteresting from an artistic point of view, from a scholarly point
of view. So I also wanted to challenge that a little bit and say: "Yes, games
are one of the most popular forms of digital media, but they are also
interesting art work, interesting writing, interesting design, and I think that
scholars and artists have to contribute to our discussion about making and
criticizing games."

CIS: What do you think about the relationship between

games and literature?

NWF: There are three relationships that I want to think about. One is the
relationship between games and the traditional literature. So, someone like
Warren Motte, who has written a book called Playtexts (from the University
of Nebraska Press), talks about writers, from the surrealists to the
OULIPO, and many others groups, who used play as a way of thinking
about their writing process, who used play as a way of thinking about the
reading process that they wanted, how the audience can go through the
text and engage with the text. That is one of the relationships that I want
to think about. Another is that some early computer games were very
textual, and some pieces were quite literary; others were graphical, and
maybe literary in some structure, but not in the language that they
contained. And what happened after that was that our ability to deal with
language computationally didn't develop as quickly as our ability to deal with
graphics. In the 1970’s and in the early 1980’s we tried to deal with
language computationally using ruled-based artificial intelligence techniques,
and that ruled-based artificial intelligence…
CIS: You mean an algorithmic process to produce a text or
work…

NWF: Yes, right… I'm talking about processes for recognizing and
producing natural language. At the moment we have techniques that work
very well using statistical techniques, operating with large bodies of
language. We use the patterns that we see in these large bodies of language
to try to interpret and produce language, and that is more successful. In the
70’s and in the 80’s, we used ruled-based techniques, and we got some
results, but could not go further. At the same time, computer graphics took
off. Computer graphics driven by military applications, driven by Hollywood,
and now driven by computer games, got better and better. So computer
games, maybe for that reason, maybe for others, became more and more
focused on graphics, and there wasn't much to say about that in terms of
literature. Now, I think that is changing. Computer game companies are
hiring full-time writers. They are hiring writers who have experience, who
think and write through and for procedures. At the same time, our ability
to deal with language, computationally and algorithmically, is getting better.
So, the second issue to think about is how these things may be producing a
new kind of literature, connected to the field of computer games. Now,
most computer games are becoming better written, but often toward the
goal of being like Hollywood blockbusters. However, I think there is a
growing alternative game movement. And the alternative game movement
may produce work as well written as good plays or good movies, instead of
as the bad movies. The third interesting relationship is thinking about how
literary structures may be important to games that it doesn't make sense to
think of as literature. An example is quest structures. Espen Aarseth has
written about this. Janet Murray has written about this. We don’t want to
think about all computer games as literature, but we can better understand
some of the structures by using literary models.

CIS: Actually, my third question has something to do with

your answer… how do you see the game market with this
explosion of these new game technologies, and with the big
media companies (like Disney, Warner, etc.) getting inside
this field?

NWF: Well, in the US we had our first big boom in games in the early
1980’s, and people like Warner did get involved; they did things like buy
game companies. And this was huge in the US, because people were playing
so many games… and then came the big bust. The computer game industry
entered in a kind of collapse. Some people have interpreted that collapse, in
part, as having to do with the intrusion of the big media companies. This
leads to people saying: “Big media companies don’t understand games,” and
so on. I don’t know if I believe that. It's hard to believe that big media
companies categorically can’t understand games. But it is true that, right
now, the big games companies are people like Electronic Arts, and people
like Microsoft, although also people like Sony, and Sony does have a
significant presence in other kinds of media. It'll be interesting to see how
these big companies play out. All that said, I think right now most computer
games are produced on the model of big media, where we have a big studio
that spends a lot of money and takes a big risk trying to create blockbusters
hits. And everything that is not a blockbuster hit is a kind of failure. We
need to change that. I think computer games are only going to grow as an
art form when they become much more diverse that they are now, in
terms of their models of production.

CIS: Do you think that this “games invasion” is a fashion, or

up-to-date, like the TV in the 50’s and the internet in the
90’s?

NWF: Well, I think TV in the 50’s and the Internet in the 90’s were
marked by a struggle to understand something, and this is a struggle,
probably momentary…

CIS: Let me situate my question: I think that the internet

changed many points about our culture, and I think that,
even today, we still cannot understand exactly what happen
through the internet and on the internet. Now we have this
game culture, which also uses the internet. Today, we still
are thinking about what is the Internet, what kind of impact
it has in our representations. I think that it is a great impact,
it is something important…

NWF: Right. I am thinking that my mother has a laptop that she carries
with her, not just when she travels, but she carries it around the house, you
know…

CIS: My parents do the same...

NWF: Right. And when she is thinking about something, and she wants
information about it, she opens her laptop and she does a web search. And,
usually, the information she wants is right there. I think we haven’t finished
thinking about what that means for our culture. For one thing, I think a
large group of people assume that the online world is going to be like a
library, with a lot of information available for free. That is very powerful,
because the most powerful thing is what people take for granted, and what
they take for granted is that the internet is a library, and if you try to
change the internet and stop the internet from being a library they are
going to say: “What?” They know that the internet is a library, and we can
only see how that developed in retrospect. In the 1990’s we were saying:
“What is the internet going to be? Is it going to be like cable television?”
Now we know that for people like my Mother the internet is like a library
(and email). We don’t know yet about computer games. We don’t know
what sort of dominant models will develop, or if they will be like the
current dominant models, or how they will challenge our expectations. But,
certainly, for those in their 30’s and younger, we have a group of people
who expect games to be part of daily life: not set apart in the arcade, but
played on a console with a television; or played on a computer where they
also do their work; or played on a device that they can keep in their pocket,
like a Game Boy. So I think that it is taken for granted that games no longer
are separate, and that will be, maybe, one change that we will start to see.

CIS: Yes, it was interesting when I was playing a certain

game and, inside the game, I found I could go to the bank. It
impressed me that while I play I am able to go to the bank,
check my balance account, or transfer money to someone.
In some cases, you can go to the supermarket and do some
shopping. Also, we start to see a lot of ads inside the games...

CIS: What do you think about the critic view on VR, related
to aspects like “reality” and “virtual”? Do you think that,
with the VR, we are trying to build a new cave for our lives,
as Plato pointed out, or that we are trying to understand
how we are what we are? Do you agree with the point of
view that we are outside Plato’s cave, and now why come
back? We are already out, and there is nothing interesting
outside, so now what?
NWF: (laughs…) If I remember Plato's cave correctly, there were chains,
and we could only see shadows. OK, this is not the literal cave, and not the
literal chains, either. So one thing that interested me about a lot of theories
of virtual reality was the assumption that we could use VR to reproduce
normal spaces, and to create impossible spaces. But I think that computer
games are the closest thing that we have to popular Virtual Reality, even if
it’s not stereo display. People move through virtual spaces a lot. Most of
these virtual spaces operate by the same physics, as much as possible, as
our reality, or contain structures as much as possible like buildings in our
reality. It’s much more popular to play a game like Counter Strike than it is
to play a game like an abstract shooter, where you can move through
impossible spaces.

CIS: Like Doom...

NWF: No, let me think of a good example… I'm trying to remember the
names of a couple of games made by a guy called The Yak, where what you
do is fly. You fly in an abstract vehicle through abstract spaces that are
made up with shapes and colors. And some are beautiful spaces, the kind of
spaces that I think a lot of early Virtual Reality theorists imagined. And, of
course, you are playing a game, and you blow up these beautiful things, and
it makes great sounds when you move through it. But this is not as popular
as shooting things in much more normal spaces. However, that said, we
don’t really know what will become popular for a certain generation. It
could be that when people who are now in their 30’s are in their 50’s they
will want these impossible spaces. Or could be that they will want more
and more realism, they will want The Sims. The Sims is about our everyday
life, but maybe they will want even more reality: the people acting more like
real people, the economy acting more like the economy. Who knows? It’s
very hard for me to predict.

CIS: The representational aspect of the games is one of the

most important points to discuss in game theories, because
it implies in what somebody can do in a game: kill, explode,
be a terrorist etc. And in the games we need a purpose or
objective to continue playing, that always include kill, buy,
sell or explode. Do you think it is possible to produce a
game in witch an objective doesn’t exist? If it’s possible,
what kind of game will it be?
NWF: First, I need to say that in some games, like Tetris, you don’t blow
up anything and you can’t win. There is no objective about winning; the
objective is only about not losing for as long as possible. I think this is kind
of interesting, because we tend to think that Americans always want to win.
And Americans love Tetris, Space Invaders and a lot of such games. Of
course, you can have a high score -- maybe having a high score it the
closest to wining -- but you always lose, and you need to keep from losing
as long as you can. But, yes, I think that there are going to be, and maybe
already are, digital media experiences that share a lot of traits in common
with games, but have different kinds of goals and different kinds of actions
that you take. But I’d say that if you don’t have game kinds of goals,
probably we should not call the experiences games anymore. Maybe we
should call them another kind of digital entertainment. So for example, do
you know projects called Dogz, Catz, and Babyz? People like Andrew Stern
and Adam Frank have worked on these projects, where you have just a
little pet that lives on your computer and...

CIS: You published something about this in your book, I

think in one of the discussions about an article…

NWF: Yes, in one discussion. Andrew Stern is one of the respondents in

the book, and he talked about those projects. They are a kind of project in
which you can explore your of relationship with the character, and I guess,
from our point of view now, they might seem a bit primitive. You know,
the graphics were simple, the artificial intelligence was simple, and who can
imagine what will happen when things like this go further? Similarly, there
are projects where the creators really focus on things like the story.
Andrew Stern collaborates with Michael Mateas (who also has a piece in
the book) on a project called Facade. In this project what you do is: you go
over to have drinks with some people who you introduced and who are
now married, and their marriage falls apart during your visit, but it falls
apart differently, depending how you interact. It falls apart horribly, almost
no matter what; there isn’t a way to win, there isn’t a score, and you don’t
have to have a high score, but people play them. It’s not been publicly
released, but I've played it, and replayed it, and a number of people that I
know, who have received copies of it, are playing, and playing again, and
playing again. Not because they want to do better, but just because they
want to understand the space of possible stories. In some ways, it is a kind
of postmodern fiction, which makes you think that the story can happen
this way, or can happen that way, with much left to chance, and where you
play the part of “chance.”

CIS: The game theory is nowadays exploring new theoretical

interfaces, and some of them are narrative and literature.
Some scholars are producing a lot of texts explaining the
resources and the advantages of using games in the
educational and pedagogical field, pointing out that games
are easy and closer to their reality than books are. Do you
agree with this point of view? What do you think of the
critics that say that this student will be a person that just
reacts to some specific actions, and that he or she will
actually not think about it, or even elaborate some new
point of view about his or her own situation? Or in other
words, quoting Lyotard: “this is the perfect world to
capitalism”. We will have just action and reaction. What do
you think about this? How can we differentiate when
somebody is responsive to a situation or when he or she is
really thinking about a problem, even playing a game?

NWF: Well, one thing that we might have to think about is where the
graphics technology for games comes from. A lot of funding is from military
sources, and their aim was to create flight simulators and battle simulators.
The reason the military put a lot of money into developing things like flight
simulators is not because they thought that books are bad, but because
maybe there were things that you can learn from the simulation, but you
can’t learn from the book, or that are very hard to learn from the book.
For them, these flight simulators were not an alternative to giving someone
a book about flying, but were an alternative to actually putting someone in a
cockpit of an airplane, an alternative to real world action. I think, in some
ways, that what we need to think about is the goal of games in education.
And the goal of games in education probably should not have to be trying
to teach things that we can learn from books, but to teach things that we
can’t teach with a book. And to teach things like these we might be able to
simulate things that we can do in the real world, or things that we can’t do
at all. People try to do this, for example, using games like SimCity to teach
kids about cities. But there we run into another problem: Sim City does
not come from nowhere, it is based on a research by an MIT guy called Jay
Forester. Forester did a lot of work trying to understand urban planning
through simulation, but his cities were very distorted cities -- for example,
his cities have no suburbs, so we have children…

CIS: I also think that he never saw a “favela” in Brazil…

NWF: Yes, and if you have children trying to learn how to understand
cities, and trying to learn how to understand cities through a simulation,
that simulation will be always authored by people, and will always encode
some of the ideological assumptions of those people. Part of what we try to
do in education is to help students to develop a critical view of what they
read in books; not just learning information, but also learning to think about
what is not there, what the author doesn't say. What we now need to
consider, in thinking about children learning through simulation, is how to
develop a critical view of what they learn from the simulation, how they can
understand the rules that make the simulation operate, and what are the
limits and the blind spots of these rules. How children can develop that is a
very tricky question; if they don’t develop that, then they are just reacting,
they are just doing that simulation in a way that we don’t like. And the
answer, maybe, is the same that we had from written literature, where
people, or part of the people, achieve a critical view of what they read, and
then they learn to write, and they learn about the writing process, and how
with the writing process all these things came out. Maybe children will have
to learn to author simulations, before they will be able to understand the
relations, limits, and ideological field of games, and are able to be critical
about simulations.

CIS: What do you think about the images in the games,

aesthetically speaking? I mean, in 90% of the games we have,
more and more, an exact reproduction of what we call
reality. In the Renaissance, we have the same thing, and now,
after Walter Benjamin, after Susan Sontag, after all the
critics of the metaphor and representation, we are
producing again the same reproduction of reality. Why do
you think that we are doing this, if the computer can create
images without any relation, or need, to capture this named
reality?

NWF: One of my favorite phrases from a game theorist named Eric

Zimmerman (and he has a lot of pithy phrases) is: “Cinema Envy”. He says
that a lot of the game industry is caught up in “Cinema Envy”, and in part
because cinema is taken seriously as an art form. But a lot of it is just
because they like films, and because games right now can’t reproduce the
cinematic experience, and because cinema is seen as desirable, and because
you can be lauded as a computer graphics researcher for producing
something more realistic. I think there are a lot of forces that drive games
to increased cinematic realism, and, at some point, that will exhaust itself. I
think, at some point, you will be able to, in real time, in response to what
the users have done, produce something that is not distinguishable from a
videotape, as good as the quality that you can get from your television.
We’ll probably have to go that far before non-realistic rendering really
begins to take hold. Right now, there are occasional games like Viewtiful
Joe, done in cartoon style, where the imagery is really trying to reflect the
content of the game in a non-cinematic way. But, right now, almost all the
work that is trying to reflect the content of the game visually is drawing
from cinema. Games like Max Payne are trying to look like a noire movie.
They are not trying to invent a new way of looking, that only will be
possible with the computer. Having said that, I think that we need to
remember that movies are starting to be influenced by computer games.
Maybe there is a new aesthetic form emerging from that as well. All that
said, personally my interest in games is not usually driven by what the game
looks like, and I agree with those critics who say that, regarding most
serious players of games, they are looking through the imagery to the play.
Eventually, what the game looks like becomes only a way of understanding
the way that the system works. Games have a meaning in terms of play, and
not only in terms of what happens visually; most games are about
accomplishing something in terms of rules and goals, and those are not
visual. On the other hand, I'm reminded that Peter Molyneux’s game studio
is working on a game called “The Movies”, and the result of play is to
produce trailers and snippets for movies, so your game goal is actually a
visual goal, and those visuals try to have a style, but again it is a style based
on movies, so who knows…

CIS: Do you think it’s possible that in the future a “game

critic” will write about a game in an analytical and critical
(scholarly) sense? I’m asking this because I think that the
majority of the critics of Game Theories and digital
narratives doesn’t quote or sometimes even know authors
or important discussions about literature and literary
criticism, and we know that this field had produced a lot of
discussions about narrative, form, meaning, representation,
reality, and one of the most important: ideology. Do you
agree with this point of view? I think that some points of
Digital Literature, and the use of the name “literature”
itself, sound to me sometimes just as an attempt to give
more credibility to this “digital” field, and what I see is a few
authors discussing criticism, related to these “digital” topics
of writing.

NWF: I think that one useful thing to do is to look at something called the
“Scandinavian School” of games scholarship. Part of the reason is that this
Scandinavian School -- and I am talking about people like Markku Eskelinen,
Espen Aarseth, and Jesper Juul -- so these people, many of them are deeply
engaged with contemporary literary criticism. They are very aware, and a
number have backgrounds as literary scholars, so they know the history of
literary criticism. And yet the work that they are doing is seen by some
literary scholars as very naive, because their work is often quite formalist,
trying to talk about the formal characteristics of games, or how you
understand the passage of time in a game, and so on. People say: “We have
been through this phase in critical history”. But their point of view is: “No,
we haven’t been through this. We have been through this in literature, we
have been through it for films, but we have to go through it again for
games”. Because games are fundamentally different. And only once we go
trough this period of formalism can we begin to take that formalism apart
and expose its limits, and talk about the blind spots of the earlier
generation -- but there has to be a first generation. Some people disagree,
and they may also come from a literary background. Let’s say the Georgia
Tech group -- people like Janet Murray, Ian Bogost, Michael Mateas, and Jay
Bolter -- who have significantly less interest in formalism than the group I
associate with Scandinavia, though also work on projects with names like
"game ontology." Henry Jenkins -- who doesn’t come from a literary
background, but from a media studies background -- in the First Person book
talks about the Scandinavian Vikings versus the North American Eagles.
There's some perception of conflict, but also a humorous attitude toward it.
And we shouldn't forget people like Gonzalo Frasca, Nick Montfort, Stuart
Moulthrop, and others who can't be put in a camp (or the fact that
Gonzalo's been both at ITU Copenhagen and Georgia Tech). I guess I
would say that, personally, I find a lot of valuable work in both groups. I
think neither group is ready to have games just talked about in terms of
current literary theory. I think that both groups agree that we need to
develop some new perspectives to understand that games are procedural
and interactive. If we don’t understand those things, and just apply
perspectives from literary studies, we will misunderstand this experience.
But I think we'll make progress. And just the same way every major
university has cinema scholarship, I have no doubt that we will not have any
serious university without game scholarship.

CIS: …and now, a hard question: do you play games? What is

your favorite?

NWF: (laughs…) Yes, I play games, and playing games is like reading: it
takes a lot of time. I mean, you're never caught up, you always need to do
more than you have done. I think that is one of the advantages that cinema
scholars have over us. You know, they take two hours to watch a movie.
And you take so many hours to play a game, and to interact in a complex
novel. You can go and survey the work of a major director in a week -- and
if you go through a series of works by a major game company it'll take
many times that. Anyway, my first experiences with games were with things
like the Infocom games, like Zork, and maybe earlier things like Hunt the
Wumpus. Then, when I was in high school, I played a lot of Tetris, and we
had a Nintendo game console. I'm also passable at arcade games like Ms.
Pac-Man and Centipede and Pole Position. Right now, I would say I've
gotten to the point that my favorite things are experimental. So I really
enjoy things like Façade, though I also enjoy playing blockbusters like Fable.
But in some level, it’s not the same; the people who are doing Fable have an
obligation to their funders to create something that will appeal to a really
wide audience. And things with such appeal, not meant for a narrow
audience, don't grab me in the same way.

CIS: Thank you and I hope that you can come to Brazil as
soon as possible to work with us in future projects, and
maybe develop a scholarship in the game field.
* Researcher and professor of new media art and digital communication. Cicero coordinates the
Software Studies Initiative in Brazil. He founded, along with Marcos Khoriati, the GPSface website and the
GPSart (GPSarte) project at www.gpsart.net. The aim of these projects is investigate new forms of social
participation using Global Position System (GPS) and also develop an online wireless community using cell
phones with GPS. The GPSface is a social networking online community and a Midlet (software)
developed in Java that connects people around the world and shows on the Google Maps the position of
the user's contact list, and also the distance of the people listed in the “contacts”. The GPSart is a Midlet
designed to draw lines on Google Maps using GPS location and it is available for unlocked cell phones that
support Java. As a researcher in Art & Technology Cicero developed in the end of 90s softwares to
create online texts on a project called “Plato online: nothing, science and technology”, which is completely
documented on a book with the same name. The project was commented worlwide due its provocative
target, e.g. the algortihms were baptized with the name of important philosophers, most of them related
to the end of the authorship in the digital era creating a huge confusion in the www since Google
exhibited the websites of the project when users searched for “Michel Foucault”, or “Gilles Deleuze”, for
example. In 2004 he started a project to develop more participation of the audience on the web and the
result was exhibited in 2006 with the project “magnetopoetry”, a website programmed in Ajax, using a
model developed by Garrison Locke. Cicero's work has been analyzed by theoriticians and curators, such
as George P. Landow in his book Hypertext 3.0 (John Hopkins UP, 2006), among others.
Currently he is a Researcher in the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) at University
of California, San Diego (UCSD) and director of the studio witz, a new media studio based in São
Paulo/Brazil. He was a Visiting Scholar at University of California, San Diego (2006-2007/Fellowship from
CAPES/State Department of Education/Brazil) and at Brown University (2005/Scholarship supported by
CAPES/MEC). Cicero holds a Master degree and a Ph.D. in Communication and Semiotics, is author of
Plato online: nothing, science and technology book (All Print), member of the Jury and Scientific Board of
FILE SYMPOSIUM (chair), and has been organizing Seminars such as Tecnocriações and Estética e Novas
Tecnologias.

website: www.cicerosilva.com

Links:
Warren Motte: http://www.colorado.edu/FRIT/profiles/motte.html
OULIPO (Cent mille milliards de poèmes:
http://x42.com/active/queneau.html e Raymond Queneau:
http://www.queneau.net)
Espen Aarseth: http://www.hf.uib.no/hi/espen/
Janet Murray: http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~murray/
Electronic Arts: http://www.ea.com/
The Sims: http://thesims.ea.com/index_flash.php
Tetris: http://www.neave.com/games/tetris/
Dogs, cats and babies:
http://www.quvu.net/interactivestory.net/papers/stern_emotionartifacts199
9.html
Facade: http://www.quvu.net/interactivestory.net/
SimCity: http://simcity.ea.com/
Viewtiful Joe: http://www.capcom.com/vj/
Max Payne: http://www.rockstargames.com/maxpayne/
The Movies: http://www.lionhead.com/themovies/index.html
Markku Eskelinen: http://www.dichtung-digital.com/2004/3-Eskelinen.htm
Hunt the Wumpus: http://www.wurb.com/if/game/442
Infocom games: http://infocom.elsewhere.org/
Zork: http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/zork1.html
Gonzalo Frasca:
http://ludology.org/staticpages/index.php?page=20030129004146960
Jesper Juul: http://www.jesperjuul.net/
Ian Bogost: http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~bogost/
Michael Mateas: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~michaelm/
Henry Jenkins: http://web.mit.edu/21fms/www/faculty/henry3/
Peter Molyneux: http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/the-
movies/513182p1.html?fromint=1
The Yak: http://www.llamasoft.co.uk/jeff.php