The ever-expanding capacities of computing offer new narrative possibilities for virtual worlds. Yet vast narratives—featuring an ongoing and intricately developed storyline, many characters, and multiple settings—did not originate with, and are not limited to, Massively Multiplayer Online Games. Thomas Mann’s

Joseph and His Brothers,

J. R. R. Tolkien’s

Lord of the Rings,

Marvel’s

Spiderman,

and the complex stories of such television shows as

Dr. Who, The Sopranos,

and

Lost

all present vast fictional worlds.


Third Person explores strategies of vast narrative across a variety of media, including video games, television, literature, comic books, tabletop games, and digital art. The contributors—media and television scholars, novelists, comic creators, game designers, and others—investigate such issues as continuity, canonicity, interactivity, fan fiction, technological innovation, and cross-media phenomena.


Chapters examine a range of topics, including storytelling in a multiplayer environment; narrative techniques for a 3,000,000-page novel; continuity (or the impossibility of it) in

Doctor Who;

managing multiple intertwined narratives in superhero comics; the spatial experience of the

Final Fantasy

role-playing games;

World of Warcraft

adventure texts created by designers and fans; and the serial storytelling of

The Wire.



Taken together, the multidisciplinary conversations in

Third Person,

along with Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin’s earlier collections

First Person

and

Second Person,

offer essential insights into how fictions are constructed and maintained in very different forms of media at the beginning of the twenty-first century.



Contributors

: Rafael Alvarez, Richard A. Bartle, Michael Bonesteel, Stanford Carpenter, Monte Cook, Paul Cornell, Anne Cranny-Francis, Sam Ford, Chaim Gingold, A. Scott Glancy, Richard Grossman, Pat Harrigan, Matt Hills, Kenneth Hite, William H. Huber, Adriene Jenik, Henry Jenkins, David Kalat, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Norman M. Klein, Tanya Krzywinska, David Lavery, Robin D. Laws, Sarah Lewison, Henry Lowood, William E. McDonald, Matthew P. Miller, Jason Mittell, Stuart Moulthrop, Kate Orman, Sean O’Sullivan, Lance Parkin, Robert M. Price, Ren Reynolds, Trina Robbins, Ken Rolston, Dave Sim, Greg Stafford, Tamiko Thiel, John Tulloch, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Walter Jon Williams