So, I’m finally catching up on things I probably should have read weeks and weeks ago, and I stumbled upon Warren’s excellent article in the Escapist. It’s interesting to me because I wrestled with similar issues when I began work on my thesis early in 2002. In fact, I was originally planning on titling my thesis “The Day the Fun Died,” and adding a chapter (which never got written) explaining that the use of agency as a key enjoyment meant that we no longer had to center on the nebulous concept of “fun” to describe games.

Of course, all of these considerations were made before I made the decision that my thesis wasn’t about games. When I decided that, all of the stuff that I’d thought about previously, including my thoughts about “fun” and my original table of contents, was irrelevant. As it stands, I think interactive narrative as a concept doesn’t need to think about fun, though don’t tell the funding people that.

Also came across Ernest’s book recommendations on Next Generation. I’m a fan of all the recommendations, and I’ve read a good deal of them (at least from the theory side) though I personally wouldn’t have recommended Pause and Effect. I just didn’t find anything that useful in it. If you’re really interested in narrative, though, I’d also recommend a few other books that I read for my thesis, including Computers as Theater by Laurel, Narratology by Bal, Story and Discourse by Chatman, and Narrative and Genre by Lacey, which is actually a pretty good summary of Hero with 1000 Faces and similar theories on pattern based narratives. The only problem with some of these books (praticularly Narratology and Story and Discourse) is that some of the material is more detailed than you would ever need to really get when trying to understand narrative from the generan sense. However, some of the key concepts are very important, and I’ve yet to see a good summary of them in most other books.