Review:

Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Herrigan: First Person. New Media as Story, Performance, and Game

First Person. New Media as Story, Performance, and Game is a collection of essays by new media practitioners and theorists. Starting out from the question whether computer games can be regarded as a form of 'electronic literature,' the book's contributors address different aspects of digital games and their media context. In this review, Julian Kücklich argues that the book fails to deliver what its title promises, but that this failure exposes some of the problems new media studies are faced with today. On the one hand, academic publishing seems to constantly increase the gap between new media scholarship and its objects of study. On the other hand, the conservatism of new media theory makes it almost impossible to address this dilemma. Thus, the book emerges as an interesting contribution to the discourse of new media, although a large part of the collection has been superseded by newer publications in journals and on-line.