Despite its being the only print source for two RPGs everyone should own – namely, James Wallis’ Baron Munchausen and John Tynes’ Puppetland – I imagine that not all of you bought MIT Press’ Second Person when it came out last year. Well, now some of the at MITP’s Electronic Book Review, along with some contentious new “answer songs” that have never appeared anywhere. Also, Push editor Jonathan Walton is taking the journal online starting with its next… well, I guess starting with all of it, because Volume 1 is slowly coming online (keep up with it at this subpage of the Push weblog).
Thanks for the recommendation, Mike. I will struggle to live up to your billing as a “source of enlightenment.”
The rest of Push 1 should be up soon, in both HTML and PDF format. The first Push 2 articles should follow shortly.
[pedant]Spendthrift means “someone who spends improvidently or unwisely,” not someone who doesn’t spend.[/pedant]
Thanks for the links! I’d heard of the Second Person book from the Baron Munchausen entry in Green Ronin’s 100 Best Hobby Games book, but I had no idea there was so much good stuff available online.
Not owning Push is hella unwise.
There is a lot of great stuff at the First/Second Person website, but I’ve actually been reading some of the “ripostes” they’ve added and man, there is some garbage thinking going on in game studies.
I was actually fairly disappointed with First and Second Person, honestly. There were a few stand-out articles and it was good to hear from people from a diversity of different backgrounds, but, man, it seemed like such a wasted opportunity in so many ways.
I haven’t dug into the First Person stuff, but as a survey of a lot of interesting things going on, I thought Second Person was pretty valuable. As analysis it didn’t hit the mark as often. Wallis’ piece on storytelling games is pretty great.