A while back, I was asked to contribute to the third in a series of books on narratives. This book, Third Person, would contain a chapter by yours truly on how we handled storytelling in City of Heroes and City of Villains.

Here’s the description from Amazon:

Product Description
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

About the Author
Pat Harrigan is a writer and author of the novel Lost Clusters. He is also the co-editor, with Noah Wardrip-Fruin, of First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (2004) and Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (2007), both published by the MIT Press.

Noah Wardrip-Fruin is Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies, forthcoming from the MIT Press. He is also the co-editor, with Pat Harrigan, of First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (2004) and Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (2007), both published by the MIT Press.

So I have been asked to give a speech tomorrow at my parents’ golden anniversary party. Here’s a sneak peek at the speech I wrote, based on interviews I had with both of them a couple weeks ago.

A wise man once said to me that “there are many different stages to love”. With my parents celebrating the 50^th anniversary of their wedding today, I wanted to take the time to extol to you what some of those stages are, and give you some insight into how my parents have tackled fifty years together.

I would say that one of the more popular stages is “Bliss”. Bliss is that whirlwind at the start of a relationship where one another can do no wrong. You see perfection in everything the other person is doing. I had asked my parents how they met and my mom’s version involved seeing my dad at a basement party her sister Jean was throwing. My dad had just gotten out of the army, and my mom asked her friends if Randy was seeing anyone. To me that is Bliss. The dating started soon thereafter, and even though the two were involved with other people at the time, I count myself lucky that they ended up together. Or else I wouldn’t even be here today to give this speech!

Another stage to love would be “Opportunity”. A couple in love will take any opportunity they can get to further their relationship. My parents found this stage when they decided that they should get married before my dad went to electronics school. This left just over a month to do everything. Get a place to marry, set up a reception, plan a honeymoon, everything. Fortunately my mother’s sister Jean and their mom called in every favor they could to see to it that the wedding went off without a hitch. A small problem occurred when the priest at my mother’s local church refused to perform the service, but a neighboring church had no such qualms. They couldn’t be married in the church proper, but in the chapel, since my dad was not catholic. For the chance to be married as quick as they did, it didn’t matter to them in the least.

Still another stage of love is “Unconditional”. This is the first point where a couple has to ask themselves “what have I gotten into?” when they look at their spouse. Fortunately for my parents, the issue that sparked this was relatively minor. My mom had forgotten her allergy medication on the honeymoon, and woke up the day after the wedding with one of the worst allergy attacks in her life. My dad was a trooper, and he convinced the local pharmacist to call and confirm my mom’s prescription so she could get the medication she needed. A lot of people might have taken that incident as an omen of worse things to come, but my parents just laughed it off as one of those things that happens to make your honeymoon even more memorable.

You’re probably thinking at this point that I am running out of stages, but I could go on and on. “Memories” is a stage, such as the most memorable delivery my parents had would have been my sister Peggy. From the fact that John Glenn had just orbited the Earth to the fact that the nurse technician scared the crap out of my mom by telling her he heard she was having twins. That was by far the most memorable of all the childbirths for both of them. “Parenting” is a very long stage, which I have the most experience with. The couple has to agree on how to discipline their kids together. Fortunately I was the little angel and never got into as much trouble as my older siblings, but the stories I have heard of the things they have done, and the punishments they received, are probably what scared me straight. I think at least one of my siblings is still grounded for life, if I’m not mistaken.

Finally I am going to talk about a stage that I probably shouldn’t: “Secrets”. Everyone has secrets, and in talking with my parents I could tell they still had secrets. This is probably a good thing, and I didn’t want to pry, but I did ask them both to share one secret with me: What is the secret to being married for fifty years?

My mother’s answer was “separate rooms”. You see, eventually, as the years go by, you tend to take different interests. By having their own rooms in the house, my parents consciously avoided situations where one or the other got on the other’s nerves. And the less you get on each other’s nerves, the happier a couple you will be. That is a good solution to get to 50 years.

My father’s answer was to find someone who shares the sanctity of marriage. I know that I myself did not enter into marriage lightly, and my sisters had definitely found their soul-mates when they settled down, so this is a lesson that my dad can rest assured that his children adhered to.

I just want to reiterate what I have been saying here today. A wise man once said to me “There are many different stages to love… and your mother and I have been through every one of them.”

Thanks Dad, for those words of inspiration.

So let’s all raise our drinks and give a toast, not only to my parents Randy and Marlene, but to Love and all the stages it comes in.

Ah, that time of year again. When the snow blankets the yards, the kids get snow-days, and the daytime high never breaks 30 degrees.

Oh wait, I live in the Bay Area. It’s just cold and wet. No snow (unless you drive east a couple hours), just bad traffic. Yes, the ability for a Californian to drive is water soluable.

We’ve completed our office move, so my commute is 20 minutes shorter in the morning, and yet remains the same 45 minute commute coming home. Stupid Oracle. I had an office for like the past 9 years, so moving back to a cube was a shock… to the amount of stuff I had accumulated over the years. My cube is full of games, toys, and statues. To paraphrase a great movie: “It looks like a really rich four year-old works here.”

I am looking forward to Christmas, even though my five year-old son asked for a toy made for eighteen month-olds. It was the ONLY thing he asked Santa for when he was on his lap, and he asked for it in GREAT DETAIL, explaining to the jolly fat man exactly what every part did and how awesome it would be to get. My wife and I are understandng and have plenty of other presents that are more age appropriate for him, but we got him the kiddie toy anyway. Can’t shatter the illusion just yet.

After Christmas I have a Warhammer 40,000: Apocalype game scheduled with a few guys from my old office. My Tau army has been bolstered by another Crisis suit and a Tigershark AX-1-0. I can’t wait to unload a 10″ template on my enemies next week.

One of the cool things the company did was put a bunch of swag up for auction for the Child’s Play charity. When I last checked we had one item bidding over $700. Holy crap! I think that next year we are going to have some awesome stuff for the charity auction, because giving to those in need really does make you feel more like a human being. It proves that we are capable of thinking of more than just ourselves. In the “me me me” world we live in, I get a warm feeling in my heart when I see things like Child’s Play succeed.

I haven’t posted in a while, so I might as well diatribe a bit.

• I’ve had some stuff going on with Andre and his school that’s been weighing on my mind.
• I’ve found that most of my normal escape mechanisms to get away from the toils of the day are no longer appealing.

That said there are some bright points:

• My wife and I have a new methodology on doing the dishes that has kept the sink (mostly) clean for over a month now.
• 4th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons was announced. This was pretty huge, as I really got into the info-drip that was the 2nd Ed to 3rd Ed change over. Now I get to relive the info drip all over again, only now I am older and more mature (yeah, right).
• Bioshock is cool. I played a bunch, but am still nowhere near the end. Everyone I know is finished or finishing. I will probably finish around December.
• Stranglehold is coming out today. I got the “now shipped” email from EBGames.com, so I have that to look forward to this weekend.
• Oh, and if you didn’t know the Xbox 360 kicks ass solely for the fact that they have Gamerpoints. I should write a blog entry about “validating my time”.

Work moved offices across the street. I love new offices, everything seems new… it’s like a new job, but you still know everyone and you know what you are doing out the gate. And you still get the same pay, but everything smells like fresh paint.

I still don’t know where the bathrooms are though.