Description: In the 1990s, the Personal Computer (or PC) was on the rise in homes, and with it came new genres of play. Yet most of the games in these new genres featured fantasylands or humorous science fiction landscapes with low stakes and little to suggest the potential of the PC as a serious space for art and play. Jane Jensen's work and landmark Gabriel Knight series brought a new darkness and personality to PC gaming, offering a first powerful glimpse of what games could be as they came of age. As an author and designer, Jensen brought her approach as a designer-writer hybrid to the forefront of game design, with an approach to developing environments through detailed research to make game settings come to life, an attention to mature dilemmas and complex character development, and an audience-driven vision for genres reaching beyond the typical market approaches of the gaming industry. With a brand new interview with Jensen herself, Anastasia Salter provides the first ever look Jensen's impact and role in advancing interactive narrative and writing in the game design process.
Brief description: Anastasia Salter is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media at the University of Central Florida, USA. She is the author of What is Your Quest? From Adventure Games to Interactive Books (2014), Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media: Sexism, Trolling, and Identity Policing (2017), co-author of Flash: Building the Interactive Web (2014), and co-editor of the Electronic Literature Collection Vol. 3.
Review Quotes: The first decades of digital history went by too fast, leaving many of us with false impressions, like the canard that computer games arose in an all-male engineering culture, a blithe assertion that overlooks the genius of people like Judy Malloy, Brenda Laurel, and Jane Jensen. Happily, genius has reach: transformative work leaves lasting marks on the girls and boys who grow up with it, and when we are lucky, those children turn into scholars like Anastasia Salter, whose capacity to remember and understand digital origins is rare indeed. This book is essential both to understanding the roots and condition of interactive narrative, and to recognizing the women who shaped it.
Stuart Moulthrop, Professor, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA