Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies

What matters in understanding digital media? Is looking at the external appearanceand audience experience of software enough--or should we look further? In ExpressiveProcessing, Noah Wardrip-Fruin argues that understanding what goes on beneath the surface,the computational processes that make digital media function, is essential.

Wardrip-Fruin looks at "expressive processing" by examining specificworks of digital media ranging from the simulated therapist Eliza to the complexcity-planning game SimCity. Digital media, he contends, offer particularlyintelligible examples of things we need to understand about software in general; if we understand,for instance, the capabilities and histories of artificial intelligence techniques in the context ofa computer game, we can use that understanding to judge the use of similar techniques in suchhigher-stakes social contexts as surveillance.

Noah Wardrip-Fruin is Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the coeditor of four collections published by the MIT Press: with Nick Montfort, The New Media Reader (2003); with Pat Harrigan, First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (2004), Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (2007), and Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (2009).