Preface to the Zeroth Edition
The Game Narrative Reader is born out of a completely unoriginal observation: we keep having the same conversations over and over. The idea that video game "discourse" is cyclical is, itself, a joke that cycles in and out all the time. Old theses come back reinvented from first principles, and so someone has to go into the noetic mines and dig out an antithesis.
Criticism, theory, and craft discussion about interactive narrative have happened over decades across many venues, and often people engaging in one area have been totally unaware of work done elsewhere. Young people who are only now approaching the field don't necessarily have a good resource to go to for where to understand the history of the field and a lot of the prior art—especially given the ongoing degradation of web search, which makes human curation more important than ever.
This website is organized in the manner of a textbook anthology. It's divided into thematic volumes, with the idea being that reading each one will add up to a good survey of the subject matter. But as this is purely a curated index of writing originally published elsewhere, every article in the Reader also stands on its own.
This "zeroeth edition" is meant as a trial balloon as much of anything; it is very much incomplete and tentative, published with the explicit goal of drawing criticism of the choices made in curating this selection and attracting suggestions of things its editor was not aware of.