Third Person

<b>Narrative strategies for vast fictional worlds across a variety of media from World of Warcraft to The Wire.</b><p>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 <i>Joseph and His Brothers</i> J. R. R. Tolkien's <i>Lord of the Rings</i> Marvel's <i>Spiderman</i> and the complex stories of such television shows as <i>Dr. Who</i> <i>The Sopranos</i> and <i>Lost</i> all present vast fictional worlds. <i>Third Person</i> 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 3000000-page novel; continuity (or the impossibility of it) in <i>Doctor Who</i>; managing multiple intertwined narratives in superhero comics; the spatial experience of the <i>Final Fantasy</i> role-playing games; <i>World of Warcraft</i> adventure texts created by designers and fans; and the serial storytelling of <i>The Wire</i>. Taken together the multidisciplinary conversations in <i>Third Person</i> along with Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin's earlier collections <i>First Person</i> and <i>Second Person</i> offer essential insights into how fictions are constructed and maintained in very different forms of media at the beginning of the twenty-first century.</p>