The following is the introduction of my Masters thesis on the design of dialogue systems in games. It was completed at McGill University in 2017, and I was fortunate enough to be awarded funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada while writing it. School!

Here's the abstract: 

Dialogue systems are integral mechanics in roleplaying video games, as forms of worldbuilding that acknowledge player choice. Early conceptions of game dialogue in text adventure games let players type in whatever they want to say, in attempts to emulate true conversational fidelity. However, their rudimentary structures limit the possibility of direct and topical responses to typed input, breaking immersion within the game. Furthermore, consumer shifts in primary gaming platforms, from personal computers to dedicated video game consoles, influence how dialogue is designed within technological restraints. This thesis examines how video game dialogue effectively mimics conversations with the player while maintaining a sense of immersion despite platform limitations. An exploration of critical game design factors, including the balance between gameplay and narrative, reveals how dialogue systems historically shift from freeform designs to more scripted structures. Though a consideration and application of commonly-used game design strategies in other development areas, this thesis promotes innovation in dialogue system design, offering new potentials for play. 

Introduction  

This is Belwit Square. Its many historic and picturesque buildings are obscured by a cloud of orange smoke.  
>go south
You can’t see well enough to find your way out.  
>get down
That sentence isn’t one I recognize.
>go back
I don’t know the word “back.”
>what
There was no verb in that sentence!
>quit

Your score is 0 of a possible 600, in 15 moves. This puts you in the class of Charlatan.[1][2]

The above transcript comes from my first playthrough of the challenging 1985 text adventure game Spellbreaker[3]. Prior to high fidelity video game graphics with characters flirting with the uncanny valley boundary, prior to rich voice acting and full orchestral scores, prior to any type of controllable avatar walking around, text adventures are considered some of the first roleplaying video games.[4] To some, the two components of the phrase text adventure stand at odds with each other, akin to a cheesy Reading Rainbow-eqsue campaign promoting literacy as cool and hip to young teens. Those accustomed to action-packed gunplay of modern shooter video games can find themselves restless at the thought of reading being the primary component of a game. However, text adventure games represent the potential of interactivity and sociality with a digital other during a period when such concepts seemed futuristic and unattainable.

Personal computers in their infancy were used to receive input, but with this software it could actually talk back. Through fantastical scenarios, these games mimic conversations, delivered by a technology that was programed and perceived as impartial and impersonal. Despite the constraints of computers in the early 1980s, text adventures made the most of existing technological capabilities and convinced the player they were listened to, and it was exciting.[5]

The typical gameplay experience of a classical text adventure game is summed up as follows. A player reads a passage on a computer monitor describing the surroundings of a fictional in-game space and any contextual information, such as tools within sight or obstacles blocking a path forward. For example, consider the opening passage of the 1976 game Adventure (later renamed to Colossal Cave Adventure) by Will Crowther, for the PDP-10 mainframe computer:  

You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.[6]  

Beneath the text is a flashing cursor indicating the option to input text, similar to those in conventional word processing programs (fig. 1). The player, using the computer’s keyboard, types in their desired action in as few words as possible. The computer immediately returns an appropriate response, and a new description follows. This gameplay loop continues across various tasks and puzzles until the game is completed (or the player gives up). Many text adventure games do not have a “game over” screen, and so the player can potentially spend long periods of time glaring at their monitor in frustration over a puzzle blocking their path and overall progress.[7] Reviews of Spellbreaker classify it as an “expert” level game, with one from Computer Gaming World claiming “when Infocom said that [this] would be hard, they weren’t kidding.”[8] The isolated nature of video gaming during this time offered few community-based resources for bypassing difficult challenges, save for video game magazines offering hints and tips for popular releases, and clever peers who had already beaten the game.

While later text adventure games feature accompanying images and graphical user interfaces (GUI), the core component of this genre is text, in both typed input and read forms. Rudimentary ASCII illustrations offer a barebones and rough representation of various scenes, but lush descriptions of fantasy scenarios paint far more vivid pictures in the player’s mind.[9] Creators of these games aim “to find a way of turning imaginary worlds lodged in the writer’s head unto virtual worlds lodged in the computer’s memory.”[10] The interactivity of a computer interface then transforms static descriptions into playgrounds of creative problem-solving.

Adventure and its peers became the first to offer the player the freedom of exploration in a world that gradually reveals itself room-by-room; they are, as Jasper Juul identifies, “games of progression” in which players face obstacles in a virtual world that they must overcome.[11] This fantasy space, created with only text, feels lived-in because of the narrator/computer “speaking” to the player, constituting a type of conversational loop of queries and responses.[12] It represents a sociality not commonly seen from computers during this time, as well as a new form of entertainment. Edward Castronova goes as far to suggest that games were important to the early financial success of the personal computer, as it was easier to make sales through demonstrating engaged fun and leisure, rather than list technical explanations of how it functioned and being “pummeled with numbers and bullet points.”[13] David Sudnow’s 1983 account, contemporary to Castronova’s scenario, agrees when he asks:

How could we not play these "games"? How could we not stand in awe of the computer… ? How not to be enthralled by the lights, sounds, and colors, knowing they result from the purest modes of human thought -- adding, subtracting, subdividing, and the like? [14]  

The appeal of a new technology is not its initial improvement of one’s daily routine, but the sensations it has on our creativities and the potentials it has to affect future societal habits.  

However, while the game narrator’s response to certain text input seems impressive, it is only to the terms of the programmer who wrote it, as it is not an organically formed phrase or the result of complex artificial intelligence algorithms. This is where my experience with Spellbreaker went awry. In many cases of early text adventure games, what the computer returns is not always contextually-appropriate, or even a response at all. This is because of the coding foundations of text adventure games, which are built around a basic text parser. To explain, when the player enters typed input, this string (a sequence of characters that may form words or phrases) is used to search through a database of input-and-response pairs of strings that the programmer has anticipated. If the entered string matches a listing, the computer returns the appropriate response. Otherwise, it sends back a null fallback statement, such as “I do not understand [string input]”. Passing the string “help” into the text adventure Zork receives the reply “You are dealing with a fairly stupid parser”; a charming self-awareness that at least acknowledges the system’s shortcomings.[15]  

This relationship between the player and computer offers a glimpse into the original aspiration of such games. Book readers are widely seen as “breathing life unto the texts they read”, but to explore a fictional world within the tale itself (and to read through the transcript after playing) conveys fantastical immersive storytelling.[16] In emulating a conversational experience with a simulated character (the all-knowing narrator guiding the player), its inspiration is more clear through tabletop role playing games (TRPGs). Such activities revolve around collaborative and conversational improvisation, as players tell a leading storyteller (the Game Master) what actions they wish to perform in a world that is described through narration.

As later chapters show, early text adventure games wanted to emulate this direct dialogue, but faced restrictions in its implementation. Programmers can only predict so many different possible player inputs, and a game’s hardware limits the complexity of software functions. What emerges then, in the junction between idealized game design and restricted platform functionality, is the risk of immersion-breaking experiences confronting the player.  

But video games today rarely, if ever, use text parsing as a mechanic; its relative obscurity is the very reason for my explanation of how text adventure games work in the first place. Game development and design decisions are influenced by several different factors. For one, the platform capabilities of a computer or a games console can prevent features, such as text parsers, from working as intended. Processing power and graphics capabilities influence what a game is capable of, and developers use various workarounds to disguise the constant negotiation that takes place between an idealized design ambition and the reality of technological limits.  

Instead of parsing, contemporary interaction between a player and a game character is mostly done through a dialogue interface, which lets the player select from a series of predetermined options they wish to say. These encounters, called branching dialogues because they separate into branching paths, are similar in structure to choose-your-own-adventure books.[17] Player input is prewritten and not manually typed in, which distances itself from notions of simulated conversions with narrators who were actually listening. In many combat video games in the home and arcade alike, players perform intricate combos with a flurry of calculated button presses, yet the complexities of dialogue and human interaction are limited to multiple choice selection on a static UI screen. Branching dialogues are overwhelmingly the status quo of dialogue systems in contemporary games, but is that enough? Did the limitations of text parsing push innovation in a static mechanic into a forgotten corner?  

While Adventure features heavily in this work, I am not pursuing Adventure studies or even text adventure games studies. Instead, I work towards the realization of satisfying game feel when it comes to dialogue systems, using the concept of perfect conversational fidelity attempted by text adventure games as an idealized aspiration. Game feel, a term coined in writing by Steve Swink but undoubtedly used in game development communities prior, is the culmination of all elements of a game, including input, aesthetics, and rules, creating an intangible and pleasurable experience.[18] Likened to a music’s timbre or a meal’s flavor, it is a mostly abstract and invisible quality, but getting it right in a game is critical. More is described about game feel later but it is, at its core, the goal for a video game to be fun. How dialogue is handled in a game can affect game feel, as the mechanic must feel smooth and natural to control. But how is this possible when approaches to organic and immersive communication with game characters have become so far removed from initial TRPG inspirations?  

I am interested in examining how video games can effectively communicate with a player, and emulate authentic interactive dialogues while maintaining good game feel. Such a topic involves a multifaceted consideration of the many elements of a video game, from their hardware platform, to the capabilities of the game software, to the broader design choices influenced by social contexts of what makes a game good. In this work, I argue that both the interactivity of TRPGs and the technological limitations of video game platforms directly influence the design of dialogue systems in video games. I examine existing debates that juxtapose ludology and narratology, conversations that have since expanded to broader cultural discourse within the video games media and the development of “game feel” as a concept. I explore the dialogue system’s earliest iterations and inspirations, and show how platform limitations guided their design to a more structured and scripted form. Finally, I suggest that the design of current dialogue systems require careful attention to several different worldbuilding elements that can benefit with a consideration of mechanics recalled in earlier text adventure games. Overall, I show that dialogue systems in video games have the potential for further innovation to offer new conceptions of play and smart design.

Within the past several years, narrative, worldbuilding, and storytelling have received increased attention from both the games industry and academia. Visual novels, for example, receive attention and praise in the popular press. Games are also more easily and commonly criticized for a poor story or subpar character development, reflecting that players care about such features. The increasing number of video game award ceremonies such as the British Academy Game Awards and the Game Developers Conference Awards also include awards championing excellent writing in games, in addition to the Writers Guild of America and the Canadian Video Game Writing Awards. Despite an outwards emphasis of actions in video games, words are critical to the playful experience. Smaller studios dedicated to interactive fiction stories, such as Inkle and Telltale Games, are blossoming and experiencing great commercial success. While some games excel at non-verbal storytelling, the ability to communicate with a fictional character makes a game world feel alive and offers endless variations in the design of encounters. Characters in games are not always enemies that the player has to defeat, they are often valuable allies that aid the player if approached. However, dialogue systems remain relatively static in design, despite their earlier foundation from a mechanic that offers far more player interaction and immersion. Revisiting this mechanic and its design, through a lens of decades of progress in games development since its conception, offers potential for new methods of play and storytelling.  
 

Important Terms

Like many disciplines within media studies and the broader humanities, the academic field of game design wears many hats and can address many different research objects: player or developer, front end or back end, textual analysis, genre analysis, historiography, graphics, audio, platform studies. From this, there are a few key terms that I focus on and deploy in my argumentation. My emphasis is less on the player experience with a completed product and more on the design process and the strategies used in creating successful game experiences.  

Video Games

Mark J.P. Wolf, in breaking down the term shows the implicit and separate meanings of “video games”. The “video” component refers to the analog image formed from pixels displayed on a cathode ray tube, a secondary platform to the game console in order to see what is being played. Wolf then defines a game as consisting of “a conflict, rules, player ability and some kind of valued outcome.”[19] While straightforward definitions, the term put together invites ambitious descriptions that attempt to encompass the experiences that video games can bring, from the classic arcade game Pac Man to experimental virtual reality simulations. For my interests, Wolf’s classification of games is enhanced with Jane McGonigal’s reading of the medium. In her view, video games are made of two elements: a type of storytelling that is also combined with puzzles and interactivity in order to progress.[20] This latter part is most unique to games in that they “refuse player progression until certain actions have been completed in a particular order”; in contrast, a book never slams itself shut to a reader, and refuses to let them begin the next chapter unless they pass a test on character arcs or conflicts in the plot.[21]

In a physical sense, I treat a video game as a piece of software that is playable on an electronic device, that requires the player’s input to progress. While the etymology of the “video” of “video game” comes from its aforementioned analog image origins, I expand this definition to its more common use in popular culture. Video games are played on video game consoles, like the Sega Dreamcast or Sony PlayStation 2. They are also played on personal computers of all shapes and sizes; the boom of mobile smart phones within the past decade has greatly expanded the demographic of video game players. Similarly, video games are short experiences with an entire start-to-end gameplay experience taking a few seconds, such as the short bursts of gameplay in Wario Ware.[22] They are also never-ending experiences spanning hundreds of hours in online Massively-Multiplayer-Role-Playing-Games (MMORPGS) such as World of Warcraft.[23] There are many different types of video games referenced in the following chapters, varying genres, gameplay length, and platform, and all are legitimate forms of play.

Text Adventure Games

The term “text adventure” is used in different ways. Nick Montfort in his comprehensive book on the genre, Twisty Little Passages, focuses on the adventure delineation as the key definer of the term; to him, text adventure games are not mystery games, they are “some out-of-the-ordinary undertaking involving risk or danger.”[24] I, however, take a contrasting stance. My scope prioritizes text over adventure, mystery, or any other secondary genre of gameplay. Early text adventures all extend from the aforementioned use of a text parser, while later games discussed still show some inspiration from this player-input foundation in iterative mechanics. As an aside, text adventure games often fall within the broader genre of interactive fiction (IF). Much of my research refers to these games as IF and it is correct in doing so. However, I resist using that term so as to not include other types of IF games which do not incorporate text parsing mechanics. These games function through the use of hypertext, where the player clicks through links embedded in a field of text, revealing continuing linear passages. This type of game in particular receives growing participation by independent creators due to the availability of the open-source IF game engine Twine, making games easy to create and share.[25] While fulfilling and engaging in their own right, they are not my focus in this work as they are not always mimicking a conversation.  
 

The text adventure games I touch upon earlier are one of the two types of games I focus on. Broadly speaking, they reached popularity from the 1970s until the mid 1980s, and are playable on a personal computer (PC). While there are certainly text adventure games produced after this period, the ones I examine fit within this timeframe; this is because it illustrates the shift of game style from PC to emerging console platforms. By platforms, I refer to specific, independent hardware connected to a display screen, that plays game programs published for that particular device.[26] These include the Atari, Apple II personal computer, and the PlayStation 3, and also mobile devices like the iPhone or Game Boy.

Roleplaying Games and Dialogue Systems

Crossing different genres and platforms, the second category of games that I discuss share specific characteristics. First, they all insert the player into a story by assuming the role of a character within that world. All games incorporate player input, making interactivity interactive, but this excludes games such as Tetris where the player does not have a narrative purpose as an actor within this game world of falling blocks. This element is prominently seen within the Role Playing Game (RPG) genre, in which the player takes on the role of a specific character, possessing their own abilities and personality quirks. Their presence critically impacts the game’s narrative. As Ilana Snyder describes, these games “always involve some kind of exploration of the game’s world, meaning that players can spend a lot of time just looking around, uncovering the features and the secrets of that world.”[27] However, other types of genres with a character focus are put into this category, within action-adventure genres or even romantic visual novels. What narrows down this grouping of games even more is their inclusion of dialogue systems.

Dialogue systems are a mechanic in games that textually represent a conversation between the player and at least one non-playable character (NPC). The player, when interacting with a NPC, gains the opportunity to speak to them. In deciding what is said to NPCs, the player can “project into the personality of the character they play”.[28] Depending on the game’s interface and and the freedom of movement for the player’s avatar, the design of such encounters differ.

For text adventure games discussed so far, this takes place through the text interface. The Hobbit for example, a later and more advanced peer to Adventure, describes the characters within the same room as the player (who roleplays as Bilbo, the lead protagonist of the J.R.R. Tolkien book); if Gandalf is present, the player can type “Talk to Gandalf” to get his attention. The Narrator, in response, replies “Gandalf is waiting”, letting the player input “Say…” in addition to whatever they wish to say to the wizard.[29] In later 3D video games with character models in a graphical world space, the player normally receives a prompt to press a button when within close proximity to a NPC. The 1999 RPG Final Fantasy IX indicates that an NPC is interactable by displaying an exclamation mark above their head (fig. 2).[30] Resulting dialogue text blossoms onto screen inside a speech bubble similar to that of comic books. It is this later interface that is most commonly seen in contemporary console video games. The functions of a dialogue system are multifaceted, but it aspires to communicate useful information to the player. This dialogue goes both ways; the game gives the player narrative information and objectives and the player, in return, uses dialogue options to communicate how they wish to role play their character. Further examples the role of dialogue in games are illustrated throughout this work.  

State of the Field

Current scholarship gives little attention to dialogue systems specifically. As I chronicle in the next chapter, discourse on the purpose of narrative within games filters through game studies in debates between ludology and narratology. However, there is no identifiable field of dialogue studies in terms of video game mechanics. There are a few reasons for this. As video games are a relatively new medium, the academic field of games studies remains small and in its infancy. Many works from game studies emerge from similar media fields including film studies and cultural studies and thus are influenced by their academic frames, but a screenplay’s dialogue and a game’s dialogue have different objectives and presentations. Furthermore, academic analysis on specific games commonly focus on their completed forms. While platform studies and software studies, as discussed in the next chapter, offer helpful glimpses beneath the plastic coating of hardware in assessing a game’s technological foundation, scholarly consideration of game design is not given adequate attention, considering the variety of different game genres present. Game analysis views its objects of study as texts to be read, and rarely focuses on the iterative process of game design, prototyping, and playtesting.

As such, various game elements, such as dialogue systems, float into the background due to their ubiquity and are considered as a given. Of course games have textual options for a player to select; nearly all video games begin with an instruction to “Press Start” to start playing and this in itself is an input-based option incorporating text. Text-based instruction is such a standard feature of video games that it is considered not worth investigating. However, the narrator within a text adventure game, or an NPC with a message to say, prompting the player to play the game in its intended manner, is not often considered in game studies discourse.

Extending from this, I argue that there is great merit in research that takes on critical making as a form of knowledge production. Areas of study that require an understanding of a creative practice, such as game development, have much to gain by examining the creation of research objects alongside critical and thoughtful analysis. Game development is an iterative process, and should prototypes enter an academic discourse, they are continually critiqued and improved; such practices make design less of a privatized experience, following growing desires expressed in the digital humanities. In this framework I hypothesize unique and diverse approaches to game design, specifically with the goal of innovating dialogue systems. My work then provides value in contributing to ongoing narratology debates while also highlighting the benefits of design research and the importance of analysis of the game design process, rather than the final product.

My views come from the perspective of a life-long player of video games and active consumer but also as a creator involved within game development, having attended the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco for the past two years. A recent involvement in games writing, including my participation in a six month games writing incubator in Montreal, as well as my networking with narrative designers, script writers, and other figures who mash words and games together, offer useful insights into the craft of making video games. Considering the views of both audiences and creators in games can help improve games writing, including dialogue and innovative mechanics.

Chapter Overview

Chapter one details the scholarly background for this investigation. It outlines the academic debates that posture narratology against ludology, in order to give a foundation to future discussions of the use of dialogue as a storytelling and worldbuilding device. Above all else, it frames two key themes: the importance of storytelling and narrative in games, and the objective of designing good game feel.  

With this foundation, chapter two focuses on the history of dialogue systems. In this chapter, I first give an overview of the history of dialogue in games. I discuss the direct influence Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) had on the development of Crowther and Wood’s 1977 Colossal Cave Adventure, one of the first games to provide text parsing abilities to the player. From this, I emphasize the importance the player’s freedom to converse has in maintaining immersive experiences, in terms of D&D (in dialogue between the player and the game master) and text adventure games (in input between the player and computer).  

Chapter three continues this line of thought to explore the technological limitations that influence this shift in game design from text to visually-based experiences. It explores game platforms and their limitations, including the impact of controller design. In filling this research gap, I identify the importance of diegetic mechanics in game design. I call upon research concerning game feel to strengthen this concept before examining two games that illustrate its use in affecting graphics and gameplay mechanics. From this I question if diegetic mechanics are helpfully applied to other forms of game design that face hardware limitations, such as dialogue systems.

Chapter four reflects on the ways that clever game design circumvents hardware limitations. I look at ways that game designers successfully hide setbacks in other areas, including graphics and gameplay, and apply these techniques to dialogue design. While dialogue systems in video games have much room for evolution, I analyze games that expand the frame of the mechanic. I also overview my own experimentations as a way of introducing diegetic systems to dialogue mechanics, as inspired by text adventure games. The objective of this is to not suggest that there is a be-all-end-all approach in dialogue, but to show the unique potentials that such design paradigms can offer; in my examples I suggest the use of constructed languages, or conlangs, as a gameplay trope that can increase immersion in NPC dialogue.

Overall I argue that while dialogue systems in games take after TRPG structures, the hardware limitations of early game consoles prevented them from reaching true fidelity and thus not meeting an accurate sense of game feel. The introduction of consoles then mark a clear shift in their design. There has been an increase of technological capabilities in game platforms over the years, but little is done to further evolve this vital component of the roleplaying experience in games. Despite this, there is much potential available if one were to look at other areas of game design for problem-solving techniques. This work then is not only a reflection of how dialogue systems function but a challenge in how they can be better designed.

[1] Infocom, Spellbreaker, Apple II (Infocom, 1985).

[2] Transcribed excerpts from text adventure games use a “>” to indicate the player’s input. Following this, lines without this are prompts from the game.  

[3] Throughout this work I use both “text adventures” and “text adventure games” to refer to the same genre of games.  

[4] Earlier video games include arcade experiences such as Pong, whereas the games I include in my scope are personal video games played within the home.  

[5] Krystina Madej, Interactivity, Collaboration, and Authoring in Social Media (Cham: Springer, 2016), 49-54.

[6] Will Crowther, Adventure, PDP-10 (Crowther, 1976).

[7] This claim comes from a long history of playing complex text adventure games and a stubbornness in refusing to seek out clues or solutions online, eventually roping in friends to assist in usually fruitless efforts.

[8] Scorpia, "Spellbreaker," Computer Gaming World, March 1986, 12.

[9] By ASCII art, I refer to imagery created from printed characters in any text editor. While they can be elaborate, here is a simple sword as an example: ()==[:::::::::::::>

[10] Benjamin Woolley, Virtual Worlds: A Journey in Hype and Hyperreality (London: Penguin books, 1993), 155.

[11] Jesper Juul, "The Open and the Closed: Game of Emergence and Games of Progression," in Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference Proceedings, ed. Frans Mäyrä (Tampere: Tampere University Press).

[12] For simplicity’s sake and to reiterate the importance of storytelling in creating believable game worlds, I am referring to the input-receiver-and-responder within text adventure games as the narrator from this point onwards.  

[13] Edward Castronova, Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun is Changing Reality (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 22-23.

[14] David Sudnow, Ways of the Hand: The Organization of Improvised Conduct (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 47.

[15] Infocom, Zork I, Apple II (Infocom, 1980).

[16] J. Yellowlees Douglas, "What Hypertext Can Do that Print Narratives Cannot," Reader 28 (1992): 9.

[17] Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design (Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 2014), 239.

[18] Steve Swink, Game Feel: A Game Designers Guide to Virtual Sensation (Hoboken: CRC Press, 2014).

[19] Mark J. P. Wolf, The Medium of the Video Game (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2005), 14.

[20] Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (London: Vintage, 2012)

[21] This comparison is derived from a comedy routine by Dana O’Brien. See also Ewan Kirkland, "Storytelling in Survival Horror Videogames," in Horror Video Games, ed. Bernard Perron (London: McFarland & Company, 2009), 73.

[22] Nintendo R&D1, Wario Ware, GameBoy Advance (Nintendo, 2003).  

[23] Blizzard Entertainment, World of Warcraft, Microsoft Windows (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004).

[24] Nick Montfort, Twisty Little passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 6.

[25] Twine, accessed March 07, 2017, https://twinery.org/.

[26] Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort, "Platform Studies: Frequently Questioned Answers," in DAC 09: After Media, Embodiment and Context: Proceedings of the Digital Arts and Culture Conference, 2009, University of California, Irvine, Saturday, Dec 12-Tuesday Dec. 15 (Irvine, CA: Digital Arts and Culture, 2010).

[27] Ilana Snyder, Hypertext: The Electronic Labyrinth (Carlton South, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1998), 182.

[28] Rusel DeMaria, Reset: Changing the Way We Look at Video Games (San Francisco: BerrettKoehler, 2007), 102.

[29] Beam Software, The Hobbit, ZX Spectrum (Melbourne House, 1982).

[30] Square, Final Fantasy IX, PlayStation (Square, 2000).