Mary Ann Buckles is widely credited as the first
academic to research and speculate about the emotional and cultural impact of
videogames
Video games, also known as computer games, are electronic games that involves interaction with a user interface or input device such as a joystick, controller, keyboard, or motion sensing device to generate visual feedback. This feedback ...
.
Buckles' dissertation, "
Interactive Fiction
''
Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the ...
: The Computer Storygame ‘
Adventure’", gained attention twenty years after Buckles presented it to the department of German literature at the
University of California, San Diego
The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Insti ...
.
Espen Aarseth
Espen J. Aarseth (born 1965) is a Norwegian academic specializing in the fields of video game studies and electronic literature. Aarseth completed his doctorate at the University of Bergen. He co-founded the Department of Humanistic Informatics at ...
, a researcher based in
Copenhagen
Copenhagen ( or .; da, København ) is the capital and most populous city of Denmark, with a proper population of around 815.000 in the last quarter of 2022; and some 1.370,000 in the urban area; and the wider Copenhagen metropolitan ar ...
, is credited with raising the profile of Buckles' dissertation, which Aarseth quotes frequently from in his own book, ''Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature''.
Buckles left academia after completing her dissertation in 1985, writing one article for
Byte Magazine
''Byte'' (stylized as ''BYTE'') was a microcomputer magazine, influential in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s because of its wide-ranging editorial coverage. "''Byte'' magazine, the leading publication serving the homebrew market ..."
'' ...
about interactive fiction as literature in 1987, which was based on her dissertation.
In it, she discusses how interactive fiction games such as Adventure can have deeper meanings for players, partially because they are responsible for making the choices, and partially because unlike linear printed texts, the number of possible variations on the "story" are quite large.
Buckles received her Ph.D. from the
University of California at San Diego.
in 1985. Her thesis was titled “Interactive Fiction: The Computer Storygame Adventure”; she felt strongly that these games would change our relationship to computers. Her dissertation board had members dead set against such a frivolous subject; she fought them the whole way, and now her thesis is very often cited in academic works on video games. , she works as a massage therapist in
San Diego, California
San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the eighth most populous city in the United States ...
and was interviewed for the interactive fiction documentary, ''
Get Lamp''.
She is married to her husband, Jack, a computational biologist.
See also
*
Get Lamp
References
External links
*
20th-century births
Year of birth missing (living people)
Living people
University of California, San Diego alumni
Video game researchers
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