It's taken me several days to think and rethink all these postings re Aarseth in general and digital/hypter-textual/cybertextual/ studies, and now I'm wondering aloud -- and happy for feedback. It seems to me as if Aarseth and his online reviewers/commentators (Montfort, Hayles etc.) are grappling with the REALLY big picture intellectual challenge that we've yet to satisfactorily work ourselves up to in class -- which is to really try and look at implications of ergodic literature on its own merits. We can and should talk about issues of materiality, of hyper versus in cyber in a rigorous way, acknowledging relationships to print media, as well as departures from, without boxing ourselves into the binary of either/or. For all his many detractors, (too strict an emphasis of computationality), Aarseth does give us both the ability to and a particular model for imagining ourselves outside the binary, as each of his commentators are well aware in the rich corners of his work they choose to comment upon. I think adding Lev M. into the mix should make for an even more yeasty and less reductive conversation.

I'd appreciate someone's thoughts too on where Marshall Luhan comes into all of this. Is he too passe for words? I seem to remember that he is generally constructed as someone who has missed the mark (gone off down the road and misssed the underground Twisty Passages?) -- but I had occasion to read a chapter on gaming he wrote this week arguing for its social dimensions and wondered what to make of it. Perhaps Facade is working toward that end? (As real D & D obviously does.)