Acknowledgments

I thank professor Donald R. Glancy, my mentor, PhD advisor, and friend. He encouraged me to explore strange new worlds and defended my work to the graduate theatre faculty at Ohio State University. Before he passed away, I was able to put the very first copy of Computers as Theatre in his hands, and that made both of us happy.

I’m very grateful to my editor, Peter Gordon, for his support in revising this book. Peter’s encouragement was just as important this time as the first time. As always, my work has been inspired and informed by Don Norman and Henry Jenkins, two of the smartest people I’ve had the pleasure to know. Barry Lopez holds a singular position in my life as a writer, friend, and the one who helped me find and hold the connection between nature and story. Documentary filmmaker Rachel Strickland has been my partner in most of the formative adventures of my professional life.

Thanks to Martin Venezky for the truly awesome cover design. Martin is in a class by himself. I’m honored that he would do this work. I also thank my dear former-student-now-colleague Verna Bhargava for the illustrations in this new edition. Verna went way above and beyond what I asked of her.

I want to give special thanks for the intellect, vision, and creativity of Douglas Englebart, who passed away while this book was in production. The story you will read about him in the book is now better known after his passing. I know that he suffered from the shifting of his particular passion for inventing for the Good to a more commercial ethos in the early days of personal computers. But all of us who worked in the big labs that existed “back in the day”—PARC, Atari, Interval, Sun, AT&T—were motivated by the same magnificent what-ifs of the new technologies we were investigating and inventing. I’m certain that Engelbart came to know that he was profoundly appreciated—the National Medal of Technology surely demonstrated that to him. I hope he knew how many of us continue to be inspired by his spirit.

I thank Christopher Ireland, David Liddle, Nancy Deyo, and all the other Purple Moonies for making and supporting excellent research and doing the hard work of founding a company. I thank Interval Research and the Banff Centre for supporting the Placeholder collaboration with Rachel Strickland, Rob Tow, John Harrison, and Michael Naimark. I have difficulty describing how much I learned from both Placeholder and Purple Moon. Some of it is expressed in this book. I also thank Eric Hulteen for his thoughtful support in developing the first edition.

I am grateful to many folks for freely sharing their wisdom and knowledge with me in this work. Sean and Jen White were extremely helpful in the domains of augmented reality and narrative design. My colleagues Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Michael Mateas at University of California, Santa Cruz, also made invaluable contributions in both theory and design. Kimberly Lau generously shared segments from her tantalizing research on World of Warcraft. My interviews with Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Pavel Curtis, Lisa McDonald, and Eric Zimmerman played an active role in the work, and conversations with my long-time colleagues Nathan Shedroff and Abbe Don helped in more ways than I can describe here. Emily Short’s work in narrative storytelling has been inspirational. My colleagues in feminist and critical game design, especially Emma Westecott and Mary Flanagan, are, as always, profoundly inspirational. I also want to thank those who freely shared images for the book, including Michelle Amsbury, Eric Zimmerman, Sean White, Quinn Dombrowski, Scott Nazarian, Laura Crawford, and Matthew McBride.

Over the years, I have had the good fortune to work with remarkable people as students, who are even more remarkable as graduates. Scott Nazarian, Matthew McBride, and Laura Crawford from Art Center as well as Will Newton and Kathleen Moynahan from California College of the Arts are among the finest students I’ve had the privilege to work with. I’ve learned a great deal from all of them. Thank you, people!

I am grateful to my family from the center of my heart. To my three daughters—Hilary, Suzanne, and Brooke—thank you. You have grown up strong and beautiful, each in your own way; I’m grateful both for who you were (the inspiration for Purple Moon and the best junior booth babes E3 ever saw) and who you are now. Thanks also to Suzanne for writing a sidebar for this book.

And then there’s Rob. In the old days at Interval (where I first met him), Rob was well known for pronouncing some things to be “deeply wrong.” He was almost never wrong in that. Over the 22 years that we have known each other, we’ve had professional and personal adventures; Rob wrote most of the code for Placeholder, and I consulted on Rob’s robot project. We hike and snorkel and hunt abalone together, we play and record Tibetan bowls in diverse natural environments, and we kayak like Klingons. We’ve talked theory, practice, or politics just about every day. Rob’s insights and editing have made this book so much better than it might have been. I think you will enjoy his sidebars as well. Rob says he liked the first edition of this book so much he married the author. That’s pretty sweet, and sometimes I choose to believe it. I thank you, Rob, for all we’ve done and all we will do.