D. Fox Harrell considers what is computational about composition, and describes the GRIOT system for generating literary texts.

Lee Sheldon describes his playable adaptation of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, which relies on his invention of a "suspicion meter" to quantify and track the player's interaction with - and assessments of - NPCs (non-player characters).

The electronic release of Second Person starts with a number of essays on tabletop role-playing. Most of these consider the entanglement of play and narrative in a variety of game systems, from the highly controlled to the largely open-ended.

Kevin Wilson describes his methodology of boiling a franchise down to its core elements and weighing the differences among media when translating games from medium to medium.

Bruno Faidutti begins with the controversial premise that "[e]very game tells a story," in his description of how he uses literary techniques to enhance gameplay - even in non-RPG systems such as board games, which don't traditionally include a story.

Eric Zimmerman describes his interactive paper book as "an inverted exquisite corpse," and although a digital version of the book would be easy to produce, he argues that an electronic edition would not produce as meaningful an experience as the printed volume.

Kim Newman describes various methods of approaching his choose-your-own-adventure-style novel, which can be read or played because, like a role-playing game, "you are at once a reader and the main character."

Using Exalted as her text, Rebecca Borgstrom begins with the premises that every role-playing game requires a setting, and that to establish a fictional world players work within a mutually agreed upon structure to construct meaning.

James Wallis uses genre as the fulcrum for balancing game rules and narrative structure in story-telling games, which he differentiates from RPGs through their emphasis on the creation of narrative over character development.

Will Hindmarch contests Greg Costikyan's challenge to the idea that "games have something to do with stories" by contending that "storytelling games reconcile the theoretically antithetical relationship between their two halves - story and game."

Greg Costikyan revisits the narrative versus game-play debate that continues to be a staple of both Game Studies and Game Design. He presents a spectrum that ranges from game-focused forms to narrative-centric models, and suggests that free-form role-playing may be the most desireable marriage of narrative and game-play.

Erik Mona takes a first step toward measuring the cultural impact of Gygax and Arneson's Dungeons & Dragons by providing a pocket history of the game's generation and evolution. Mona explains the addition of character development as a game goal - the innovation that distinguishes D&D from its predecessors, and started the role-playing revolution.

Kenneth Hite argues that the long-running, H.P. Lovecraft-inspired Call of Cthulhu franchise differs from traditional tabletop role-playing in its focus on suspense rather than character growth. Hite's analysis suggests that in its origins and emphasis on narrative structure Cthulhu is a highly literary game.

Van Leavenworth, in his response to Hite, delves more deeply into Cthulhu's literariness, in particular the "large adventure book 'footprint'" of the series. He contends that the Lovecraft mythos provides a framework for the generation of narratives that - unlike many RPG stories - hold up beyond the game-play session.

David Alger responds to Herber by disagreeing with the latter's claim that narrative trumps game-play in the Cthulhu "Haunted House" scenario, stressing that even the most narratively driven games still must be playable in order to be games.

Jonathan Tweet explains how, unlike highly narratively structured games such as The Call of Cthulhu, the free-form, character-focused Everway includes a matrix that allows for the creation of coherent characters and productively constrains the otherwise open-ended game-play.

Keith Herber discusses how in his "Haunted House" scenario for Call of Cthulhu, characters are driven insane by their attempt to unravel the game's mysteries. Herber's explanation distinguishes his work from many other role-playing games in which the goal is to develop characters and acquire power and/or wealth. In contrast, characters in Herber's scenario are rewarded with mental instability.

Lori Emerson introduces a gathering of nineteen electro-poetic essays. This gathering brings together both critics and creators of electronic poetry; as is usually the case in ebr, the 'electronic' does not exclude, but helps us to reconfigure and revalue poetic works in print as well as define what works in digital environments.

Eugene Thacker resituates the work of Eduardo Kac, not as art applied to the life sciences, but as a form of bio-poetics, consistent with the electro-poetics that has been a longtime focus of critical writing in ebr. Rather than reduce the work to its material (in life-forms, or in text, or in code), Thacker identifies ways that language, form, and life intersect in works of bio-art.

Rowan Wilken sets himself the challenge of theorizing the unrepresentable in relation to the architectural model of the diagram.