Cybertext Poetics: The Critical Landscape of New Media Literary Theory, A Review

A prominent representative of ludology, the academic study of games, Markku Eskelinen has gathered in this impressively fat book (with frequently inserted recapitulative figures, but totally deprived of any other illustration) his essential thinking on the subject. However, one should prevent the reader from the very start that the scope of Eskelinen's book is strictly formal and theoretical: what he intends to establish is a general framework for the description and analysis of all texts that can be produced and read today. More specifically, his ambition is to list the various dimensions that can be distinguished in a literary text, whatever form such a text may take, and to study the combinatory principles that rule their use.