Introduction: Eco’s Semiotics and the New Participatory Imagination

In 1979, Umberto Eco published The Role of the Reader, a collection of essays that would reshape how critics, writers, and semioticians understood the interaction between author and reader. Central to this work is the concept of the open text — a text deliberately structured to require interpretation, ambiguity, and active collaboration by its reader. As opposed to the closed text, which restricts meaning and funnels interpretation along a predetermined path, the open text invites multiplicity. It presumes, even demands, an active reader who participates in the generation of meaning. Eco argued that such texts construct what he termed a "model reader," one capable of actualizing the text’s interpretive potential through thoughtful engagement.¹

More than four decades later, Eco’s semiotic insight proves uncannily prophetic when applied to contemporary developments in digital media, particularly within the genre of science fiction. In the immersive ecosystems of massively multiplayer online games (MMOs), procedurally generated simulations, and collaborative science fiction platforms, the reader is no longer a passive decoder. Instead, they become a world-builder — not merely constructing meaning from signs, but constructing the very world in which signs are embedded. This phenomenon marks a profound shift in narrative and ontological assumptions, one Eco could not have foreseen in technological detail, but whose structural principles he mapped with surprising accuracy.

This paper explores the conceptual migration from Eco’s open text to what we might call the open world: narrative environments in which the participatory model reader becomes a co-author, a procedural myth-maker, and a collaborative architect of speculative realities. Through an analysis of key case studies — from video games such as Dwarf Fortress, No Man’s Sky, and Outer Wilds, to expansive online fiction projects like the SCP Foundation and Orion’s Arm — this study will argue that Eco’s semiotics provides a vital theoretical scaffold for understanding 21st-century participatory science fiction. In these digital and collaborative platforms, the open text is no longer confined to paper; it has become infrastructure, interface, and world.²

By revisiting Eco’s framework in light of these emergent textualities, we gain a richer vocabulary for understanding how meaning is co-produced in contemporary media ecologies. We also see how science fiction — long a laboratory for imaginative possibility — serves as the ideal genre in which this shift from interpretation to co-creation is taking place. The open world is not a negation of authorship, but its dispersion and reinvention. In the echo of Eco’s model reader, we find the blueprint for a participatory imagination that is only beginning to define the narrative culture of the digital age.³

Notes

¹ Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Indiana University Press, 1979.
² Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative as Virtual Reality 2: Revisiting Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Johns Hopkins UP, 2015.
³ Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. NYU Press, 2006.

Chapter Two ~ The Open Text: Theory and Implications

Umberto Eco’s theory of the open text emerged from a confluence of semiotics, structuralism, and literary theory, offering a counterweight to traditional notions of textual authority. At its core, Eco’s open text is one that resists closure — it is constructed in such a way that it allows, or even demands, interpretive intervention by the reader. Eco proposed that texts are not inert objects to be decoded according to authorial intent, but rather semiotic machines that generate meaning in interaction with a competent reader.¹

The contrast with the closed text is instructive. A closed text leads the reader toward a specific interpretive conclusion, often through tightly controlled rhetorical and narrative devices. Detective fiction, for example, is frequently closed in this sense: its clues are planted to elicit a single correct resolution. In contrast, open texts are characterized by ambiguity, multiplicity, and the potential for divergent readings. Eco cites works like James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and certain avant-garde compositions as paradigms of textual openness — not because they lack structure, but because their structure facilitates a range of plausible readings without collapsing into incoherence.²

This openness does not equate to interpretive anarchy. On the contrary, Eco insists on the importance of constraints in producing meaningful openness. A truly open text is not an unstructured or purely random artifact. It is rather one that provides structured indeterminacy — a framework within which interpretive freedom can flourish. For Eco, the "model reader" is not just anyone with a subjective opinion, but an ideal collaborator who grasps the rules of the game and plays creatively within them.³ This model reader is positioned not outside the work, but inside its generative logic.

This theoretical nuance becomes especially important when we consider how Eco’s ideas resonate with contemporary digital forms. In computational environments, constraints are literalized in code, yet often facilitate a kind of interaction that mirrors the open text’s structure. Game engines, algorithms, and data structures offer affordances and limits — the digital equivalents of narrative frameworks — that make player agency meaningful. In this way, Eco’s vision of openness anticipates the logic of later procedural and participatory media, where the text is not finished until the reader acts.

Importantly, Eco also situated the open text within a broader cultural and ethical framework. He warned against overinterpretation, cautioning that even open texts require respect for their structure and context.⁴ In a digital world flooded with modding communities, fan rewrites, and wiki-based fiction, this caution remains relevant. Openness is not a license to disregard internal consistency; it is a call to responsible co-creation. The open text, then, is not a dissolution of authorship, but its redistribution across a network of signs, structures, and subjects.

Notes

¹ Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Indiana University Press, 1979, pp. 3–43.
² Ibid., pp. 33–35.
³ Eco, Umberto. “Overinterpreting Texts,” in Interpretation and Overinterpretation, edited by Stefan Collini, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 45–66.
⁴ Ibid., pp. 24–28.

Chapter Three ~ From Interpretation to Participation: The Digital Shift

When Eco first outlined the dynamics of the open text, the dominant media form was still the printed book — static, bounded, and governed by material and institutional limitations. Yet embedded in his theory was a latent potential that would only fully emerge with the arrival of digital media: the transformation of reading from interpretation into participation. If the model reader of the printed text was a skilled interpreter, the model user of the digital text becomes a co-designer, a procedural agent who interacts not only with narrative signs but with the architecture that generates them¹.

This shift is most visible in interactive digital media — in hypertext fiction, video games, and simulated environments. The emergence of hypertext in the late 20th century offered the first glimpse of a text that could branch, loop, and reconfigure itself in response to user input. Works such as Michael Joyce’s Afternoon, a story or Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl forced readers to choose paths, arrange sequences, and consider the implications of textual non-linearity². Although early hypertext fiction was often experimental and niche, it marked a break from the fixity of the page and suggested a future in which the reader’s choices could become structurally significant.

In video games, this participatory logic becomes more fully realized. Here, meaning arises not simply through symbolic representation, but through interaction with systems — with physics engines, AI routines, decision trees, and procedural algorithms. The game Mass Effect, for instance, constructs branching narratives that respond to player decisions across multiple installments, resulting in divergent outcomes and character arcs. In The Stanley Parable, the player’s very act of defiance or obedience becomes the text. Narrative itself is modulated through interaction, forming a recursive loop between system and user³.

Crucially, this transformation is not merely technological but ontological. The user’s engagement is not limited to interpreting a story world; it extends to inhabiting and reshaping it. What Eco theorized as interpretive openness has, in digital space, become architectural openness — a form of co-authorship embedded in interface and code. In open-world games and simulation platforms, the narrative may not be pre-written at all, but instead emerge from mechanics. This is the logic of sandbox environments like Minecraft, or of procedurally generated worlds like No Man’s Sky, where players discover meaning through exploration, construction, and emergent behavior⁴.

In these media, the "text" is no longer a bounded object but a potentiality — a matrix of affordances in which users trace their own paths. Reading becomes navigation. Interpretation becomes design. Eco’s model reader, reimagined for the digital sphere, is less a passive recipient of ambiguity and more an active participant in the realization of worlds. The semiotic machine has become literal — procedural systems, code, and engines now perform what Eco once theorized as the implicit structure of literary openness.

Notes

¹ Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
² Hayles, N. Katherine. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. University of Notre Dame Press, 2008.
³ Murray, Janet. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. MIT Press, 1997.
⁴ Wardrip-Fruin, Noah. Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies. MIT Press, 2009.

Chapter Four ~ World-Building as Semiotic Process

If Eco’s open text enabled the reader to help construct meaning within a textual framework, then digital world-building multiplies this effect: it invites the user to construct not only meaning, but worlds. In games, simulations, and collaborative fiction environments, the open text becomes an open system, generating settings, characters, and events through procedural rules and emergent behavior. This development marks a shift not only in degree but in kind — from interpretive participation to ontological co-authorship.¹

In procedural or sandbox games, narrative arises not from a pre-written plot but from the interaction of systems and agents. Dwarf Fortress is a paradigmatic example. The game’s engine simulates entire civilizations, mythologies, ecosystems, and individual biographies — often with absurd, tragic, or eerily lifelike results. Players routinely document their playthroughs in long-form sagas and illustrated histories, many of which are more complex and emotionally resonant than traditionally authored fiction.² In Dwarf Fortress, Eco’s model reader reappears as a world-maker, drawing narrative from simulation, inference from interaction.

This logic is carried further in No Man’s Sky, which uses algorithms to generate over 18 quintillion unique planets, each with its own terrain, atmosphere, flora, and fauna. While the game was initially criticized for its lack of curated story, its eventual evolution into a platform for open exploration, base-building, and shared documentation embodies a deeper kind of textual openness. Players become cataloguers, settlers, archaeologists, and mythographers — roles traditionally assigned to authors and narrators.³

The underlying semiotic principle is that systems can become texts, and interaction with them can yield narrative. In this sense, world-building is a semiotic process: a process of sign-making through rules, constraints, and feedback loops. What Eco identified as gaps in the literary text — blanks that the reader fills in — are in digital media instantiated as affordances and parameters. The “text” is not just what is written or shown, but what can happen — what might be discovered, triggered, or constructed.⁴

Even in more narrative-driven titles, such as Outer Wilds, the player must reconstruct a buried story-world through exploration, puzzle-solving, and observation of recursive time loops. The absence of explicit guidance mirrors the structure of the open text: the reader is invited to divine structure from fragments, clues, and constraints. Here, the player’s epistemic activity — learning the rules of the universe — is itself the act of narrative realization.⁵

This kind of engagement transforms readers into theorists, engineers, and ethnographers of fictional universes. As such, the work of world-building is no longer confined to the authorial pen but distributed across player interactions, procedural design, and community interpretation. The semiotics of world-building, long a component of science fiction, has become a practical methodology in digital culture — a way of producing meaning that is exploratory, systemic, and always partial.

Notes

¹ Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” in First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, MIT Press, 2004.
² Paul, Christopher A. The Toxic Meritocracy of Video Games: Why Gaming Culture Is the Worst. University of Minnesota Press, 2018, pp. 91–106.
³ Murray, Janet H. Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice. MIT Press, 2012.
⁴ Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. MIT Press, 2003.
⁵ Isbister, Katherine. How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design. MIT Press, 2016, pp. 145–152.

Chapter Five ~ Collective Authorship in Online Sci-Fi Projects

While video games exemplify the transformation of the reader into a system-interacting participant, collaborative online fiction projects demonstrate another mode of Eco’s open text: the distribution of authorship across a collective of contributors. In platforms such as the SCP Foundation, Orion’s Arm, and the speculative evolution community, we find vast science fiction universes constructed not by a single author or design team, but by thousands of individuals co-authoring within shared frameworks. The result is a hybrid of fiction and infrastructure — a textual environment sustained by procedural consistency, social negotiation, and community ethos.¹

The SCP Foundation (Secure, Contain, Protect), originating on an imageboard and evolving into a complex narrative wiki, exemplifies the possibilities and paradoxes of collective authorship. It presents itself as a scientific archive of anomalous entities and phenomena, each entry written in a dry bureaucratic tone that masks enormous imaginative range. Contributors write self-contained articles (“SCPs”), tales, and technical documents that expand the lore, interpret or subvert previous entries, and build intertextual links across the canon.² Yet “canon” here is not stable — it is a consensus fiction, often debated and reinterpreted by users who act as both critics and creators.

Orion’s Arm operates similarly, though with a focus on scientifically rigorous far-future speculation. Its contributors have developed a post-singularity universe with multiple clades of posthuman intelligences, megastructures, artificial life, and recursive civilizational histories. Unlike more playful collaborative fictions, Orion’s Arm is governed by editorial review and a commitment to scientific plausibility. In Eco’s terms, the model reader here is expected not only to co-create but to adhere to strict world-consistency protocols.³ Openness is maintained, but within clearly defined epistemological constraints.

These projects foreground a tension central to all collaborative authorship: how to balance creative freedom with internal consistency. The solution, as Eco anticipated, lies in constructing texts with open structures, not open meanings in the abstract. SCP and Orion’s Arm are not just wikis — they are systems of genre, tone, and diegetic logic. They demand that contributors internalize a grammar of contribution: stylistic tropes, ontological rules, and genre expectations.⁴ The “text” becomes a scaffolding for shared invention, and the reader becomes a genre-aware improviser within a semiotic architecture.

Another vital feature of these ecosystems is their feedback-rich, iterative nature. Writers receive critique from peers, revise work, and build upon shared reference points. Community votes, editorial boards, and thematic events guide production. This resembles not only the open text but also Eco’s notion of the encyclopedic — a system in which interrelated entries build a dense web of associations.⁵ In this sense, collaborative online fictions are less like traditional narratives and more like evolving databases — semiotic structures with their own inertia, momentum, and recursive logic.

These digital collectives raise questions about authorship that Eco’s framework helps clarify. Rather than seeing the death of the author, we see its multiplication. Authorship becomes a distributed function, emerging from the aggregate of interpretive and creative acts performed within a shared world.⁶ Here, the open text no longer refers simply to ambiguity, but to institutionalized co-authorship: a practice, a platform, and a living process of textual evolution.

Notes

¹ Fathallah, Judith May. Fanfiction and the Author: How Fanfic Changes Popular Cultural Texts. Amsterdam University Press, 2017.
² Kennedy, Patrick. “SCP Foundation: A Collaborative Writing Platform as Internet Folklore,” Transformative Works and Cultures, vol. 37, 2021.
³ Hall, Alexander. “Designing Hard SF Universes: The Case of Orion’s Arm,” Extrapolation, vol. 59, no. 3, 2018, pp. 291–309.
⁴ Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Routledge, 1992.
⁵ Eco, Umberto. The Infinity of Lists, trans. Alastair McEwen, Rizzoli, 2009.
⁶ Coppa, Francesca. “A Brief History of Media Fandom,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, McFarland, 2006.

Chapter Six ~ Eco’s Model Reader and the Participatory Subject

At the center of Eco’s semiotic theory lies the figure of the model reader: not a passive recipient of content, but an ideal participant in the construction of meaning. This reader is imagined by the text itself — encoded into its structure as someone capable of making the inferences, connections, and interpretive leaps that the work requires.¹ In traditional literature, this often meant a reader familiar with genre conventions, cultural references, or stylistic nuance. In the digital and collaborative spaces discussed above, the model reader evolves: no longer an interpreter alone, but a procedural subject — one who not only understands a system but acts within it.

The participatory subject engages not just in reading but in feedback, iteration, authorship, and design. Games and collaborative science fiction platforms construct implicit and explicit expectations of this subject: that they will learn the mechanics, respect the boundaries of the fictional world, contribute meaningfully, and expand the text without breaking its coherence. In effect, these environments create model players, model writers, and model designers — each inheriting the structural role Eco once reserved for the model reader.²

This shift signals an ontological expansion of the reading act. Participation in a simulated or collectively authored universe often involves social roles, governance protocols, technological knowledge, and discursive fluency. The participatory subject must code-switch between different registers: from narrative immersion to wiki-editing, from myth-making to rule enforcement. The subjectivity Eco theorized becomes fractured, polyvalent — distributed across interfaces, communities, and modalities.³

Yet the spirit of Eco’s vision persists. The open text was never meant to dissolve structure into chaos; it was meant to honor the intelligence and creativity of the reader. In digital participatory culture, that honor takes new forms. The reader becomes world-builder, theorist, contributor. They are not expected to know everything, but to learn in order to participate. The model reader of today is a dynamic figure — not a stable archetype, but a subject in process, one whose interpretive labor is rewarded by creative agency.

Participation is thus both epistemic and ontological. To read is to know, to know is to act, and to act is to become part of the text’s unfolding form. In this light, Eco’s model reader becomes a figure of transformation: not simply decoding signs, but embodying and extending their logic.⁴

Notes

¹ Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader. Indiana University Press, 1979, pp. 7–10.
² Ryan, Marie-Laure. “From Narrative Games to Playable Stories: Toward a Poetics of Interactive Narrative,” Storyworlds, vol. 1, 2009, pp. 43–59.
³ Jenkins, Henry. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. NYU Press, 2013.
⁴ Consalvo, Mia. Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames. MIT Press, 2007.

Chapter Seven ~ Counterpoints and Critical Tensions

While the migration from open text to open world offers expansive new terrains for storytelling and interpretation, it is not without its tensions. Eco himself was acutely aware of the dangers of radical openness. In his later work, particularly “Overinterpreting Texts,” he cautioned against readings that ignore the constraints and internal logic of the work.¹ This warning echoes powerfully in participatory science fiction communities and games, where the promise of openness can at times devolve into chaos, incoherence, or exclusion.

One of the key risks is fragmentation. Collaborative environments often generate sprawling content webs with overlapping, contradictory, or competing narratives. The SCP Foundation, for example, has developed multiple “canons,” each with different tonal, thematic, or ontological assumptions. While this multiplicity can be seen as a strength — a kind of living palimpsest — it also makes onboarding difficult for new contributors and readers. Without centralized narrative cohesion, participatory worlds can become illegible to all but the most deeply embedded insiders.²

Another tension arises from the informal hierarchies that inevitably emerge within "open" communities. Even in ostensibly democratic spaces, authority tends to consolidate around early adopters, administrators, or those with high cultural capital. In this way, openness can mask gatekeeping. Eco’s model reader was an ideal construct, but in practice, communities often impose standards for tone, lore accuracy, or writing quality that function as ideological filters. Openness becomes conditional — extended only to those who internalize the right style or master the correct references.

Finally, there is the question of coherence and artistic value. Does participatory authorship inevitably dilute narrative integrity? Some critics have argued that large-scale shared universes prioritize quantity over depth, pastiche over vision.³ The modular, often wiki-driven structure of these worlds can make it difficult to craft sustained emotional arcs or nuanced characters. While some projects have overcome this through collective editorial frameworks or meta-narrative devices, the challenge remains: how to balance collective expression with literary craftsmanship.

Eco's framework, once again, proves useful not because it resolves these tensions but because it anticipates them. The open text was always a balancing act — between freedom and form, multiplicity and structure. The digital extension of this principle only magnifies those stakes. As participatory science fiction continues to evolve, its communities and creators must remain vigilant: openness is not an end in itself, but a discipline — one that requires care, critique, and continual negotiation.

Notes

¹ Eco, Umberto. “Overinterpreting Texts,” in Interpretation and Overinterpretation, ed. Stefan Collini, Cambridge University Press, 1992.
² Booth, Paul. Digital Fandom: New Media Studies. Peter Lang, 2010, pp. 119–140.
³ McCulloch, Gretchen. “Constructed Worlds and the Limits of Lore,” WIRED, 2021.

From Semiotics to Shared Reality

When Umberto Eco articulated the concept of the open text in the late 1970s, he was addressing a changing literary landscape — one in which meaning was no longer dictated from above but assembled through interpretation. What he could not have foreseen, though he may have intuited, was that this structural openness would evolve into spatial, procedural, and social openness on an unprecedented scale. In the cooperative storytelling of science fiction games and collaborative online universes, Eco’s open text becomes a shared operating system: a semiotic foundation for building not just narratives, but entire realities.¹

The participatory reader is now a world-builder, a designer of simulations, a contributor to wikis that function as narrative archives. Whether navigating procedurally generated galaxies or submitting entries to a fictional containment database, today’s reader does not merely interpret texts — they inhabit them, modify them, and in doing so, render them real within shared imaginative frameworks.² This marks a fundamental transformation of authorship: not its disappearance, but its expansion into an ecology of interaction, iteration, and distributed intelligence.

Eco’s legacy, then, is not only theoretical but architectural. His model reader — capable of decoding ambiguity, engaging with structure, and co-producing meaning — has become the prototypical participant in our most sophisticated media systems.³ These systems, whether embedded in digital games, collaborative fiction platforms, or algorithmically mediated worlds, all rely on his core insight: that texts are not static objects but dynamic invitations.

Moreover, this transformation has implications that extend beyond fiction. Participatory semiotics is now a feature of how we engage with culture, politics, and technology. Online platforms blur the lines between author and audience, fact and fiction, play and critique. The "texts" we co-create — from fan lore to AI-generated stories to virtual worlds — are not isolated entertainments. They are laboratories for collective meaning-making, infrastructures for imagining new modes of being.⁴

To revisit Eco today is not merely to honor his theory, but to recognize its prophetic dimensions. He gave us the grammar to describe a world in which interpretation becomes co-authorship, and co-authorship becomes the foundation of narrative worlds that are lived, revised, and shared. In the architectures of collaborative science fiction, his open text finds its fullest expression — no longer bound by page or authorial intention, but unfurling endlessly into open worlds.⁵

Notes

¹ Eco, Umberto. The Open Work. Trans. Anna Cancogni. Harvard University Press, 1989.
² Calleja, Gordon. In-Game: From Immersion to Incorporation. MIT Press, 2011.
³ Hayles, N. Katherine. “Intermediation: The Pursuit of Meaning Across Media,” New Literary History, vol. 38, no. 1, 2007, pp. 99–125.
⁴ Jenkins, Henry, Ford, Sam, and Green, Joshua. Spreadable Media. NYU Press, 2013.
⁵ Aarseth, Espen. “Allegories of Space: The Question of Spatiality in Computer Games,” in Cybertext Yearbook 2001, ed. Markku Eskelinen and Raine Koskimaa, University of Jyväskylä, 2002.

Works Cited

Aarseth, Espen. “Allegories of Space: The Question of Spatiality in Computer Games.” Cybertext Yearbook 2001, edited by Markku Eskelinen and Raine Koskimaa, University of Jyväskylä, 2002, pp. 152–171.
Booth, Paul. Digital Fandom: New Media Studies. Peter Lang, 2010.
Calleja, Gordon. In-Game: From Immersion to Incorporation. MIT Press, 2011.
Consalvo, Mia. Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames. MIT Press, 2007.
Coppa, Francesca. “A Brief History of Media Fandom.” Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, McFarland, 2006, pp. 41–59.
Eco, Umberto. The Infinity of Lists. Translated by Alastair McEwen, Rizzoli, 2009.
---. The Open Work. Translated by Anna Cancogni, Harvard University Press, 1989.
---. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Indiana University Press, 1979.
---. “Overinterpreting Texts.” Interpretation and Overinterpretation, edited by Stefan Collini, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 45–66.
Fathallah, Judith May. Fanfiction and the Author: How Fanfic Changes Popular Cultural Texts. Amsterdam University Press, 2017.
Hall, Alexander. “Designing Hard SF Universes: The Case of Orion’s Arm.” Extrapolation, vol. 59, no. 3, 2018, pp. 291–309.
Hayles, N. Katherine. “Intermediation: The Pursuit of Meaning Across Media.” New Literary History, vol. 38, no. 1, 2007, pp. 99–125.
—. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. University of Notre Dame Press, 2008.
Isbister, Katherine. How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design. MIT Press, 2016.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. NYU Press, 2006.
---. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, MIT Press, 2004, pp. 118–130.
—. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. With Sam Ford and Joshua Green, NYU Press, 2013.
---. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Routledge, 1992.
Kennedy, Patrick. “SCP Foundation: A Collaborative Writing Platform as Internet Folklore.” Transformative Works and Cultures, vol. 37, 2021. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2021.1995.
McCulloch, Gretchen. “Constructed Worlds and the Limits of Lore.” WIRED, 2021.
Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. MIT Press, 1997.
—. Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice. MIT Press, 2012.
Paul, Christopher A. The Toxic Meritocracy of Video Games: Why Gaming Culture Is the Worst. University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. “From Narrative Games to Playable Stories: Toward a Poetics of Interactive Narrative.” Storyworlds, vol. 1, 2009, pp. 43–59.
—. Narrative as Virtual Reality 2: Revisiting Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015.
Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. MIT Press, 2003.

Bibliography for Further Study

Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. Translated by Stephen Heath, Hill and Wang, 1977.
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT Press, 1999.
Chapple, Freda, and Chiel Kattenbelt, editors. Intermediality in Theatre and Performance. Rodopi, 2006.
Eskelinen, Markku. Cybertext Poetics: The Critical Landscape of New Media Literary Theory. Continuum, 2012.
Juul, Jesper. Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. MIT Press, 2005.
Klastrup, Lisbeth, and Susana Tosca. “Game Worlds: Designing for Meaningful Play.” In The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, edited by Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, Routledge, 2014.
Montfort, Nick. Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction. MIT Press, 2003.
Nieborg, David B., and Thomas Poell. “The Platformization of Cultural Production.” The Political Economy of Communication, vol. 6, no. 1, 2018, pp. 25–48.
Walton, Kendall L. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Harvard University Press, 1990.
Wardrip-Fruin, Noah. Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies. MIT Press, 2009.