Jane Jensen

Anastasia Salter is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media at the University of Central Florida, USA. She is the author of What is Your Quest? From Adventure Games to Interactive Book (2014) and co-author of Flash: Building the Interactive Web (2014). She is an editor of the Electronic Literature Collection Vol. 3.

The first decades of digital history went by too fast, leaving many of us with false impressions, like the canard that computer games arose in an all-male engineering culture, a blithe assertion that overlooks the genius of people like Judy Malloy, Brenda Laurel, and Jane Jensen. Happily, genius has reach: transformative work leaves lasting marks on the girls and boys who grow up with it, and when we are lucky, those children turn into scholars like Anastasia Salter, whose capacity to remember and understand digital origins is rare indeed. This book is essential both to understanding the roots and condition of interactive narrative, and to recognizing the women who shaped it.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgementsPrefaceForeword1 Introduction: Long Ago at Sierra2 Being Gabriel Knight: Character and Research-driven Interactive Narrative3 Hidden Objects: Crafting Mystery through Dazzle and Reward4 Down Pinkerton Road: Jensen and the Adventure Game Renaissance5 Jane Jensen: In Her Own Words6 Legacy of a Writer-DesignerGameographyWorks CitedIndex