"[A] book in the spirit of "A Commentary on the Sixth Edition Unix Operating System" that examines and explains the source code of one of the most popular video games ever made, based on the decompilation work of PRET."
html excerpt from wiley's mfa thesis: "A dungeon raid is a violent archaeology carried out within a hostile system of architecture rather than in a specific place. The “place” of a videogame dungeon lies in a form of visionary architecture, created by some imperial force positioned in a hierarchy of power that is part of a fantasy world... Adjacent to fantasy and architecture, dungeon games have an opportunity to critique history, power, place, and orientation."
"Snelson plays a wandering bard – misusing the system to produce the most unlikely of scrawls: small poems scattered across the game’s landscape. The book is a documentation of that performance in a prosody marked by the poetics of fandom. They are recorded here as movie captures, static images, and poetic texts, arranged in four parts spelling a newly coherent object."
"I’m not suggesting that Rushdie carries a picture of Mario around with him at all times, but I am suggesting he might force it into conversation in the green room of a writers’ festival, and that by the power of the novelists descriptive language, Oates would have a pretty good idea of what Mario looked like, and what his deal was. It’s possible that she might respond to a picture of Mario with “oh that’s Salman’s little friend” but I’m fairly sure she would remember the name."
the etrian odyssey motherlode (skill simulators, wikis, reference tables, patches, calculators, cheats, let's plays, etc etc etc)