Nick Montfort

Nick Montfort is an author of literary work for the computer; he also studies the forms, functions, aesthetics, computational nature, and cultural contexts of such work and of related production in new media, digital art, and video gaming. He is completing a Ph.D. in computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania on narrative variation in interactive fiction, having earned masters degrees at MIT (in media arts and sciences) and Boston University (in creative writing — poetry). Montfort has taught undergraduate and graduate classes at three institutions and given dozens of talks to audiences with different disciplinary backgrounds. The digital media projects he has undertaken in the past seven years include the blog Grand Text Auto, where he and five others write about computer narrative, poetry, games, and art; Ream, a 500-page poem written on one day and put online as Digital Ream; Book and Volume, an interactive fiction; Mystery House Taken Over, a collaborative "occupation" of a classic game; Implementation, a novel on stickers written with Scott Rettberg; Ad Verbum, a short, award-winning interactive fiction; The Ed Report, a serialized novel written with William Gillespie; and the interactive fiction Winchester's Nightmare: A Novel Machine. Montfort's forthcoming articles include "Obfuscated Code" in the MIT Press volume Software Studies, "Narrative and Digital Media" in The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, "Fretting the Player Character" in the MIT Press book Second Person, and "Playing to solve Savoir-Faire" in the Manchester University Press book Videogame/Player/Text, and "Combat in Context" in Game Studies; his most recent publication is an article he co-authored in Science. Montfort is an editor of the Web and CD-ROM anthology The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1 (with N. Katherine Hayles, Stephanie Strickland, and Scott Rettberg, ELO, forthcoming) and of the book and CD-ROM The New Media Reader (with Noah Wardrip-Fruin, The MIT Press, 2003). He wrote the first academic book about interactive fiction, Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (The MIT Press, 2003). With William Gillespie, he wrote 2002: A Palindrome Story (Spineless Books, 2002), which was acknowledged by the Oulipo as the world's longest literary palindrome.