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.

His hands-on knowledge of digital writing (which he teaches and performs at the same time), his almost encyclopedic yet never asphyxiating awareness of what is happening in the field, his capacity of selecting the best of what has been done, his broad-mindedness and his refusal to promote certain kind of digital writing to the expense of other ones, his extreme modesty (this is not an author who is promoting his own ideas on digital writing), as well as his perfect understanding of what the reader may be expecting from this kind of book, all these qualities make him a wonderful guide.

Historien er en meditasjon over to ulike klassiske ideer om tid: Chronos, tid slik vi fornemmer at den progressivt folder seg ut, ok Kairos, ideen om tid som sentret omkring øyeblikk av en saerlig uforanderlig betydning.