the actual in-game affordances great an architecture of loneliness

Who determines what is "interesting"? If it doesn't have the flexibility to change in the moment, do we get dimensional reporting that lacks potentially important angles that a human would pick up on? (like dimensions of race, sexuality, gender, structural bias, etc).

teaching players how to fight not how to think

I wonder what/if there any, significance to war in videos games as entertainment vs. war in novels or war in film as entertainment. The mediums have different affordances, but war has been a topic of entertainment across popular mediums for decades and centuries.

I think our experiences are always mediated, both by authorial intent and also subjective experiences that tint the experience. "Unmediated truth" sounds like a long shot to me -- "truth" about the world doesn't really exist since the truth of experience is layered with subjectivity.

I think this concept of a text "resisting" the reader or "yielding" to the reader is quite interesting. I wonder if we think that reading a book with what is characterized here as non-trivial effort (eyes moving across page, turning page) is inherent to the medium or trained behavior. In other words, do we find reading a codex to be trivial effort and traversing a hypertext fiction non-trivial effort because one really is easier to do than the other, or because we have been trained throughout our lifetimes on how to approach print codex?

I am leaning towards the latter; I think of young children and babies who can figure out how to use iPhones before they can learn to read. I also think that as the "norm" shifts, and more and more kids grow up experience narrative and storytelling thru video games and hypertext fictions, our notions of what constitutes non-trivial and trivial will change. The singular focus and dedication needed to read a codex may likely become a struggle for a generation that grows up experiencing digital media, rather than print media, as the norm.

This can be related back to Janet's Murray's essay on the affordances of digital media. Spatial was one of them, and is reflected here as well. The linear path of navigation thru the typical print media codex forks into a non-linear, spatially rendered space where the user can choose where to advance at will.

An interesting point to the sometime fleeting nature of hypertext -- in print media, there is some guarantee that my copy of Moby Dick is the same as your copy of Moby Dick. We may interpret the print book different as readers with different knowledge backgrounds, but the work presented by the author remains consistent. "Consistent" becomes variable in many hypertext environments. What are the implications for how we read, build and share knowledge?

I also wonder about what separates elit from forms like videogames or RPGs. Many games have a digital element as well as a plot, characters, motifs, etc. Does elit have to be tied to something textbased. All of the examples above seem to integrate use of an alphabet as the primary mode of understanding the work versus gameplay as the mode of experiencing/understanding.