Nick Montfort
Associate professor of digital media
areas of expertise: interactive narrative, imaginative and poetic digital writing, material history of computational media, video and computer games
Nick Montfort's digital media writing projects include a group blog about computer narrative, poetry, games and art; the series of 256-character poetry generators; a 500-page poem written in one day; Mystery House Taken Over, a collaborative "occupation" of a classic game; Implementation, a novel on stickers written with Scott Rettberg; The Ed Report, a serialized novel written with William Gillespie; and works of interactive fiction, including Book and Volume, Ad Verbum and Winchester's Nightmare. Montfort edited The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1 with N. Katherine Hayles, Stephanie Strickland and Scott Rettberg (ELO, 2006) and The New Media Reader with Noah Wardrip-Fruin (MIT Press, 2003).
He wrote Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT Press, 2003) and, with William Gillespie, 2002: A Palindrome Story (Spineless Books, 2002), which the Oulipo acknowledged as the world's longest literary palindrome.
He is now investigating narrative variation in interactive fiction and the role of platforms in creative computing. His latest book, co-authored with Ian Bogost, is Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (MIT Press, 2009), the first book in the Platform Studies series.
request an interview: Sarah McDonnell | 617-253-8923 | s_mcd@mit.edu