After I wrote the piece one level up, on SimCity and Narrative, I did some keyword searches on Google and found the following essays, which I will read when I have a bit of time, learning as I go how my ideas are unoriginal, lame, and long-ago-disproven. The fun of weak scholarship!
Jorn Barger on Simulation
Chris Crawford on Narrative Synthesis.
Ted Friedman, in "Making Sense of Software: Computer Games and Interactive Textuality".
Jerome McGann (a true hero of criticism!) and Johanna Drucker (who's a very well-known expert in artist's books), now teamed up like a super-hero academic crime-fighting team, in THE IVANHOE GAME, which must be read to be believed, as it is so cool, so cool, it is tearfulmaking cool, and it has a title like an episode of Columbo, which makes it even cooler, and makes me sad I didn't go to grad school...terror strikes at the University of Virginia when 3 co-eds are found dead with carefully typeset and hand-printed notes pinned to their jackets - and the only answer to the killer's identity comes from playing The Ivanhoe Game. Jerome McGann and Johanna Drucker team up for the first time since their appearance in The Cage of Ezra Pound, working together as textual critics who must battle endless departmental meetings, fight with suspicious deans, and race time to apply their uncanny typographic-analysis skills to decode the final mysteries of The Ivanhoe Game...before another murder can occur.
Julian Kücklich's In Search of the Lost Text: Literary Theory and Computer Games.
David Glassborow and Masoud Yazdani's A Methodology for Producing Simulation-type Computer Games.
Brad Cox's Social Construction of Reality .
Michele Knobel's CRITICAL LITERACY AND NEW TECHNOLOGIES.