Acknowledgements
This webtext has benefited greatly from advice and support from Eric Monson and Angela Zoss at Duke University's Visualization & Interactive Services, and from Victoria Szabo at Duke's Information Science + Information Studies program.
The research behind this webtext stems from a postdoctoral research fellowship at Duke University, supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and from a collaborative research project, co-directed by myself and Andreas Sudmann of the Freie Universität Berlin, titled "Digital Seriality." The latter is a sub-project of the research network Popular Seriality — Aesthetics and Practice, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and based in Berlin, Hannover, and Göttingen.
I would particularly like to thank the following members of the research network for their feedback and discussion: Ruth Mayer, Andreas Sudmann, Frank Kelleter, Daniel Stein, and Felix Brinker. Thanks also to Patrick LeMieux for his advice and feedback at an early stage of this project.
The webtext has also profited from useful feedback provided by audiences who listened to various versions of this research. Thanks to the people at Duke University's Visualization Friday Forum, the Games and Interactive Media Seminar (GAIMS) and the MediaX initiative at Stanford University, as well as the organizers of the Thinking Serially conference at The Graduate Center at CUNY for providing opportunities to talk about this work.
The background image used throughout this webtext was made by Chris DeLeon and is featured here: http://www.hobbygamedev.com/int/emergent-visual-language-in-super-mario-bros-level-endings/. It was made on the basis of Ian Albert’s SMB maps: http://ian-albert.com/games/super_mario_bros_maps/. I would like to thank Chris DeLeon for permission to use his image, as well as Ian Albert for making his work freely available.
Finally, I would like to thank the editors and anonymous peer-reviewers at Kairos for their support and useful comments on an earlier draft of this webtext. Thanks in particular to Alex Reid, who provided valuable feedback during the revision process.