Mary Ann Buckles

Mary Ann Buckles is widely credited as the first academic to research and speculate about the emotional and cultural impact of videogames. Buckles’ dissertation, "Interactive Fiction: The Computer Storygame ‘Adventure’", gained attention twenty years after Buckles presented it to the department of German literature at the University of California, San Diego. Espen Aarseth, a researcher based in Copenhagen, is credited with raising the profile of Buckles’ dissertation, which Aarseth quotes eight times in his own book, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature.

As of 2006, Buckles works as a massage therapist in San Diego, California and was interviewed for the interactive fiction documentary, Get Lamp.