In 1985, Buckles wrote “Interactive Fiction: The Computer Storygame ‘Adventure,’ ” a scholarly look at the early text-based game Adventure and the people who played it.

Buckles was hardly a devotee of the game herself, and the topic didn’t have a lot to do with her main area of study at UCSD, which was German literature, particularly poetry.

But something about players’ passionate attraction to Adventure piqued her interest.

Like other text-based games (also known as interactive fiction), Adventure is essentially a mini-novel that enlists the player as a character. Through myriad choices about where to go or what action to take next, the player determines the course of the story. —James Hebert —Mary Ann Buckles bucked academia, and found the poetry in computer games (SignOnSanDiego.com)

This story broke on Ludology.org about two years ago, and the full story appeared in the NY Times just afterwards. (Hebert duly notes this, but calls the story “brief.”)