Notes on Janet H. Murray Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace
Key concepts: active audience, agency, chatterbot, constructivism, cyberbard, encyclopedic, hypertext, immersion, kaleidoscopic narrative, lexia, maze, moral physics, multiform story, objective correlative, object-oriented software design, participatory, procedural authorship, rhizome, scrapbook multimedia, simulation, spatial.
Connects electronic media to tradition of novels, drama, and cinema as Manovich does, foregrounding emotional aspects including fear of new representational technologies. Gives a survey of evolution and types of effects and narrative in computer games, and then hypertext fiction. Predictable introduction to Afternoon as first serious hypertext literature, then survey of virtual reality installations and computer models of plot. Computer is performance instrument expertly manipulated by cyberbard, not autonomous source of plot. Recounts ELIZA phenomenon to pose four properties of digital environments: procedural, participatory, spatial, encyclopedic. Differences between compiled and interpreted code; comparison between conversation in ELIZA and programming in Zork as reflecting human-computer relationships. Object orientation implicit in LISP facilitated the game design. Narrative constraints scripting the player necessary to create a virtual world with the available resources. Wardrip-Fruin, Bogost and many other depart from this early conclusion.
Related theorists: Bogost, Borges, Bush, Eco, Jenkins, Michael Joyce, Kolby, Laurel, Lord, Manovich, McLuhan, Minsky, Moulthrop, Nelson, Propp, Turkle, Wardrip-Fruin.
Introduction
A Book Lover Longs
for Cyberdrama
(4-5) The new theoreticians no longer
saw the novel as the “bright book of life” but as an infinite
regression of words about words about words. Joining in this
conversation involved learning a discourse as arcane as machine code,
and even farther from experience.
(5) I was at that time the
humanities faculty member in the [MIT] Experimental Study Group
(ESG), in which conventional courses were taught in an individualized
manner. . . . They believed the particular programming language they
were learning was both the brain's own secret code and a magical
method for creating anything on earth out of ordinary English words.
They saw themselves as wizards and alchemists, and the computer as a
land of enchantment.
(6) The combination of text, video, and
navigable space suggested that a computer-based microworld need not
be mathematical but could be shaped as a dynamic fictional universe
with characters and events.
(6-7) For my experience in humanities
computing has convinced me that some kinds of knowledge can be better
represented in digital formats than they have been in print. . . .
Although the computer is often accused of fragmenting information and
overwhelming us, I believe this view is a function of its current
undomesticated state. The more we cultivate it as a tool for serious
inquiry, the more it will offer itself as both an analytical and a
synthetic medium.
Anticipates new storyteller who is both hacker and bard; has the hacker motivation been shunted by availability of cultural software tools?
(9) As I watch the yearly growth in ingenuity among my students, I find myself anticipating a new kind of storyteller, one who is half hacker, half bard. The spirit of the hacker is one of the great creative wellsprings of our time, causing the inanimate circuits to sing with ever more individualized and quirky voices; the spirit of the bard is eternal and irreplaceable, telling us what we are doing here and what we mean to one another.
PART 1
A New Medium for
Storytelling
Chapter 1
Lord Burleigh's Kiss
Universal fantasy machine of Star Trek holodeck to go with Bush memex, Nelson Xanadu and other imagined equipment.
(15) The Star Trek holodeck is a universal fantasy machine, open to individual programming: a vision of the computer as a kind of storytelling genie in the lamp.
Alien Kisses
The fear accompanying new representational technologies.
(18)
The paralyzing alien kiss is the latest embodiment of the fear with
which we have greeted every powerful new representational
technology—from the bardic lyre, to the printing press, to the
secular theater, to the movie camera, to the television screen.
(18)
Aldous Huxley's Brave New
World (1932),
set six hundred years from now, describes a society that science has
dehumanized by eliminating love, parenthood, and the family in favor
of genetic engineering, test-tube delivery, and state
indoctrination.
(21) For Huxley and Bradbury, the more persuasive
the medium, the more dangerous it is. As soon as we open ourselves to
these illusory environments that are “as real as the world” or
even “more real than reality,” we surrender our reason and join
with the undifferentiated masses, slavishly wiring ourselves into the
stimulation machine at the cost of our very humanity.
Frightening future not of technologized docility but violent fragmentation; compare to Edwards cyborg narratives.
(21-22) Starting in the 1970s and 1980s, the same fears provoked by the advent of film and television began to be expressed against videogames, which added interactivity to the sensory allures of sight, sound, and motion. . . . The nightmare vision of a future totalitarian state has been replaced by the equally frightening picture of a violently fragmented world organized around cyberspace, where ruthless international corporations, secret agencies, and criminal conspiracies struggle for control.
The Thinking Woman's Feely
(25) The Star
Trek story
can be seen as a fable differentiating humane and meaningful digital
storytelling from the dehumanizing illusions that the dystopians warn
about.
(26) Eventually all successful storytelling
technologies become “transparent”: we lose consciousness of the
medium and see neither print nor film but only the power of the story
itself.
Chapter 2
Harbingers of the
Holodeck
(28) The garish
videogames and tangled Web sites of the current digital environment
are part of a similar period of technical evolution, part of a
similar struggle for the conventions of coherent communication.
(29)
Decades before the invention of the motion picture camera, the prose
fiction of the nineteenth century began to experiment with filmic
techniques.
(29) Now, in the incunabular days of the narrative
computer, we can see how twentieth-century novels, films, and plays
have been steadily pushing against the boundaries of linear
storytelling.
The Multiform Story
Multiform story presenting single situation in multiple versions has many examples prior to electronic versions.
(30)
I am using the term multiform
story to
describe a written or dramatic narrative that presents a single
situation or plotline in multiple versions, versions that would be
mutually exclusive in our ordinary experience. Perhaps the best-known
example of a multiform plot is Frank Capra's beloved Christmas story,
It's a
Wonderful Life (1946).
(30)
But for many postmodern writers, the quintessential multiform
narrative is the much darker story in Jorge Borges's “The Garden of
Forking Paths” (1941).
(34) Part of the impetus behind the
growth of the multiform story is the dizzying physics of the
twentieth century, which has told us that our common perceptions of
time and space are not the absolute truths we had been assuming them
to be.
(38) To be alive in the twentieth century is to be aware of
the alternative possible selves, of alternative possible worlds, and
of the limitless intersecting stores of the actual world.
The Active Audience
(40)
Nevertheless, calling attention to the process of creation in this
way can also enhance the narrative involvement by inviting
readers/viewers to imagine themselves in the place of the
creator.
(40-41) Although television viewers have long been
accused of being less actively engaged than readers or theatergoers,
research on fan culture provides considerable evidence that viewers
actively appropriate the stories of their favorite series.
Jenkins prosumer texual poaching makes global fanzine of WWW.
(41)
This “textual poaching,” as media critic Henry Jenkins
has called it, has become even more
widespread on the World Wide Web, which functions as a global
fanzine.
(42) Role-playing games are theatrical in a
nontraditional but thrilling way. Players are both actors and
audience for one another, and the events they portray often have the
immediacy of personal experience.
(43) In all of these gatherings,
the attraction lies in inviting the audience onto the stage, into the
realm of illusion. These are all holodeck experiences without the
machinery.
Turkle MUD studies reveal evocative environments; one day do a study of the SCA.
(44) As the social psychologist Sherry Turkle has persuasively demonstrated, MUDs are intensely “evocative” environments for fantasy play that allow people to create and sustain elaborate fictional personas over long periods of time.
Movies in Three Dimensions
(49)
The three-dimensional sound and images held out the possibility of a
dramatic art form that can juxtapose the inner and the outer life as
easily and gracefully as prose.
Riding the Movies
(49)
The “movie ride” is engineered for strong visceral effects. It
combines the surprises of the funhouse with the terrors of the roller
coaster.
(50) But the move-rides are providing evidence that
audiences are not satisfied by intense sensation alone. . . .
Developers have lately been expanding the duration of the rides and
are adding more characters and incidents to them to meet the rider's
expectation of dramatic action. Most ambitiously, they are giving the
rider more freedom to direct the ride and more opportunity to affect
the unfolding story.
Dramatic Storytelling in Electronic
Games
(51) The largest
commercial success and the greatest creative effort in digital
narrative have so far been in the area of computer games.
(52)
Although puzzle games can subordinate the story to the game play,
just as the fighting games do, many puzzle games take advantage of
this slower pace to offer a richer level of story satisfaction.
(53)
The death of Floyd [in Planetfall]
is a minor milestone on the road from puzzle gaming to an expressive
narrative art.
Strategic use of sound and music to achieve immersion in games to be like movie amusement rides.
(53-54) On the other hand, some game designers are making good use of film techniques in enhancing the dramatic power of their games. For instance, the CD-ROM game Myst (1993) achieves much of its immersive power through its sophisticated sound design. . . . The music shapes my experience into a dramatic scene, turning the act of discovery into a moment of dramatic revelation.
Story Webs
(55)
Hypertext is a set of documents of any kind (images, text, charts,
tables, video clips) connected to one another by links. Stories
written in hypertext can be divided into scrolling “pages” (as
they are on the World Wide Web) or screen-size “cards” (as they
are in a Hypercard stack), but they are best thought of as segmented
into generic chunks of information called “lexias” (or reading
units).
(55-56) The existence of hypertext has given writers a new
means of experimenting with segmentation, juxtaposition, and
connectedness.
(56) The first widely successful hypertext
narrative is The Spot,
a sexually titillating soap opera about a group of West Coast yuppies
living in a beach house who post their diary entries regularly on the
Web.
Storyspace hypertext system by Bolter and Smith designed for writing narrative as linked text blocks; look for programmer perspective.
(57)
The literary publisher Eastgate Systems distinguishes its products
from both pornographic “Web soaps” and games by calling them
“serious hypertext.” The pioneering work in this genre is Michael
Joyce's Afternoon (1987),
written in the Storyspace
hypertext system,
which he codesigned with Jay David Bolter and John Smith specifically
for the purpose of writing narrative as a set of linked text
blocks.
(58) But to the postmodern writer, confusion is not a bug
but a feature. In the jargon of the postmodern critics, Joyce is
intentionally “problematizing” our expectations of storytelling,
challenging us to construct our own text from the fragments he has
provided. . . . The architectural playfulness of Afternoon,
its construction as a series of discrete lexia linked by overlapping
paths, and the poetic shaping of its individual lexia mark it as the
first narrative to lay claim to the digital environment as a home for
serious literature in new formats.
Computer Scientists as Storytellers
Examples of virtual reality installations, AI experiments, interactive narrative demonstrate storytelling by computer scientists (Laurel and Strickland).
(59) Researchers in fields like
virtual reality and artificial intelligence, who have traditionally
looked to the military for technical challenges and funding, have
recently turned from modeling battlefields and smart weapons to
modeling new entertainment environments and new ways of creating
fictional characters.
(59-60) The bicycle interface [at Mitsubishi
Electronics Research Laboratory] acts like the vehicles in a
movie-ride in that it makes the distances seen on the screen seem
much more concrete by tying the visual movement to a kinetic
environment. However, here the world is not built for adrenaline
rushes but for socializing exploration.
(60-61) One of the most
intriguing such installations is the Placeholder
world
created by Brenda Laurel
and
Rachel Strickland for Interval Research Corporation in California.
Laurel, who holds the world's first Ph.D. in interactive narrative,
has been designing games and user interfaces since the 1970s. . . .
Once inside the Placeholder world, they can enter the bodies of
virtual animals and move as they move.
(61) Perhaps the least
encumbered holodeck experience available right now is in front of the
twelve-foot computer screen set up by the ALIVE project of MIT's
Media Lab as a “magic mirror” in which interactors see their own
reflection placed beside the cartoon images of virtual characters
designed in the lab.
(62) When the Media Lab setup is not in use
for these advanced projects, graduate students play Doom
by
projecting its cavelike landscape on the screen and standing in front
of it holding a plastic gun.
(62) In addition to creating vivid
virtual worlds we can enter and fictional characters we can interact
with, researchers are also developing complex computer models of
plot.
(64)
Judging from the current landscape, we can expect a continued
loosening of the traditional boundaries between games and stories,
between films and rides, between broadcast media (like television and
radio) and archival media (like books or videotape), between
narrative forms (like books) and dramatic forms (like theater or
film), and even between the audience and the author.
Chapter 3
From Additive to Expressive Form
Beyond
“Multimedia”
(66) As in
the case of the printing press, the invention of the camera led to a
period of incunabula, of “cradle films.” . . . The key to this
development was seizing on the unique physical properties of
film.
(67) The equivalent of the filmed play of the early 1900s is
the multimedia scrapbook (on CD-ROM or as a “site” on the World
Wide Web), which takes advantage of the novelty of computer delivery
without utilizing its intrinsic properties.
(68) Therefore, if we
want to see beyond the current horizon of scrapbook multimedia, it is
important first to identify the essential properties of digital
environments, that is, the qualities comparable to the variability of
the lens, the movability of the camera, and the editability of film
that will determine the distinctive power and form of a mature
electronic narrative art.
ELIZA Comes to Life
(71)
Weizenbaum had set out to make a clever computer program and had
unwittingly created a believable character. He was so disconcerted by
his achievement that he wrote a book warning of the dangers of
attributing human thought to machines.
The Four Essential Properties of Digital Environments
Digital
Environments Are Procedural
Weizenbaum ELIZA demonstrated procedural property of digital environments.
(72) Weizenbaum stands as the earliest, and still perhaps the
premier, literary artist in the computer medium because he so
successfully applied procedural thinking to the behavior of a
psychotherapist in a clinical interview.
(73-74) The lesson of
ELIZA is that the computer can be a compelling medium for
storytelling if we can write rules for it that are recognizable as an
interpretation of the world. The challenge for the future is how to
make such rule writing as available to writers as musical notation is
to composers.
Digital
Environment Are Participatory
(74)
This is what is most often meant when we say that computers are
interactive.
We mean they create an environment that is both procedural and
participatory.
(75) In making a fantasy world that responded to
typed commands, the programmers were in part celebrating their
pleasure in the increasingly responsive computing environments at
their disposal.
Differences between compiled and interpreted code to introduce participatory property of digital environments.
(76) Compiling your code before running it is like writing a book and then hiring someone to translate it for your readers. Using an interpreter is the equivalent of giving a speech with simultaneous translation. It provides more direct feedback from the machine and a more rapid cycle of trail and revision and retrial. . . . Running LISP on a time-sharing system meant that its dynamic “interpreter” could immediately “return” an “evaluation” of any coded statement you typed into it.
Comparison between conversation in ELIZA and programming in Zork as reflecting human-computer relationships.
(76-77) Whereas ELIZA captured the conversational nature of the programmer-machine relationship, Zork transmuted the intellectual challenge and frustrations of programming into a mock-heroic quest filled with enemy trolls, maddening dead ends, vexing riddles, and rewards for strenuous problem solving. . . . In order to succeed, you must orchestrate your actions carefully and learn from repeated trial and error. In the early versions there was no way to save a game in midplay, and therefore a mistake meant repeating the entire correct procedure from the beginning. In a way, the computer was programming the player.
Object orientation implicit in LISP facilitated the game design; also discusses demon processes.
(78) Because LISP programmers were
among the first to practice what is now called object-oriented
software design, they were well prepared to create a magical place
like the world of Zork.
That is, it came naturally to them to create virtual objects such as
swords or bottles because they were using a programming language that
made it particularly easy to define new objects and categories of
objects, each with its own associated properties and procedures.
(78)
In fact, most interactive narrative written today still follows a
simple branching structure, which limits the interactor's choices to
a selection of alternatives from a fixed menu of some kind.
Narrative constraints scripting the player necessary to create a virtual world with the available resources; Wardrip-Fruin, Bogost and many other depart from this early conclusion.
(79) The lesson of Zork is that the first step in making an enticing narrative world is to script the interactor. . . . By using these literary and gaming conventions to constrain the players' behaviors to a dramatically appropriate but limited set of commands, the designers could focus their inventive powers on making the virtual world as responsive as possible to every possible combination of these commands.
Digital Environments Are
Spatial
(79-80)
Linear media such as books and films can portray space, either bay
verbal description or image, but only digital environments can
present space that we can move through. . . . We recognize the fruit
of all of these developments in our conceptualization of the digital
domain as “cyberspace,” an environment with its own geography in
which we experience a change of documents on our screen as a visit to
a distant site on a worldwide web.
Spatial characteristic of digital environments due to both screen display and interactor navigation.
(80)
The computer's spatial quality is created by the interactive process
of navigation.
(82) The computer screen is displaying a story that
is also a place.
(83) The interactor's navigation of virtual space
has been shaped into a dramatic enactment of plot. We are immobilized
in the dungeon, we spiral around with the insomniac, we collide into
a lexia that shatters like a bomb site. These are the opening steps
in an unfolding digital dance. The challenge for the future is to
invent
an increasingly graceful choreography of navigation
to
lure the interactor through ever more expressive narrative
landscapes.
Digital Environments Are
Encyclopedic
(84)
Just as important as this huge capacity of electronic media is the
encyclopedic expectation they induce. . . . It is as if the modern
version of the great library of Alexandria, which contained all the
knowledge of the ancient world, is about to rematerialize in the
infinite expanses of cyberspace.
Encyclopedic characteristic of digital environments evidenced by fan culture.
(84-85) One early indication of the suitability of epic-scale
narrative to digital environments is the active electronic fan
culture surrounding popular television drama series. As an adjunct to
the serial broadcasting of these series, the Internet functions as a
giant bulletin board on which long-term story arcs can be plotted and
episodes from different seasons juxtaposed and compared.
(85) But
as the Internet becomes a standard adjunct of broadcast television,
all program writers and producers will be aware of a more
sophisticated audience, one that can keep track of the story in
greater detail and over longer periods of time. . . . In some ways,
television dramas seem to be outgrowing broadcast delivery
altogether.
(87) Not only does the weblike structure of cyberspace
allow for endless expansion possibilities within the fictional world,
but in the context of a worldwide web of information these
intersecting stories can twine around and through nonfictional
documents of real life and make the borders of the fictional universe
seem limitless.
(87) Most of what is delivered in hypertext format
over the World Wide Web, both fiction and nonfiction, is merely
linear writing with table-of-contents links in it. . . . The
conventions of segmentation and navigation have not been established
well enough for hypertext in general, let alone for narrative.
Authority of constraints bestowed by programmed environment create illusion of complete coverage, but hide political and design assumptions as SimCity critics point out.
(88)
Simulations like these take advantage of the authority bestowed by
the computer environment to seem more encyclopedically inclusive than
they really are. As its critics pointed out, the political
assumptions behind SimCity
are
hidden from the player. . . . Nevertheless, the basic competitive
premise of the game is not emphasized as an interpretive
choice.
(89-90) But the encyclopedic capacity of the computer can
distract us from asking why things work the way they do and why we
are being asked to play one role rather than another. . . . We do not
yet have much practice in identifying the underlying values of a
multiform story.
Digital Structures of Complexity
Rehearses the story of Bush Memex and Nelson Xanadu.
(91) This earliest
version of hypertext reflects the classic American quest—a charting
of the wilderness, an imposition of order over chaos, and the mastery
of vast resources for concrete, practical purposes.
(91) He
[Nelson] sees associated organization as a model of his own creative
and distractible consciousness, which he describes as a form of
“hummingbird mind.” . . . Nelson's vision of hypertext is akin to
William Faulkner's description of novel writing as a futile but noble
effort to get the entire world into one sentence.
Eliot objective correlative for capturing emotional experience in cluster of events in literary works; how this operates in hypermeida an gamelike features of simulation remains unstudied and incunabular.
(93) T.S. Eliot
used the term objective correlative to
describe the way in which clusters of events in literary works can
capture emotional experience. . . . The more we see life in terms of
systems, the more we need a system-modeling medium to represent
it—and the less we can dismiss such organized rule systems as mere
games.
(93) Current narrative applications overexploit the
digressive possibilities of hypertext and the gamelike features of
simulation, but that is not surprising in an incunabular medium.
(94)
Every expressive medium has its own unique patterns of desire; its
own way of giving pleasure, of creating beauty, of capturing what we
feel to be true about life; its own aesthetic. One of the functions
of early artifacts is to awaken the public to these new desires, to
create the demand for an intensification of the particular pleasures
the medium has to offer.
PART II
The Aesthetics of the
Medium
Chapter 4
Immersion
(98)
A stirring narrative in any medium can be experienced as a virtual
reality because our brains are programmed to tune into stories with
an intensity that can obliterate the world around us. . . . It is
what made Cervantes' contemporaries fear the new fad of silent
reading.
Learning to swim in participatory immersive environments.
(98-99) The experience of being transported to an elaborately simulated place is pleasurable in itself, regardless of the fantasy content. We refer to this experience as immersion. . . . But in a participatory medium, immersion implies learning to swim, to do the things that the new environment makes possible.
Entering the Enchanted Place
Turkle research on psychology of cyberspace claims uninhibited access to emotions, thoughts, behaviors closed in real life.
(99)
As Sherry Turkle documents
in her perceptive research on the psychology of cyberspace, working
on the computer can give us uninhibited access to emotions, thoughts,
and behaviors that are closed to us in real life.
(100) Because
the liminal trance is so inherently fragile, all narrative art forms
have developed conventions to sustain it. One of the most important
ways they have done this has been to prohibit participation.
(101)
Whether or not it is destructive to art, audience participation is
also very awkward. . . . When we enter the enchanted world as our
actual selves, we risk draining it of its delicious otherness.
Finding the Border
(103)
Part of the early work in any medium is the exploration of the border
between the representational world and the actual world.
(105) In
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was common to play with
the borders of the illusion by presenting a novel as a collection of
actual letters.
Structuring Participation as a
Visit
(106) For purposes of
experiencing multisensory immersion, one of the simplest ways to
structure participation is to adopt the format of a visit.
The Active Creation of Belief
(111)
Such immersive stories invite our participation by offering us many
things to keep track of and by rewarding our attention with a
consistency of imagination.
(112) The great advantage of
participatory environments in creating immersion is their capacity to
elicit behavior that endows the imaginary objects with life.
Structuring Participation with a
Mask
(112) Historically,
spectacle tends to move toward participatory narrative in order to
retain our attention, to lengthen the immersive experience. For
instance, in the Middle Ages, the rituals of the church were extended
into a folk dramatic form.
(113) In digital environments we can
put on a mask by acting through an avatar.
(113) Virtual reality
technology can offer a new kind of costuming and pageantry. Brenda
Laurel and Rachel Strickland have devised “smart costumes” for
the virtual playground called Placeholder.
(114)
Smart costumes and social avatars are encouraging steps in the
direction of a more expressive and less gun-crazy medium.
Structuring Collective Participation with Roles
Regulating Arousal
(119)
the objects of the imaginary world should not be too enticing, scary,
or real lest the immersive trance be broken.
(121) One solution to
the need for boundaries and conventions in participatory narrative is
to focus on exhibitionism rather than on simulated sex.
Discussion of LARP mechanics regulating arousal suggest study the SCA as real virtual reality.
(122)
In live-action role-playing games, the narrative conventions that
control the boundary between the real world and the illusion are
called “mechanics.” LARP mechanics are
a kind of abstract mimicry for behaviors that would otherwise require
props, danger, or physical involvement.
(125) The computer is
providing us with a new stage for the creation of participatory
theater. We are gradually learning to do what actors do, to enact
emotionally authentic experiences that we know are not “real.”
Chapter 5
Agency
Aesthetic pleasure of agency, pleasures of navigation, story in mazes (Borges pullulating web), rapture of rhizome are characteristics of electronic narratives and games.
(128-129) Agency, then, goes beyond both participation and activity. As an aesthetic pleasure, as an experience to be savored for its own sake, it is offered to a limited degree in traditional art forms but is more commonly available in the structured activities we call games. Therefore, when we move narrative to the computer, we move it to a realm already shaped by the structures of games. Can we imagine a compelling narrative literature that builds on these game structures without being diminished by them? Or are we merely talking about an expensive way to rewrite Hamlet for the pinball machine?
The Pleasures of Navigation
(130)
Electronic environments offer the pleasure of orienteering in two
very different configurations, each of which carries its own
narrative power: the solvable maze and the tangled rhizome.
The Story in the Maze
(130)
The adventure maze embodies a classic fairy-tale narrative of danger
and salvation.
(131) In the right hands a maze story could be a
melodramatic adventure with complex social subtexts. For instance,
instead of a fairy tale palace it could be set in a Kafkaesque city
where the secret police are rounding up and deporting citizens with
the wrong kind of papers.
(132) However, there is a drawback to
the maze orientation: it moves the interactor toward a single
solution, toward finding the one way out. . . . We want the
“pullulating” web that Borges described, constantly bifurcating,
with every branch deeply explorable.
Rapture of the Rhizome
(132)
Deleuze used the rhizome root system as a model of connectivity in
systems of ideas; critics have applied this notion to allusive text
systems that are not linear like a book but boundaryless and without
closure.
(133) The indeterminate structure of these hypertexts
frustrates our desire for narrational agency, for using the act of
navigation to unfold a story that flows from our own meaningful
choices.
(134) The boundlessness of the rhizome experience is
crucial to its comforting side.
Giving Shape to Anxiety
(135)
The key to creating an expressive fictional labyrinth is arousing and
regulating the anxiety intrinsic to the form by harnessing it to the
act of navigation.
(137) The multithreaded web story achieves
coherent dramatic form by shaping our terror into a pattern of
exploration and discovery.
The Journey Story and the Pleasure
of Problem Solving
(138) On
the computer the journey story emphasizes navigation—the
transitions between different places, the arrivals and departures—and
the how-to's and the hero's repeated escapes from danger.
(139)
The most dramatically satisfying puzzles are those that encourage the
interactor to apply real-world thinking to the virtual world.
Games into Stories
(140)
In fact, narrative satisfaction can be directly opposed to game
satisfaction, as the endings of Myst,
widely hailed as the most artistically successful story puzzle of the
early 1990s, make clear.
Games as Symbolic Dramas
(142)
Every game, electronic or otherwise, can be experienced as a symbolic
drama.
(143) In games, therefore, we have a chance to enact our
most basic relationship to the world—our desire to prevail over
adversity, to survive our inevitable defeats, to shape our
environment, to master complexity, and to make our lives fit together
like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Each move in a game is like a
plot event in one of these simple but compelling stories.
(143-144)
Games can also be read as texts that offer interpretations of
experience. . . . Instead of keeping what you build, as you would in
a conventional jigsaw puzzle, in Tetris everything you bring to a
shapely completion is swept away from you. Success means just being
able to keep up with the flow. This game is a perfect enactment of
the overtasked lives of Americans in the 1990s.
Games as symbolic dreams include interesting interpretation of Tetris as enactment of overtasked American lives and rain dance of postmodern psyche.
(144) Tetris
allows us to symbolically experience agency over our lives. It is a
kind of rain dance for the postmodern psyche, meant to allow us to
enact control over things outside our power.
(144-145) The
violence and simplistic story structure of computer skill games are
therefore a good place to examine the possibilities for building upon
the intrinsic symbolic content of gaming to make more expressive
narrative forms.
The Context Story
(145)
The most common form of game—the agon, or contest between
opponents—is also the earliest form of narrative.
(146) These
gaming conventions orient the interactor and make the action
coherent. They are equivalent to a novelist's care with point of view
or a director's attention to staging.
(147) the moral impact of
enacting an opposing role is a promising sign of the serious dramatic
potential of the fighting game.
(147) We need to find substitutes
for shooting off a gun that will offer the same immediacy of effect
but allow for more complex and engaging story content.
Constructivism
(148-149)
Since objects in a text-based MUD are made out of programming code
and words, there is no limit to what can be called into being within
the virtual world. . . . The constructivist pleasure is the highest
form of narrative agency the medium allows, the ability to build
things that display autonomous behavior.
(149) As computer access
spreads, it is likely that more and more people will turn from
win/lose game playing to the collective construction of elaborate
alternate worlds.
Constructivism exemplar MMORPGs virtually instantiate the well-run LARP game; how does her prediction fit with decline in popularity of Second Life and rise of casual construction games?
(151) Perhaps the
most successful model for combining player agency with narrative
coherence is a well-run LARP game.
(152) Producing such systems
will require the union of computer science expertise with
participatory storytelling artistry.
The Interactor as Author
Attribution of procedural authorship by interactor mistakes agency in digital narrative for content and game mechanics creation.
(152-153)
Authorship in electronic media is procedural. Procedural
authorship means writing the
rules by which the texts appear as well as writing the texts
themselves. . . . The procedural author creates not just a set of
scenes but a world of narrative possibilities.
(153) Contemporary
critics are attributing authorship to interactors because they do not
understand the procedural basis of electronic composition. The
interactor is not the author of the digital narrative, although the
interactor can experience one of the most exciting aspects of
artistic creation - the thrill of exerting power over enticing and
plastic materials. This is not authorship but agency.
Chapter
6
Transformation
Kaleidoscopic Narrative
(155-156)
As Marshall McLuhan pointed
out, the communications media of the twentieth century are mosaic
rather than linear in structure, as
compared to the printed book.
(156) The computer presents us with
the spatial mosaic of the newspaper page, the temporal mosaic of
film, and the participatory mosaic of TV remote control. But even
while it combines the confusing multiplicity of these mosaic media,
the computer offers new ways of mastering fragmentation.
(157) One
the computer we can lay out all the simultaneous actions in one grid
and then allow the interactor to navigate among them. We can have the
expansiveness of the novel with the rapid intercutting of the
film.
(160-161) By experiencing such interwoven stories as one
unit, we can enhance the kaleidoscopic capacity of our minds, our
capacity to imagine life from multiple points of view.
Kaleidoscopic subjectivity may be emerging transformation facilitated by computer media experience from print based single perspective fixity.
(161-162) We no longer believe in a single reality, a single integrating view of the world, or even the reliability of a single angle of perception. Yet we retain the core human desire to fix reality on one canvas, to express all of what we see in an integrated and shapely manner. The solution is the kaleidoscopic canvas that can capture the world as it looks from many perspective—complex and perhaps ultimately unknowable but still coherent.
Morphing Story Environments
Virtual
Reality in Haworth Parsonage
(166)
The regressive, violent, overheated emotional universe of the young
Brontes is very like the narrative world of many electronic
games.
(169) Projection of highly personal (but universally felt)
emotional content onto the figures of the formulaic story moves the
content into a field where it is safe to think about it. . . .
Because the fantasy has been externalized, it can be manipulated. . .
. The experience of closure here may not be in the beauty of the
particular story but in the completeness of engagement with the whole
range of story possibilities.
(169) D. W. Winnicott described a
similar process of imaginative “saturation” in children's play. .
. . As a society we use television series in much the same way,
asking them to present us with situations that are particularly
frightening or appealing and that we have not yet assimilated into
our national consciousness. The programs assemble formulaic
characters and situations that express our anxieties and desires and
then offer variations on the patterns.
Enactment as a Transformational Experience
Compare transformative power of enactment in virtual realities to Gee projective identity.
(170-171) Enacted
events have a transformative power that exceeds both narrated and
conventionally dramatized events because we assimilate them as
personal experiences. The emotional impact of enactment within an
immersive environment is so strong that virtual reality installations
have been found to be effective for psychotherapy. . . . The inner
changes brought on by such experiential learning then allow them to
apply the same behaviors to the real world.
(173) The goal of
mature fictional environments should not be to exclude antisocial
material but to include it in a form in which it can be engaged,
remodeled, and worked through.
Refused Closure
(174)
The question of confused extent and refused closure is explicitly
posed by Michael Joyce in his hypertext novel Afternoon,
which has no overview of contents and no clearly marked ending.
(175)
The refusal of closure is always, at some level, a refusal to face
mortality. Our fixation on electronic games and stories is in part an
enactment of this denial of death.
Tragedy in Electronic Narrative
The
Mind as Tragic Labyrinth
(177)
A labyrinthine hypertext might be the ideal medium for capturing the
interior monologue as a sort of snapshot of the mind itself.
The Web of Mourning
Simulation and Destiny
Can there be sense of tragic inevitability in digital narrative, Eco sense of destiny, thinking of Ryan?
(178) Could a digital narrative offer a higher degree of agency while
still preserving the sense of tragic inevitability? Can we have an
interactive story that still retains what Umberto Eco calls its sense
of destiny?
(179-180) What is more, a digital narrative could
capture something we have not been able to fix as clearly in linear
formats: not just a tragic hero or a tragic choice but a tragic
process.
The Multipositional View
(181)
On the computer we can reenter the story and experience more than one
run of the same simulation. We can play all the parts, exhaust all
the possible outcomes.
PART III: Procedural Authorship
Chapter 7
The Cyberbard and the
Multiform Plot
(186) Many
narrative theorists and writers have insisted that there are a
limited number of plots in the world, corresponding to the basic
patterns of desire, fulfillment, and loss in human life. . . . Ronald
B. Tobias, in one of the more competent of the many guidebook for
writers, suggests there are twenty “master plots” in all of
literature.
The Oral Bard as a Storytelling
System
(190) But even if a
verbal substitution system cannot by itself produce satisfying and
coherent digital narratives, it is a useful model for establishing
the “primitives” or basic building blocks of a story construction
system.
(190) Today's interaction conventions are equivalent to
the invention of a few useful epithets for the gods and heroes, basic
tools that every storyteller but needs but not enough to get you far
with a particular tale.
(191) The next level of patterning after
the stock phrase in the bardic storytelling method is what Lord
refers to as the theme, that is, a generic narrative unit that can be
fit into multiple narratives, a unit such as the departure of a hero,
the catalog of ships, the dressing of a hero for battle, the boast of
a hero before battle, and the death of a hero.
(192) Genre fiction
is appropriate for electronic narrative because it scripts the
interactor.
(192) A mature narrative tradition will take advantage
of this common base of formulas to refine the scripts, to offer the
interactor a richer range of behaviors.
Bardic recreations from underlying pattern better model for cybertexts than fixed work model of print texts; authorship also shifts from individual performer, as IT integration, to milieu of working code.
(194) But what it conserves is not a single particular performance but the underlying patterns from which the bards can create multiple varied performances. Their success in combining the satisfactions of a coherent plot with the pleasures of endless variation is therefore a provocative model of what we might hope to achieve in cyberspace. To do so we must reconceptualize authorship, in the same way Lord did, and think of it not as the inscribing of a fixed written text but as the invention and arrangement of the expressive patterns that constitute a multiform story.
Vladimir Propp and the Bardic
Algorithm
(197) When he
finished analyzing all the extant tales, Propp was able to summarize
all the variants of the Russian folktale in one inclusive
representation. His work suggests that satisfying stories can be
generated by substituting and rearranging formulaic units according
to rules as precise as a mathematical formula.
The Computer as Storyteller
(198)
Several kinds of abstract schema have been proposed by computer
scientists as ways of representing stories, many of them based on a
model of story structure grounded in cognitive theory. Most of these
systems, however, have an unnervingly reductive quality to the
humanist.
(201) One way of avoiding the arduous task of teaching
the computer to understand the world well enough to make such
aesthetic judgments is to code very specific story elements in terms
of their dramatic function.
CMU Oz group envisioned by Stephenson in Diamond Age.
(202) The Oz group [at CMU] is attempting to create a system that a writer could use to tell stories that would include an interactor, a story world with its own objects, computer-based characters who act autonomously, and a story controller that would shape the experience from the perspective of the interactor.
The Shaping Role of the Human Storyteller
Computer is performance instrument expertly manipulated by cyberbard following moral physics, not autonomous source of plot.
(207) Since plot
is a function of causality, it is crucial to reinforce the sense that
the interactor's choices have led to the events of the story. . . .
Stories have to have an equivalent “moral physics,” which
indicates what consequences attach to actions, who is rewarded, who
is punished, how fair the world is.
(207-208) By generating
multiple stories that look very different on the surface but that
derive from the same underlying moral physics, an author-directed
cyberdrama could offer an encyclopedic fictional world whose
possibilities would only be exhausted at the point of the
interactor's saturation with the core conflict. The plots would have
coherence not from the artificial intelligence of the machine but
from the conscious selection, juxtaposition, and arrangement of
elements by the author for whom the procedural power of the computer
makes it merely a new kind of performance instrument.
The Coming Cyberbard
(208) Since the
writer's task is analogous to composing a multi-instrument musical
performance, what is needed is a system for specifying story motifs
that is as precise as musical notation and that works something like
the packages now available for arranging music, that is, by letting
the author specify one part at a time and then try out the
combinations and make appropriate adjustments.
(210-211) But
suppose we attempted to use the powerful abstraction tool of the
frame to represent not the infinitely describable real world but the
very limited domains of genre fiction.
(211) The writer would
create no only frames to represent all the possible thematic
morphemes of the genre but also plot frames to specify all the ways
they could be arranged for a single interactor. These frames might
include a “mode” terminal containing substitution rules that
would allow the same generic elements to be assembled in very
different styles.
Compare and contrast cyberbard, cybersage, evacuated individuality argued by Kittler.
(213) None of these formats puts the processing power of the computer directly into the hands of the writer. . . . It seems to me quite possible that a future digital Homer will arise who combines literary ambition, a connection with a wide audience, and computational expertise. But for now we have to listen very, very carefully to hear, amid the cacophony of cyberspace, the first fumbling chords of the awakening bard.
Chapter
8
Eliza's Daughters
Chatterbots
(215)
Probably the most famous of Eliza's daughters is the virtuoso
character known as Julia, developed by Michael Maudlin of Carnegie
Mellon University. Julia is a “chatterbot,” a text-based
character like Eliza who carries on conversations with the people
around her. Julia was built to live on MUDs, and she has many
agreeable social behaviors: she plays the card game hearts, keeps
track of other inhabitants, relays messages, remembers things, and
gossips.
(217) In order to make query systems succeed, one must
limit their domain of expertise and then anticipate the many ways in
which questions might be asked.
(219) A conversation with a
chatterbot is a kind of improvised skit between human and
computer-controlled actors. A successful chatterbot author must
therefore script the interactor as well as the program, must
establish a dramatic framework in which the human interactor knows
what kinds of things to say and is genuinely curious about how the
chatterbot might respond.
Authorship of
Chatterbots
(220) For any
chatterbot, the test of coherency is how it deals with the inevitable
problem that arises when the interator's utterance contains no key
word.
(222) Computer characters who can carry on persuasive
conversations could be an expressive narrative genre in themselves,
as well as compelling elements in a larger fictional world.
Modeling the
Inner Life
(225-226)
[Psychoanalyst Kenneth] Colby was influenced by theories of
cybernetics as well as by Freud in designing his model, and his
program traces the patient's moment-to-moment state of mind (as
expressed in numbers representing degrees of anxiety, excitation,
pleasure, self-esteem, and well-being) through intricate feedback
mechanisms that regulate the degree of distortion applied to any
potential statement. . . . Since the goal of the interaction is to
enable the simulated patient to express her hatred of her father
directly and thereby abandon her neurotic belief system, Colby can be
credited as the first person to conceive of an automated fictional
character with an inner self that is capable of change and growth.
Goal-Based
Critters
(226-227) Leading
engineers turned from building all-encompassing centrally controlled
systems to designing worlds made from a collection of “intelligent
agents,” each of whom was pursuing its own goals. This change in
computer architecture has an equivalent effect for the creation of
digital narrative. It is as if computer scientists stopped trying to
build a world by coming up with an omniscient storyteller and decided
instead to create it out of a collection of autonomous
characters.
(230-231) His [Oz group's Lyotard virtual cat] inner
life is built on an intricate but precise calculus in which events
are compared against goals, actions are compared against standards,
and objects are compared against attitudes; Lyotard's psyche is a
giant emotional algebra equation in which all the values are changing
all the time. . . . A Tolstoy of the next century could hardly model
Anna Karenina's conflict between her love for the passionate Vronsky
and her love of her son by setting a panel of affect sliders and
filling in a template with her goals and standards.
(232) In other
words, Lyotard's most dramatically interesting behavior arises from a
specific personality structure the authors improvised, on top of the
more generic model, just for him.
(233) We need to place the
formulaic elements, the stenciled images, within an idiosyncratic
arrangement based not on science but on an interpretation of the
world.
Multicharacter
Environments
(235) In other
words, in addition to performing one's own character's repertoire of
actions, deploying them appropriately and responding to the other
characters in a multicharacter world, one must have a way of
synchronizing these individual actions with the general action so
that one is presented with a coherent picture.
(237) With this
degree of formulaic patterning in mind, it becomes possible to think
of generating scenes between procedurally described characters.
Pulling the Strings of the Digital Puppet
Emergence as Animation
Cybernetic paradigms from central command, finite state automata, to decentered emergent systems require shifting paradigms of analysis.
(240)
In the first cybernetic models, systems were thought of as being
under a central command structure, like a thermostat, and computer
programs were built in simple hierarchies with one master program
that controlled other programs, or subroutines. Later systems were
often based on the notion of a “finite state automaton” that
chugged from one complex state to another in sequences that could be
charted in an neat map of circles connected by lines. But as our
models of the world have become more complex, systems have become
decentered: their processing operations are distributed among many
entities, none of which is in central control, and the possible
states of the system as a whole are no longer thought of as finite.
The new emergent systems have reached such a degree of intricacy that
they are their own description; there is no other way to predict
everything they are likely to do than to run them in every possible
configuration.
(243) What we look for in a created character is
not mere surprise but revelation. . . . A truly round character would
surprise the interactor by acting in a way that is consistent with
its known behavior but that takes it to a new level.
(245-246)
Such modest incunabular creatures may seem hopelessly far from what
we can achieve with Forster's “word masses,” but they are
nonetheless part of the same effort at understanding what it means to
be human. Twentieth-century science has taught us that an important
part of the answer to that question lies in understanding how complex
systems like the ones the computer can embody for us resemble living
things. . . . With oddly celebratory bravado, the computer scientist
Marvin Minsky is found of proclaiming that human brains, in
fact, human beings altogether, are simply “meat machines.”
But if we are merely meat machines, how are we to value ourselves and
one another?
(246-247) Digital dogs and cats invert the notion of
a meat machine by turning an automaton into a pet. They make the idea
of the mechanical less frightening by bringing it into our cultural
space and domesticating it, just as our distant ancestors made the
frightening world of the beasts less so by turning the wolf into a
watchdog.
PART IV: New Beauty, New Truth
Chapter
9
Digital TV and the Emerging Formats of Cyberdrama
(252)
Although science fiction and fantasy narratives will always remain
strong in cyberspace, the documentary elements of the Web—the
family albums, travel diaries, and visual autobiographies of the
current environment—are pushing digital narrative closer to the
mainstream.
The
Hyperserial: TV Meets the Internet
(253)
The merger that Nicholas Negroponte has long been predicting is upon
us: the computer, television, and telephone are becoming a single
home appliance.
(254) The more closely the new home digital medium
is wedded to television, the more likely it will be that its major
form of storytelling will be the serial drama.
(254) Probably the
first steps toward a new hypererial
format
will be the close integration of a digital archive, such as a Web
site, with a broadcast television program.
(257) The encyclopedic
capacity of the computer allows for storytelling on the Faulknerian
scale and invites writers to come up with similar contextualizing
devices—color-coded paths, time lines, family trees, maps, clocks,
calendars, and so on—to enable the viewer to grasp dense
psychological and cultural spaces without becoming disoriented.
(258)
The ending of a hyperserial would not be a single note, as in a
standard adventure drama, but a resolving chord, the sensation of
several overlapping viewpoints coming into focus.
Mobile Viewer
Movies
(259) Glorianna
Davenport's Interactive Cinema Group at the MIT Media Lab has come up
with several graceful alternate presentation styles in which a
continuous movie plays before the viewer, offering automatic default
sequences when no choice is made or responding to the suggestive
positioning of a cursor by displaying an appropriate alternative
selection in a non-interruptive, seamless manner.
(260) This
multidirectional audio, an enhancement of existing sound technology,
would serve to make the perception of three-dimensional space much
more concrete.
(260) This mobile viewer format would be very well
suited to the current television genre of the problem drama, which
addresses a socially charged issue, like racism or abortion, on which
viewers hold very different views.
(261) The creation of a
commentary space within the fictional universe would put the viewer
in the role of a member of a Greek chorus, a sounding board for the
concerns of the protagonists.
Virtual Places
and Fictional Neighborhoods
(262-263)
In the next decade, as the dungeons and forests of the MUDs are
translated from words into three-dimensional images, more and more
users may find themselves residing in such shared fantasy
kingdoms.
(264) Gradually these lushly realized places will turn
from spectacle experiences to dramatic stages. We will move from the
pleasures of immersion and navigational agency to increasingly active
and transformational experiences.
(265) Rebel
Assault is
even more exciting because it allows players to have their own
adventures, parallel to those in the movies and carefully woven into
the same event sequence and time frame.
(265) As 3-D environments
become more detailed, children and adolescents will be increasingly
drawn into virtual environments that function as satellites of the
communities described in movies, comic books, and, most compellingly,
broadcast television series.
Role-Playing in an Authored World
(266)
Multiuser worlds without such external authoring run into trouble in
establishing the boundaries of the illusion.
(267) A cyberdrama
that combines a strong central story with active role-playing would
need clear conventions to separate the area in which the interactors
are free to invent their own actions from areas over which they
cannot expect to have control.
(269) Highly ritualized
interactions can actually increase the participants' freedom, rather
than limiting it, by offering them more choices of coherent
action.
(270-271) Solo play would allow the interactor to explore
all the stories within the limits of the world and to play all the
parts until they had exhausted all the possibilities of personal
imaginative engagement within a nostalgically charged situation.
Although the connective and collaborative pleasures of the digital
environment are the focus of much current attention, the private
pleasures, like those of reading, are also likely to continue to
attract us. As a domain in which we can actively participate in a
responsive environment without consequence in the real world, the
desktop story would may, like the novel, engage our most compelling
transformational fantasies.
The Emerging Cyberdrama
Over a decade later this prediction has not been realized; instead, non-immersive social media forms an accompaniment rather than replacement reality.
(271-272) As the virtual world takes on increasing expressiveness, we will slowly get used to living in a fantasy environment that now strikes us as frighteningly real. But at some point we will find ourselves looking through the medium instead of at it. . . . At that point, when the medium itself melts away into transparency, we will be lost in the make-believe and care only about the story.
Chapter
10
Hamlet on the Holodeck
(274)
The real literary hierarchy is not of medium but of meaning.
(274)
I am asking if we can hope to capture in cyberdrama something as true
to the human condition, as as beautifully expressed, as the life that
Shakespeare captured on the Elizabethan stage.
Procedural
Authority
(275) Just as we
have only recently learned to think of the solitary reader as playing
an active role through imaginative engagement with the story, so too
are we just beginning to understand that the interactor in digital
environments can be the recipient of an externally authored
world.
(276) Cyberdramatists will exercise authorial control
through the techniques of procedural authorship, which would let them
dictate not just the words and images of the story but they rules by
which the words and images would appear.
Traditions of
Virtuosity
(278) The stories
that people make up collaboratively in virtual environments are of
this tribal nature; they may seem trite or derivative to an outsider,
but they can be riveting and emotionally resonant for the
participants.
Formulaic
Invention and Originality
(278-279)
Literary stereotypes are like rough sketches of the world, which the
next generation of the more capable artist can modify and elaborate.
. . . Formulaic entertainment and form-shattering art are both
embedded in a cultural repertoire for story patterns. Electronic
narrative will only translate that repertoire into a new arena.
New Beauty, New Truth
Her vision of Hamlet on the holodeck is stories emerging from whole system simulation.
(280-281)
The most ambitious promise of the new narrative medium is its
potential for telling stories about whole systems. The format that
most fully exploits the properties of digital environments is not the
hypertext or the fighting game but the simulation: the virtual
world full of interrelated entities, a world we can enter,
manipulate, and observe in process. We might therefore expect the
virtuosos of cyberdrama to create simulated environments that capture
behavioral patterns and patterns of interrelationships with a new
clarity.
(281) But twentieth-century science has challenged our
image of ourselves and has perhaps outrun our ability to imagine our
inner life. A linear medium cannot represent the simultaneity of
processing that goes on in the brain—the mixture of language and
image, the intimation of diverging possibilities that we experience
as free will.
(282) The narrative imagination has the power to
play leapfrog with analytical modes of understanding. . . . the
coming cyberdrama may help us reconcile our subjective experience of
ourselves with our rapidly expanding scientific knowledge of biology.
. . . A computer-based literature might help us recognize ourselves
in the machine without a sense of degradation.
(283) Finally, the
experience of the Habitat community described in chapter 9 suggests
that the collective virtuosity of the role-playing worlds may provide
a tradition of stories around the themes of violence and
community.
(284) But it is first and foremost a representational
medium, a means for modeling the world that adds its own potent
properties to the traditional media it has assimilated so quickly.
Murray, Janet Horowitz. Hamlet on the Holodeck : The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: Free Press, 1997. Print.