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| WHEN STORY LINES GO ONLINE
Janet H. Murray on the future of Narrative in Cyberspace October 23, 1997 |
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Questions asked
in this forum:
What does "nonlinear narrative" mean? How is the novel superior interactive media? Will future novelists also be computer programmers? Will interactive stories dangerously blur the lines between fantasy and reality? Will the interactive medium ever get any respect?
NewsHour Coverage
October 13, 1997
David Gergen speaks with Janet H. Murray about her book "Hamlet on the Holodeck."
December 25, 1996
The NewsHour reviews the past year's online developments.
September 5, 1996:
A Gergen Dialogue on the downside of technology.
February 15, 1996
How far has the computer come in 50 years?
February 15, 1996:
A report on the effort to make computers more like humans.
Browse the NewsHour's coverage of the Cyberspace.
OUTSIDE LINKS
A Web resource guide to "Hamlet on the Holodeck."
Janet H. Murray's Web site
"Homicide" one of Murray's favorite examples of interactive stories on the Web.
Amazon.com's collaborative John Updike story "The Greatest Tale Ever Told".
Edward Packard's bedtime story was going nowhere. Feeling his plot line grind to an uncomfortable halt, he turned to his two muses-- daughters Caroline and Andrea-- for inspiration. Packard noticed his young audience immediately perked up with the opportunity to choose what the shipwrecked hero should do. But each girl wanted to take a different route, forcing Packard to make up two plot lines to satisfy each girl.
Out of this bedtime tale, Packard and creative partner Raymond Montgomery started a popular series of children's books called Choose Your Own Adventure, which casts the reader as hero and allows them to choose how to weave through the numerous story paths in the book.
Now approaching the 184th and final installment in the series, Packard and Montgomery look back on the Choose Your Own Adventure phenomenon fondly, for although the series' popularity has waned among the new generation of readers, it is widely viewed as the paperback precursor of cyberspace story telling, made popular with the growth of the Web and other interactive media.
In fact, the impact of the series seems so strong that its name has become a part of everyday language. Just recently, Montgomery saw a magazine article use "Choose Your Own Adventure" as a generic term to describe the interactive nature of cyberspace. And both Packard and Montgomery say that their books, first published in 1979, came out at about the right time to influence today's cyberspace industry. "Some of those brilliant nerds in Silicon Alley might have gotten some inspiration from some of those books," said Packard." Choose Your Own Adventure sort of anticipated computer games and interactive things."
But actually, according to Janet H. Murray, the tradition of interactive storytelling goes back further than the first Choose Your Own Adventure book. In her book "Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace," Murray explains that audiences have been choosing their own adventures since "the earliest beginnings of storytelling" when bards would adjust tales to suit audience responses. In a similar way, fairy tales, which vary slightly from region to region, suggest that a single story has been tinkered to fit audiences by region.
Today, interactive story telling exists both offline and online, in everything from improv skits, where performers "make up a story in from of our eyes," to online novels, such as Amazon.com's recent "The Greatest Tale Ever Told" in which novelist John Updike collaborated with 44 online users to write a story.
From Murray's analysis, interactive cyberspace storytelling is just a continuation of a very long literary tradition, one which Murray considers a positive influence, challenging and engaging the creative powers of the end user. "I would say that the expansion of it has made us more sophisticated as story tellers."
But most readers would find the thought of trading in John Updike for what Murray calls a "collective John Updike machine" less than appealing. Will new media change the novel or wipe it out all together? As Murray's book title suggests, will interactive storytelling evolve to resemble interactive fantasies straight off Star Trek's holodeck? If so,how will people distinguish between fantasy and reality?
With these questions, is Murray's utopian view of storytelling in cyberspace too optimistic?
Janet H. Murray will now answer your questions.
Could you begin by explaining what a nonlinear narrative is? Are there different types of interactive stories?
Janet H. Murray responds:
Stories can be "nonlinear" or "interactive" both on and off the computer. Throughout the twentieth century we seem to be turning toward stories told from multiple intersecting points of view (like Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury"), stories that have multiple possible outcomes (like Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths" or the "Back to the Future" movies). The trend runs through high and low culture as my examples suggest. It has to do in part with the fact that we see our lives as more open to choice and possibility, less controlled by social convention or by what the Victorians called "Providence" than human beings have in other eras.
The computer offers new formats for such open-ended and multi-threaded stories. Hypertext stories let the reader navigate through segments of the tale, following different characters through the same time period or tracing different thematic connections. Interactive games and simulations allow us to replay the same situation in many different ways,observing and savoring the range of possibilities. Although most of these games are focused on battles or clever puzzle-solving, as they absorb more cinematic techniques they are increasingly plot-oriented and less concerned with winning and losing, and they are beginning to be populated with characters who are not just adversaries or puzzle-posers, but interesting in themselves.
Digital storytellers are learning how to let events unfold dramatically in worlds that have their own rules of behavior. For instance, a recent cd-rom game called "The Last Express" puts the interactor into the role of a passenger on the Orient Express railroad just before World War I, and populates the train with characters who speak different languages and walk around on their own regardless of what the protagonist chooses to do. I am charmed by the way the game lets you eavesdrop on the passengers' conversations as they talk about books or politics, in multiple languages (with some subtitles). It is a satisfying experience that goes beyond the murder and intrigue of the game-like plot, because it is imaginatively compelling to be in a fictional place and to chose which characters to pay attention to as the story unfolds.
Back to the top....
What advantages do you see with a strictly linear narrative (e.g. the printed novel) over interactive hypermedia systems?
Janet H. Murray responds:
The written word fixed to the page or the stream of images projected on a conventional movie screen are entirely outside the control of the reader/viewer. We may fantasize along with the text or images and we certainly interpret them actively as we read or watch, but we do not control what happens next. When we add in the possibility of participation we have walked across the invisible "fourth wall" of the theater. In Chapter Four of "Hamlet on the Holodeck" I talk about the problems this poses and the kinds of artistic strategies that address these problems. I find it intriguing to watch the new digital artists are inventing ways to script the interactor, to signal to us what we can and cannot do within the frame of the story. At their best such new conventions allow us not just to suspend disbelief, but to actively create belief -- to make a virtual world more real to us by moving through it, to make a character more real by exploring the range of their reactions to what we offer. (I talk about the various pleasures of narrative experience at length in the three chapters on the aesthetics of the medium.)
Back to the top....
Will future writers of the future also have to be great computer programmers as well?
Janet H. Murray responds:
Yes and no. Digital storytellers will write procedurally -- will create imaginary worlds by describing the way things behave. They will create not just words and images but sets of rules like computer programs. But in order to do this with ease, there will have to be authoring environments that are easier to use than programming languages, authoring environments that allow creators to focus more on content and less on computerese, that let them preview the many possibilities inherent in an interactive story.
For instance, in the course on interactive narrative I teach at MIT, I give students a simple authoring environment for making interactive characters like Joseph Weizenbaum's famous ELIZA (the virtual therapist who echoes back what her patients say in comically appropriate ways). The students do not have to be programmers to create comically predictable characters -- the authoring system lets them specify what they expect an interactor to say and what they want to say in return without having to write computer code to make it happen. Like any writer, the student's main focus is on characterization and dramatic effect, and have to be artistically creative in coaxing the interactor into saying the things that will make their characters come to life. (I describe this in detail in Chapter Eight.) But the appearance of a new medium does not mean the old ones disappear. Dramatic literature did not end when the novel appeared. Folk ballads are still popular despite the invention of the television or the symphony orchestra. A new medium of expression expands the repertoire of ways in which we can think about our lives. It does not eradicate the previous media if we still have things that we need to capture in those long familiar, ever-evolving forms. So "future writers" will not "have" to be anything. The storytellers of the future will just have more ways of doing what they have always done.
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Do non linear stories break down the lines between reality and fantasy? What are the dangers of this?
Janet H. Murray responds:
All storytelling -- in fact all representational art forms -- offer the danger of deluding us. A new form is particularly threatening because we have not yet created the boundary conventions that help us to separate what happens "on stage" from what happens in real life. When binge reading was relatively new to the world, Don Quixote went mad from spending so much time in the fantasy world of the chivalric romances. Most of us, however, can tell the difference between a jousting knight and a windmill.
Back to the top....
Do you think this new medium will ever achieve the respect of traditional media like the novel or the poem?
Janet H. Murray responds:
This is an interestingly phrased question, because it asks not whether digital narrative can be as valid an art form, as print texts, but whether it can command the same respect. I have spent a lot of time considering the first question -- whether or not there could be a work as compelling and enduring as "Hamlet" some day in a medium which now seems so chaotic and game-like. I think this is an open question, and a question very much worth asking, because it focuses us on what we want storytelling to do for us -- to capture truth and beauty, to tell us who we are and what we mean to one another. I wrote this book in order to test out that question, and the more I examined it the more hopeful I became.
But whether digital narrative will be accorded respect is an entirely different question. As I say in the final chapter of "Hamlet on the Holodeck," there is no hierarchy of media, only of meaning. There are many foolish and vicious stories produced in print, and many subtle and deeply imagined stories produced for the movie theater and the TV screen. I do not think that a story is intrinsically valuable because it appears between covers, any more than I think (as people did just a century ago) that the only literature worthy of serious attention were ancient Latin or Greek texts.
I think we should distinguish between formulaic stories and great original works of art. But I do not think we should tie these discriminations to the medium in which the story is told. Therefore, though I sympathize with people who think they have to oppose the computer in order to defend the book, I think they are profoundly mistaken. The computer is carrying on the work of the book, the work of understanding the world and communicating that understanding. Therefore I hope that people will increasingly approach digital narrative art with all the energy and seriousness of aspiration as we would any other storytelling form.
Additional viewer comments:
Patricia Schwarz of Pasadena, CA writes:
I think this is the most over-hyped part of the New Info Age. Great literature comes out of madness, not out of finding the right algorithm to combine the voices of a committee of frustrated but otherwise sane and ordinary wannabe-writers.
Raskolnikov and Marmeladova by committee? Hah!
Only a really tormented individual could have dreamed up Raskolnikov and made him come to life. The delight of "Crime and Punishment" is that Dostoevsky drags you with him into really ugly, desperate, shameful and horrifying places you'd never willingly go by yourself.
The non-consensual aspect of that journey is important. It's important that Dostoevsky control the ride. If the readers can actually step out and change Raskolnikov or Marmeladova to their liking, that would ruin every scrap of potential impact and meaning for the entire story all at once.
Every work would wind up with the depth of the average Star Trek episode. Or the average pre-market-tested Hollywood movie.
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