Steven Jones

Department of English
Loyola University Chicago
sjones1@luc.edu

MYST is a registered trademark of Cyan, Inc.

 

The Myst Age

 

My point of departure is the fact that the 1993 Broderbund-Cyan CD-ROM game Myst has sold an estimated two million copies to date, making it among the most widely experienced hypernarratives (if not, strictly speaking, hypertexts) in our time.¹ Only the Web as a whole has allowed more users to follow more forking paths to unexpected if not indeterminate ends. Even if we grant the phenomenological differences between a literally textual and a graphical environment, theorists of hypertext would do well to pay attention to Myst and what it reveals about the place of the Book at this late moment in the history of print culture. When the stand-alone CD-ROM game is situated in the context of cultural production (in this case, materially, the publishing enterprise), the world-making impulse figured in the very structure of the game, as successive or parallel “ages” or technological regimes, tellingly gives way to messier arrangements in the social nexus–extraneous networks, intertexts, contradictory modes of production, overlapping markets of users, hybrid notions of genre, sparse or tangled, end-less webs of provisional links. Myst and its production makes a text worth reading, in part because of the way it reminds us of what we know but are continually tempted to forget: that no text–much less hypertext–is an island.

 

Despite its graphical interface and its being marketed as a virtual reality game, Myst is fundamentally a hypertext product. It was developed in the early, quintessentially hypertextual software, HyperCard,² and one navigates the spaces of the game by clicking through successive cards in a series of stacks; it’s just that the cards contain images rather than verbal lexias. Besides, as others have noted, Myst has deep (sub)cultural roots in command-line games like Adventure and Zork, with their virtual environments the player manipulates by way of raw text.³ ASCII commands–turn left; open trapdoor; pick up torch–are replaced in Myst and its species of game with mouse clicks through a lushly rendered series of images (over 2500 in this case). In effect, such hypermedia games translate hypertext into pictures. Another way to put it is that they amount to nonverbal renderings of what Michael Joyce once articulated as the ideal hypertext experience, in which “movement” takes place as a series of “yields” to the touch of the hand of the user. ⁴ In this case, the user’s hand holds a mouse and the onscreen cursor is the familiar tiny-hand icon. Trial and error, experimental wandering, is the only way short of an “external” hint book to learn which objects or paths “yield” to a click. When frustrated or trapped–in the dead-end tunnel of a maze, for example–one is at first tempted (as the documentation warns us) to give in to unproductive “thrashing,” clicking wildly on every possible feature of the scene.

 

Viewed more positively, this potential for frustration looks like freedom. The lack of directions and paucity of verbal clues in the game are precisely what most reviewers have praised.⁵ Like stumbling into someone else’s dreamscape or stepping into a quiet surrealist painting, the general opinion runs, this game encourages the suspension of disbelief in one’s freedom to navigate. The paths fork and you must choose, but there is no default motion sweeping you along: you stand still until you click. And since, as the publicity for the product repeatedly makes clear, no one dies in this game–Myst is an antithesis to the maze game Doom–the user tends to relax into the rhythm of aimless wandering, a flâneur without the crowd, strolling, alert and yet dreaming, ready to respond with a forefinger click of focussed attention to any phantasmagoric object or scene. By far the most promising objects, however, those that yield instant transportation to other “ages,” turn out to be the enigmatic, backlit, fetishistic, leatherbound books that are everywhere you turn in this landscape.

 

From Arthurian narratives to Romantic and Victorian poetry, of course, magic talismanic books have been central devices in the romance-quest tradition, a tradition whose complicated history eventually sweeps up games like Myst. But we can be more precise than this. The books in Myst are clearly self-conscious products of our own Late Age of Print. Their magic is of a historically specific kind, connected to hypertext and what it portends for the aura of the Book and its culture.

 

In fact, brothers Rand and Robyn Miller, the celebrated creators of Myst, explain their design in terms that will sound familiar (to say the least) to any theorist of hypertext.⁶ In one interview, for example, Rand reports that the “interactive story design” of the game “went along two paths–the linear and the non-linear.”

 

The linear was the back story and the history, all those elements that followed a very strict time-line. The non-linear was the design of the worlds and was more like architectural work. Like building a world without the time element at all--a snapshot of an age. Now the struggle was to try to merge the two by revealing some parts of the linear story during the exploration of the non-linear world, while maintaining the explorer's feeling that he/she can go anywhere and do anything they please.⁷

 

So described, the celebrated freedom of such game-play, the “non-linear structure” of the user’s constrained choices, exists in a tension with the sense of an ending built in under the game’s surface. On one level, the story flows right to a single site: the subterranean cave of “D’ni” below the island’s central Library. On another level (or played another way), it remains on the surface of the island, free to move in a determinate but unpredictable number of directions. But the alternative levels of narrative are not equal. As Rand Miller sees it, “the end had to pull things back together for one of the several different ending scenarios.” The plot stream that leads inevitably to these endings breaks through the surface of game-play intermittently, like the famous underground river of Coleridge’s Xanadu. The user is, however, always aware of something portentous rumbling just below the surface of the island (partly prompted by the suggestive ambient soundtrack). Like Friday’s footprints in the sand, there are teasing clues and signs of an overarching, providential plot, the mystery in the Myst. Most of the game was designed without a cinematic-style linear storyboard, but the designers did use structural maps and what they refer to as “top-down” flow-charts. As they point out, the subterranean flow of the story was intentionally built into the user’s experience of the landscape; if the designers couldn’t completely constrain the paths taken by users, they could, as Rand Miller says, “gently nudge them, using clues and other information, toward the end.”

 

Although no user ever has to reach it, of course, the “authorized” endgame of Myst is a conventional narrative denouement with a couple of abbreviated forking paths. The bedrock of Myst Island–as well as the other “ages” or parallel universes to which players can travel–turns out to be a highly overdetermined oedipal story, like that of any number of Fantasy-SF novels. According to Rand Miller, the story developed, which is to say: its “details came to light,” not before but in the midst of designing the game. However, because of the huge commodity success of the CD-ROM, the codex book version–like the novelization of a popular movie derived from a screenplay’s back-story–was published after the game, not as a luridly illustrated paperback in a standard SF trilogy, but as a relatively expensive hardcover ($22.95), by Hyperion Books. As a linked-media publishing event, Myst: The Book of Atrus, makes a fascinating text.

 

Its glossy boards are covered in photo-faux leather, complete with “water stains,” “scratches” and raised and textured “gilt” corners, and its main title is represented as “stamped” or “burned” into the cover, with its subtitle apparently scribbled beneath with a pen, just above a mandala or rose-window emblem. Inside, the pages are artificially yellowed, the illustrations deliberately primitive pencil or charcoal sketches from the protagonist’s notebook. Clearly, this is a book that means to be a Book–and in as many ways as graphically possible. It is also a book about (magic) books, the story of a patriarchal wizard who possesses a Prospero-like techne that allows him to make worlds by writing them (or perhaps only to open portals to existing, parallel worlds–this is kept unresolved). The same magic allows him (and others) to travel to these worlds (or “ages”) via special “linking books.” A functional prequel, The Book of Atrus ends literally where the game of Myst begins, its first-person Epilogue repeating the Prologue voiceover one hears at the beginning of the game–an “ending…not an ending,” written in the protagonist’s journal, explaining that a lost Myst book dropped into a volcanic fissure earlier in the novel is, in fact, the very same small book that plops down into the darkened, starlit space of your computer screen when you open the game.

 

By returning recursively to a back-story that actually grew out of their HyperCard experiments in architectural/cyberspatial play, the Cyan design team has self-consciously and literally inscribed a book at the “origin” of their “non-linear” hypernarrative. The hardcover prequel that developed from the game itself is thereby figured as the organic “trunk,” the origin from which the multilinear branches of any user’s game-play must grow:

 

no branching from the ground up until the first branches. Those first branches are the non-linear part--where the user can start defining where the story goes. (Rand Miller)

 

Like the character Atrus, the authors of Myst claim to have created worlds by writing a book. But in fact the worlds have a kind of historical priority over the book–they were designed before the novel was written. The installation of the novel as the game’s “prequel” may say something about perceptions of the consumer market for CD-ROM hypernarratives. Having become gods of the new media, heroic garage entrepreneurs, the members of the Myst team still feel the need to be traditional authors. Toward that end they hired David Wingrove, an experienced British writer of Fantasy-SF, as co-author of the prequel. But the interesting questions of collaborative authorship, origins, genres, and intertextual influences surrounding Mystdo not end there.

 

The Jules Verne Age

 

The creators of Myst have repeatedly held up one book in particular as the primary textual inspiration for the game: Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island (1874).⁸ This classic Victorian SF novel will serve my purposes here, however, not so much as a source, but as a “linking book” through which we can enter the age of nineteenth-century techno-adventure fiction and the literary tradition in general. Verne is an important figure for modern SF and postmodern cyberculture (from the earliest cinema to the fiction of William Gibson), especially as his work exemplifies a gendered subgenre largely constructed in the Victorian period: “boy’s adventure fiction.”⁹ Within this subgenre, one strain in particular develops out of the “Robinsonnade”–from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to The Swiss Family Robinson to Treasure Island–the story of castaways who must fend for themselves, reconstructing western civilization on a primitive desert island.

 

As Pierre Macherey argued long ago, the significance of Verne’s work lies in the dislocated relationship between the “theme” of “nature conquered”–demonstrated through the image of the island–and the genre of the fantastic narrative (and what happens to this narrative once Verne sets it in motion).¹⁰ In the end, the theme of conquest has been called into question in crucial ways; however, along the way, the various adventures often seem mainly excuses to showcase ingenious gadgetry and complicated machines–which are all constructed out of the raw materials of nature, like precocious solutions to difficult engineering-school puzzles. The episodes seem mere pretexts for technical descriptions; bridges, tunnels, ships, gunpowder, metal alloys, pulleys, elevators, windmills, dams, and machines of every sort are designed, built, and then explained in exhaustive detail. The moral of this part of the story would seem to be the inevitability of progress: “From nothing they must supply themselves with everything,” we are told of the castaways. In answer, a shipwrecked sailor cheerfully remarks: “there is always a way of doing everything” (37, 26). Technological conquest is represented by Verne as the better part of a global colonial enterprise:

 

we will make a little America of this island! we will build towns, we will establish railways, start telegraphs, and one fine day, when it is quite changed, quite put in order and quite civilized, we will go and offer it to the government of the Union. (81)

 

But as in Myst, there is also in this adventure novel a nagging mystery to be solved. Verne’s castaways discover traces of a presence on the island, which would qualify the terms of their colonization. Increasingly they find signs of an anonymous, paternal, yet invisible hand, which offers provisions and needed equipment, intervenes at moments of crisis, and–significantly–leaves written, textual clues to guide and encourage the colonists. At one crucial moment in the story, the castaways discover barrels of supplies, seemingly washed up on the beach by chance. These include “tools,” “weapons,” “instruments,” “clothes,” “utensils”–and books. The inventory of the books is short, but includes an atlas, dictionaries, and a Bible, as well as three reams of paper and “2 books with blank pages” (186). It is not hard to see these blank books as the tempting tabulae rasa on which Myst was written by the Miller brothers and the Cyan team, books which then become the fetishistic objects that so characterize its graphical interface. But it is the English Bible (inevitably) which becomes the text through which the invisible genius of Verne’s island speaks to the colonists under his secret direction. Upon opening it at random one Sunday evening in a traditional game of prophetic fortune telling, the castaways find a passage marked with a penciled cross: “For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth” (188).

 

The hidden author who annotates and then plants the inscribed Bible for the colonists to “discover” turns out to be Captain Nemo, a Byronic, oriental (anti)hero. A defeated Indian rebel leader, Nemo is a political actor turned Frankensteinian loner, and his authority complicates the theme of progress and adventure. We know him from the earlier Verne book, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, as Verne’s internal self-references in this book pointedly remind us. Nemo is the authorial voice and presence behind the novel’s back-story. As his name in reverse indicates, he is the “omen” of meaning revealed in the island’s encyclopedic Book of Nature–not to mention in the sacred Book itself. But he is also an enlightened savant, an inventor of futuristic devices, a kind of techno-wizard and maker of worlds. He has constructed a little self-sufficient world under the sea–his submarine the Nautilus, complete with its Victorian library, electric lighting, and pipe organ–as well as a subaqueous and subterranean cavern in which the colonists finally discover him. This climactic setting obviously inspired the endgame of Myst, in which the user is granted a “face to face” encounter with the creator and genius of Myst Island, Atrus, found writing in a book in his underground cave directly beneath the central Library. There, users finally learn the master narrative behind all the techno-puzzles they have been solving and the floating linking-books they have been following to and from the other linked “ages.”

 

Like the ending of Verne’s novel, which stands as a kind of contradiction to the progress and conquest themes of the book, this ending of Myst comes as something of an anticlimax. To some users it seems entirely irrelevant to the “real point” of the game: the multilinear, nomadic wandering in the mist-shrouded landscape, which can take different paths with each new round of play, sometimes stretching over the course of months. But the persistence of the typical computer gamer’s yardstick–the estimated number of hours it takes to “solve” or complete the game–in online reviews and discussions reminds us that the spine of the back-story is not exactly beside the point for all users, perhaps even for those who favor a less linear style. Deferring the endgame can become a game strategy in itself, a strategy of more or less conscious resistance. Just as in The Mysterious Island, in Myst there is a basic narrative tension–reminiscent of the Russian Formalists’ famous distinction between fabula and sjuzhet¹¹ between following the multiply-forking paths of the interactive puzzles, and following the linking-books to different worlds and “solving” the linear (if slightly forking) back-story mystery, thereby winning the game. The poet Robert Pinsky describes the urge to explore in Myst and related games in terms of active resistance to “a kind of authorial tyranny:”

 

the reader-user applies herself to see the text expand. This is the opposite of cant about the "freedom" readers have when dealing with interactive texts; it is the freedom of the detective trying to solve a crime, or the captive trying to escape... (26).

 

In fact, this is congruent with the tendentious conclusion of Verne’s novel, which carries over into the computer game it inspired, whether or not its designers fully intended it: it is Nemo’s strong-willed agency that makes sense of–or, depending on your point of view, displaces, determines, and thus renders meaningless–the castaways’ collective agency. Their ad hoc interactions with the environment are, we discover, always already part of a master narrative; all things work together toward a coherent end, directed, finally, by the “authorial” intentions of a solipsistic romantic genius, who takes his island down with him in the closing pages. Given that Verne is so often cited as the primary inspiration for Myst, a connection borne put by numerous allusions to, parallels with, and translations from the novel in the game, the Miller brothers’ shift in roles–from game programmers, to hardcover authors, to, it may yet turn out, film auteurs (or at least screenwriters)–follows a certain generic logic. As Robyn Miller explained in a recent online forum, referring to the team’s ongoing work on the sequel game, “Myst II“: “sometimes we wish we didn’t have to deal with the headaches of a non-linear story. It is by far our largest obstacle in creating a story that is as powerful as a movie or a good book.”¹²

 

On the morning of the 20th of April began the "metallic period," as the reporter called it in his notes....

At last, on the 5th of May, the metallic period ended, the smiths returned to the Chimneys, and new work would soon authorize them to take a fresh title.

—The Mysterious Island (113, 116)

 

In Myst, the linear narrative of progress toward a determined end is also ambivalently figured in the basic structural division of the “worlds” of the game into “ages,” allowing players to travel synchronically among different technological periods: “The Channelwood Age,” “The Mechanical Age,” and so on. No clear or unequivocal evolutionary story obtains in these time-space worlds, no march of progress from Bronze to Iron to Electrical. In keeping with the Victorian ambiance of Verne’s fiction, crudely wired electricity, steam power, and noisy hydraulics dominate the game, and technological regimes are mixed promiscuously: a streamlined 1920s rocketship (reminiscent of Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon as well as the Millers’ earlier children’s game, Cosmic Osmo) is docked on the shore near trees and an electrical tower with a large breaker switch, for example, and a hydraulic elevator takes one up inside a giant pine tree. The connection between “making progress” toward the endgame and the theme of technological progress through a series of successive “ages” is hard to simply dismiss. Against this imperative, as it were, the wanderings of the typical player take place in a temporal-spatial gamezone, where technological history is suspended or frozen, so that the “ages” of the game exist as if in a synchronous cabinet of techno-curiosities, surrealistically stationed around in the time-space landscape. Compare this description by Verne of his colonists’ first vision of Captain Nemo’s room, connected to the library onboard the Nautilus:

 

An immense saloon--a sort of museum, in which were heaped up, with all the treasures of the mineral world, works of art, marvels of industry--appeared before the eyes of the colonists, who almost thought themselves transported into a land of enchantment. (The Mysterious Island, 459)

 

The Diamond Age

 

Another recent treatment, but with added Pynchonesque irony, of this idea of the synchronous technology museum lies at the center of Neal Stephenson’s SF novel, The Diamond Age. Here, however, the anachronism is theorized as a future society in which class–or neotribal “phyle”–determines the level of technological society at which one lives. Different ages in isolated coexistence, in a messy pastiche of cultural landscapes apparently modeled in part on mid-twentieth-century Shanghai, different phyles living within walled “[en]claves.” Unevenly applied nanotechnology has rendered everything a question of one’s phyle and its relative access to the “means of production” in a radically literal sense–the molecular “Feed” tubes through which nanotech compilers receive their universal raw material. The Diamond Age commences the instant diamonds become cheaper to “compile” than glass. Out in the distant territories, saboteurs’ fires smolder and a radical alternative to the hierarchical Feed (the Seed) is developing underground among secret hacker societies or “Cryptnet nodes.” But at the very top of this world, high on the mountaintop, is the Neo-Victorian ‘clave, with its tolling cathedral bells and the nano-Diamond Palace of Source Victoria, where the Feed originates, just as the Victorian technological empire originated at the famous Crystal Palace exhibition of 1851.

 

This dys/utopian future sometimes seems to be merely the infrastructural setting for Stephenson’s exploration of the possibilities of hypertext. The subtitle of the novel: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, names the “book” at the center of this book, an object that looks exactly like a dusty leatherbound volume but contains the latest high-nanotech “rod logic” computers. Commissioned by a Neo-Victorian aristocrat as an educational gift for his daughter, the Primer eventually ends up by chance in the hands of a young “Thete,” a tribeless girl. The rest is an ironically Dickensian plot of changing fortunes and great expectations, except that the young girl (named “Nell” in a parody of the notoriously sentimental Dickens heroine) becomes a highly skilled ninja warrior and revolutionary princess leading a mass march of liberated orphan girls. This surprising twist comes about through her complicated interactions with the Primer, which becomes for her not only a book, but an educational computer, a nanny, a series of multimedia puzzle/adventure games, and a kind of magical amulet.

 

All of this makes The Diamond Age sound like a computer game folded into a novel–which in a sense it is. Stephenson is a former physics and geography major and something of a programmer, an author whose work is helping to define the permeable fractal border between cybergames and SF literature. His 1992 book Snow Crash, according to its acknowledgments, began as a collaborative effort to build a “computer-generated graphic novel” and–no surprise–will soon be a CD-ROM game; large portions of The Diamond Age take place as extended narrative transcriptions (set in a contrasting, typewriter-like font) of sword-and-sorcerer games played by Nell.¹³ Within the fiction, the Primer provides Nell with a graphical user interface and high degree of interactivity for what are basically hypernarrative VR adventures, generically like advanced versions of Myst, but with more arcade-style “action” at crucial moments in the sometimes violent plot.

 

Besides the shared game-play milieu, The Diamond Age shares with Myst a Hitchcockian “MacGuffin,” a central plot device and fetishistic object, a very bookish hyperbook. What Nell comes to understand late in the story is that, for all its advanced computer power, the Primer is basically a highly complex “ractive,” that is an interactive (rather than passive) multimedia work: “a conduit, a technological system that mediated between Nell and some human being who really loved her” (366). This recognition involves for Nell the beginning of a personal quest for her surrogate mother, the skilled bohemian ractor Miranda, who has been hired to perform online interactions through the Primer since Nell’s troubled girlhood. But this idealization of motherhood and the Primer is only part of its story. The Primer is the product of the engineer Hackworth’s invention and programming code, his self-divided mind (he is, after all, a Neo-Victorian and a born hacker, as his name indicates) in which both the hierarchical Feed and distributed Seed technologies overlap. Like any computer product, the Primer is the collaborative result of Hackworth’s design team and the uncountable subprograms they have built into its processors. Moreover, the Primer is designed to “bond” with it primary owner; once it falls into her hands, it alters itself in numerous, unpredictably chaotic ways, mapping its narratives onto Nell’s “psychological terrain” (94) as that terrain is in turn redrawn by her repeated multilinear readings and adventures. It is not a book at all, really, but a highly porous hypertextual node at the center of a messy web of multiple, cyborganic intentions, human agency, technology, and raw chance–a figure for the networked social nexus itself.

 

Thinking through Stephenson’s figure of the Primer can help us to see how Myst, a kind of hypernarrative prototype for such possible worlds, also exists outside the boundaries of its own CD-ROM or novelization–or, for that matter, any future film adaptation. It is shaped by but finally operates outside the complete control of its authors’ intentions, whether expressed as the authorized back-story or in the web of prequels, sequels, walk-through Web pages, official strategy guides and pirated hint books, in a great many genres that have or may continue to be spun off the game’s possibilities.

 

The Late Age of Print

 

Stephenson’s relatively unstable vision of Neo-Victorianism appeared at a moment when “Victorian values” were being promoted by conservatives like the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb and the historian-politician Newt Gingrich as an alternative to cultural relativism.¹⁴ At roughly the same time, in a very different sphere, the cult of “steampunk” SF, best represented in Gibson and Sterling’s The Difference Engine, was resuscitating nineteenth-century “dead tech” in a mixed gesture of ironic appropriation and deep-seated nostalgia. The Vernean steam engines, mechanical cogs, hydraulics, and overhead wiring all around Myst Island are examples of a continuing, widespread fascination with Victoriana in many fin-de-siecle representations of technology in our time. The traditional technology of the printing press and codex book is only one more example of this general (re)turn to the dominant images of high industrialism in the search for links to our own possible futures.

 

But the Book is a particularly loaded figure–arguably the figure of figures–for this anxious longing. The present essayistic journey across several parallel genres has been intended in part to remind us that, despite recent jeremiads and prophecies, it remains profoundly true that, as Maurice Blanchot once put it, “Culture is linked to the book.”

 

The book as repository and receptacle of knowledge is identified with knowledge. The book is not only the book that sits in libraries--that labyrinth in which all combinations of forms, words and letters are rolled up in volumes. The book is the Book. (145-46)

 

While it may well be, as J. David Bolter has argued, that “the printed book…seems destined to move to the margin of our literate culture” (2), one would never know it from these recent works in and about hypertext. Perhaps, however, what we need to pay closer attention to is the very prominence of the Book at the heart of emergent cyberculture, especially in the form of an etherial digitized image, amulet, and fetishized object–and (in Stephenson) a parodic simulated “book” that is really a material node within a vast and chaotic, socially distributed network. This flamboyant curtain call of the Book in these different cultural productions of the Late Age of Print surely signals a deeper anxiety, a sense of the impending absence of the material book as an object of cultural significance in the face of increasing hypertextual play.

 

Notes

 

1. According to an e-mail reply from Cyan, Inc., 17 April 1996. (My thanks to Cyan for permission to use the two MYST images included in this article.)

 

2. HyperCard’s role in the early commercial shipping and implementation of hypertext is by now legendary. Significantly, Apple once mounted testimonials on the product by the Miller brothers (“we love it”).

 

3. See Robert Pinsky, “The Muse in the Machine: Or, the Poetics of Zork,” pp. 3, 26. Zork is now available in a multimedia CD-ROM version. The general historical connection between command-line VR games and hypertext is noted and helpfully contextualized by Benjamin Woolley in his Virtual Worlds, pp. 152-65.

 

4. See the reprinted introductory document for Joyce’s hypertext fiction, Afternoon, a Story: “Artists’ Statements–Giving Way(s) before the Touch,” in Of Two Minds, pp. 185-87.

 

5. One representative review, by John and Michael Veronneau, in the online newsletter, Big Blue & Cousins, May 1995, praises the game in terms that connect hypernarrative peace and freedom with unsolved mystery. A “non-confrontational” ambiance, the reviewers suggest, “lends itself to the peaceful and leisurely exploration of the unknown and the enigmatic” (Review). Another brief report on the game by Wendy Anson, “Intermedia ’95,” PMC 5.95 (May 1995), notes more critically the parallel between this specular “freedom” and Benjamin’s capitalist wanderer caught up in the commodity system, the flâneur (paragr. 27-29)–a suggestive allusion I repeat in the paragraph that follows above. (PMC 5.3: May, 1995). Even though the Myst CD-ROM is for the home computer, it is hard not to notice that, in this context, “arcade game” takes on a whole new meaning.

 

6. A key intervention in the discussion of hypertext as either dialectical or bi-axial is Stuart Moulthrop’s “Rhizome and Resistance,” which critiques the simple application of Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between “smooth” and “striated” to the space of hypertext.

 

7. Gloria Stern, interview with Rand Miller, ( “Through the Myst” ). Comments by Rand Miller are from this interview unless otherwise noted.

 

8. For example, in Jon Carroll, “Guerrillas in the Myst,” Wired (August 1994), 69-73 (71).

 

9. The subgenre has been consolidated in this century by the publishing industry, and its works are often found in mid-priced glossy hardcover series, lavishly illustrated–by N. C. Wyeth, in particular. Robyn Miller, in an interview printed as an appendix to MYST: The Official Strategy Guide, not only names Verne as a primary source but remarks that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century adventure fiction is his “favorite” genre: “like Treasure Island and things kids used to like. The spirit of adventure” (170). Though Miller’s “kids” sound gender-neutral, such fiction has traditionally been aimed at boys, and Verne’s island, in particular, is an idealized homosocial boys’ club. There is not a single woman character in the large cast of the novel, but this proved to be only a temporary obstacle for Hollywood. The screenplay for the 1961 movie simply wrote in several female castaways in technicolor dresses, who wash up on the shore at the right moment. In Myst, the elusive Catherine is the one main character in the family romance never visually represented in the game. Advance publicity suggests that Catherine will be the “star” of Myst II. After the present essay was essentially completed, the second hardcover book based on the back-story of the game appeared–Myst: The Book of Ti’ana–with a woman as its central character.

 

10. A Theory of Literary Production, 159-248. Macherey’s readings of The Mysterious Island have influenced a number of interpretations in the present essay, beginning with his treatment of the problem of origins and of the troubled relationship between the colonists’ agency and Nemo’s prior agency as “the secret stage-manager” of the highly artificial island (219-222).

 

11. “Fable” and “subject,” or “story” and “discourse,” are binaries in the High Structuralist tradition. It is no accident that they are particularly applicable (pace Tzvetan Todorov, for example) to detective fiction, where secrecy and a concealed plotline drives the surface plot. But see Barbara Herrnstein Smith, “Afterthoughts on Narrative,” Critical Inquiry (Autumn 1980), 213-36, for a corrective reminder that every narrative is “a social transaction,” and that “deep-plot structures” are not given but are always already “constructed,” produced by some particular readers in specific historical and cultural circumstances (218-19). Even a back-story “fable” is a version among possible versions of a given narrative.

12. Transcript of Robyn Miller in an online conference, 19 December 1995 ( Mystique ). On the codex Book of Atrus as a deliberately linear, physical alternative to the nonlinear, indeterminate game world, see Kyle Shannon’s 1995 interview with the Millers.

 

13. Stuart Moulthrop, “Deuteronomy Comix” (review of Snow Crash), PMC 3.2 (January, 1993), speculates that Snow Crash may have been designed as a hypertext (paragr. 20). Moulthrop’s review raises a number of relevant questions for the present essay, including bibliocentrism in Stephenson’s work to that point (PMC Review 1.193). A I write (late 1996), Viacom New Media is advertising a projected CD-ROM game, Snow Crash, which will contain four possible “endings.”

 

14. Himmelfarb’s book, The De-Moralization of Society, is the primary inspiration for Gingrich’s fetishization of Victorian values. For a review that uses Stephenson’s to critique Gingrich’s and Himmelfarb’s Neo-Victorianism, see Stefanie Syman’s “Victorians Lost in Space” (FEED, 17 May 1995). The Millers have agreed that a longing for history and tradition may lie behind their conception of Myst. (Kyle Shannon interview).

 

Works Cited

 

• Anson, Wendy. “Intermedia ’95.” Postmodern Culture 5.95 (May 1995), rev. 3.595.
• Barba, Rick and Rusel DeMaria. MYST: The Official Strategy Guide. Rocklin, CA: Prima Publishing, 1995.
• Blanchot, Maurice. “The Absence of the Book.” The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Essays. Trans. Lydia Davis. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1981, pp. 145-60.
• Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates, 1991.
• Carroll, Jon. “Guerillas in the Myst.” Wired August 1994, 69-73.
• Gibson, William and Bruce Sterling. The Difference Engine. New York: Bantam, 1991.
• Goldberg, Michael. “Breaking the Code with Neal Stephenson” (interview). Addicted To Noise, 1.07 (July 1995). http://www.addict.com/ATN/issues/1.07/Features/Neal_Stephenson/index.html.
• Himmelfarb, Gertrude. The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values. New York: Knopf, 1995.
• Joyce, Michael. Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.
• Landow, George P. Myst Notes. http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/hypertext/landow/111/MdWeb/MNMyst1.html
• Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production. London and New York: Routledge, 1978 (chapter on Verne written 1966).
• Miller, Rand and Robyn Miller, with David Wingrove. Myst: The Book of Atrus. New York: Hyperion, 1995.
• Miller, Rand and David Wingrove. Myst: the Book of Ti’Ana. Cyan, Inc., 1996.
• Miller, Robyn. Compuserve chat session transcript, 19 December 1995, Mystique. http://www.bekkoame.or.jp/~mystique/ConferenceScript.html
• Moulthrop, Stuart. “Rhizome and Resistance: Hypertext and the Dreams of a New Culture.” In Hyper/Text/Theory. Ed. George P. Landow. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. 299-319.
• Moulthrop, Stuart. “Deuteronomy Comix.” Postmodern Culture 3.2 (January 1993), rev. 1.193 (Review of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash.)
• Myst. Broderbund and Cyan, Inc. (CD-ROM), 1993.
• Pinsky, Robert. “The Muse in the Machine: Or, The Poetics of Zork.” New York Times Book Review (199x), 3-26.
• Shannon, Kyle. Interview with Millers/review of Myst, Urban Desires 1.7 (Nov./Dec. 1995). http://desires.com/1.7/Toys/Myst/Docs/tocrrk.html
• Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. “Afterthoughts on Narrative.” Critical Inquiry (Autumn 1980), 213-36.
• Stephenson, Neal. The Diamond Age; or, The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. New York: Bantam, 1995.
• Stephenson, Neal. Snow Crash. New York: Bantam, 1992.
• Stern, Gloria. “Through the Myst–Another World.” World Village Gamer’s Zone interview with Rand Miller. http://www.worldvillage.com/wv/gamezone/html/reviews/myst.htm
• Syman, Stefanie. “Victorians Lost in Space.” FEED Magazine, 17 May 1995. http://www.feedmag.com/95.05syman1.html
• Verne, Jules. The Mysterious Island. New York: NAL/Signet, 1986.
• Veronneau, John and Michael. Review of “Myst.” Big Blue & Cousins Newsletter 12.5 (May 1995). http://www.bbc.org/~bigblue/may95nl.htm
• Woolley, Benjamin. Virtual Worlds. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1992.