Cyberdrama in the Twenty-First Century

Patrick Cook

Department of English
George Washington University
pcook@gwu.edu

 

Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace.New York: The Free Press, 1997.

 

The finest writing on what some call the current communications revolution more often than not has emerged from the keyboards of scholars who combine training in the humanities with mastery of computers and cyberculture. Janet Murray fits this description as well as anyone, and her Hamlet on the Holodeck is the product of the creative interaction of both aspects of her thinking self. In addition to being a scholar of Victorian literature adept at drawing upon modern literary and cultural theory, she is also Director of the Program in Advanced Interactive Narrative Technology and Senior Research Scientist in the Center for Educational Computing Initiatives at MIT. Her outstanding book, which Library Journal named one of two “best computer books” of 1997, is at once a primer for the uninitiated, a historically and technically informed analysis of recent developments in electronically enabled storytelling, and a visionary prediction of how we may experience narrative in the more fully digitized future.

 

Murray begins with Captain Kathryn Janeway, starship captain in the Star Trek: Voyager series, interacting with the Victorian characters who inhabit her holonovel in the virtual reality of her ship’s holodeck. The episode “marks a milestone in this virtual literature of the twenty-fourth century as the first holodeck story to look more like a nineteenth-century novel than an arcade shoot-’em-up” (16); the latter form has been the preference of stories run by most male crew members. Janeway’s attraction to her story’s brooding romantic hero becomes “an exercise posing psychological and moral questions for her” (16), and the episode thus stands as Murray’s representative anecdote for the artistic and educational potential of the kinds of narrative experience that will soon be available as technology progresses. Murray acknowledges the dystopic potentials of technological advance, conceding, for example, that “the violent gaming culture that now characterizes much of cyberspace is likely to spread as the Internet gains speed and bandwidth” (283). But, as her title suggests, she views our rapidly evolving communications technology as more liberating than dehumanizing, indeed as the opening of vast new artistic possibilities continuous with the great tradition of storytelling stretching from ancient epic poetry, through Renaissance drama and the Victorian novel, to modern cinema.

 

Murray sees a number of innovations that feed a desire for audience participation as harbingers of the holodeck. The shape of future literature is foreshadowed by the multiform story, “the narrative that presents a single situation or plotline in multiple versions, versions that would be mutually exclusive in our ordinary experience” (30). Multiform short stories such as Delmore Schwartz’s “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” and Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths” and multiform films such as It’s a Wonderful Life and Groundhog Day express the modern “perception of life as composed of parallel possibilities” (37). This kind of narrative demands that the reader or audience assume a more active role, a development that Murray sees paralleled in the participatory dynamics of fan culture, most fully in the live-action role-playing (LARP) games in which fans of fantasy literature “assume the roles of characters in the original stories to make up new characters within the same fictional universe” (42). Three-dimensional movies produce a similar urge for audience participation, since the compelling illusion of being in a space awakens instincts to explore it. Amusement park attractions that allow one to “ride the movies” combine a visceral experience with gratifications of our need for story. Computer games are evolving from early versions consisting of simple-minded combat sequences and puzzles toward more narrativized versions featuring dramatic moments, immersive use of sound, and a cinematic point of view. The participatory demands of hypertext fiction reveal that burgeoning genre’s connection to these other forms of participatory storytelling.

 

All these phenomena are prominent in the critical discourse on postmodern culture. Murray’s contribution is to stress that they are related manifestations of a drive to merge performed and written narrative traditions with the rapidly expanding digital environment. Since participation is central to her vision of narrative’s future, some consideration of the relation between the participatory aspects of traditional and such emerging narrative forms would have been welcome. But Murray is less interested in theoretical continuities than in technological developments produced, one assumes, by scientists unburdened by the niceties of modern literary narratology or reader-reception theory. Readers will enter less familiar territory in her discussion of computer scientists as storytellers, where she reviews how researchers in virtual reality and artificial intelligence “have recently turned from modeling battlefields and smart weapons to modeling new entertainment environments and new ways of creating fictional characters” (59). One of the most impressive of proto-holodecks operates on her own turf. The MIT Media Lab contains a twelve-foot “magic mirror,” a computer screen in which viewers see themselves in three-dimensional space with “computer-based characters with complex inner lives who can sense their environment, experience appetites and mood changes, weigh conflicting desires, and choose among different strategies to reach a goal” (61). This kind of project suggests what future equivalents of a movie theater might be, as viewers would enter a story whose plot would be modified as a result of their actions.

 

The narratives we will enter in the electronic theater of the future, Murray argues, will be shaped not only by formats inherited from older media, but also by properties native to the digital environment: its procedural, participatory, spatial, and encyclopedic aspects. The computer’s procedural power for shaping narrative became remarkably evident in 1966 with the creation of ELIZA, the first program to simulate the qualities of human conversation. The creator of ELIZA so successfully mimicked the procedural thought of a psychotherapist interacting with a patient that computers running the program could carry on a conversation persuasively, at least for a while. In the late sixties, the adventure game Zork realized the computer’s participatory powers through its fantasy world that responded to typed commands, allowing players to move through dungeon rooms and and fight off evil trolls. In the 1970s, the first graphic user interface was created at Xerox PARC, the first graphics-based game was produced by Atari, and the first “surrogate travel system” in which a mapped space could be walked through was created at MIT. The computer’s encyclopedic power grew as memory technology expanded geometrically. Its capacity to convey an unprecedented abundance of information “translates into an artist’s potential to offer a wealth of detail, to represent the world with both scope and particularity” (84); in this it recapitulates the representational incentives of the day-long bardic recitation and the multi-volume Victorian novel.

 

After establishing this historical perspective, Murray devotes separate chapters to three “pleasures” that collectively define the aesthetics of emerging digital media: immersion, agency, and transformation. Like older forms of narrative and representation, a computer game or simulation can serve as a Winnicottian “transitional object,” providing us with something onto which we can project our desires and fears, but the fuller sensory matrix the simulation creates allows us to live out our fantasies to an unprecedented degree. The computer’s participatory powers must be calibrated carefully, however, since “the more present the enchanted world, the more we need to be reassured that it is only virtual” (103). Murray outlines various strategies developed in our early or “incunabular” stage of digital technology to establish and test the borders between the real and actual. She explores the realization of the “visit metaphor” in simple joystick games, which create correspondences between user movement and virtual motion; the “active creation of belief”–her revision of Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief”–through the user’s manipulation of virtual objects; and the structuring of participation through “avatars” or representatives within the virtual world. The popularity of MUDs (Multi-User Domains, a form of online role-playing) derives from the computer’s ability to sustain the fiction through continuous characterization of all participants, but also from “the ability to flip back and forth between player and character, to remove the mask in order to adjust the environment and then put it back on again” (116). As the form has evolved, methods for controlling the real/virtual boundary have been refined, regulating such things as the degree of a dialogue’s privacy (one can “whisper” to another or talk publicly) or the consequences of an action (as in life, sex has a variable probability of resulting in pregnancy). “Little by little,” Murray concludes, “we are discovering the conventions of participation that will constitute the fourth wall of this virtual theatre, the expressive gestures that will deepen and preserve the enchantment of immersion” (125).

 

As narrative moves into cyberspace, new opportunities for the pleasures of agency familiar to us from games will become part of any new significant literary form. On this subject again Murray considers first the elementary innovations of our nascent electronic culture, where the simple pleasures of navigation have been been encouraged by two distinct configurations, “the solvable maze and the tangled rhizome” (130). Combat videogames and puzzle dungeons often employ the maze form, and “in the right hands a maze story could be a melodramatic adventure with complex social subtexts” (131). But mazes limit opportunities for agency through their restricted options and their movement toward a single solution. Rhizomic hypertext fictions lack an end point or exit, but Murray finds severe limitations in even the most sophisticated existing versions: “in trying to create texts that do not ‘privilege’ one order of reading or interpretive framework, the postmodernists are privileging confusion itself” (133). She suggests that successful developments will realize some kind of compromise form, with a combination of goal-driven and open-ended potentials. The chapter also considers the relation between games and stories. Unlike those who have argued that computer-based narrative is inherently unsatisfying because it is dependent upon the “win/lose simplicity” of game structure, Murray believes that “the intrinsic symbolic content of gaming” can be developed into more expressive forms. The ability to switch sides in a contest, for example, opens opportunities for complicating perspectives and raising moral questions.

 

The electronic environment promises unprecedented pleasures of transformation because “it offers us a multidimensional kaleidoscope with which to rearrange the fragments over and over again, and it allows us to shift back and forth between alternate patterns of mosaic organization” (157). Stories can be interwoven in new ways and multiple points of view can be experienced in varied sequences, combining cinema’s compelling visual surface with the novel’s richer experience of interiority. The reader or “interactor” can be given the opportunity to construct her own story from formulaic elements in an environment that is less a story than a set of story possibilities. Cyber-narrative’s “vision of retrievable mistakes and open options” (175), its resistance to closure, easily supports the comic side of life, but in one of the book’s most provocative sections Murray argues that the measure of its maturity will be an ability to support tragedy as well. She offers as a possible model various ways that a young man’s suicide could be narrated: experiencing the obsessive return to “associational paths that lead to closed loops of thinking” (176); a kaleidoscopic presentation of the wake, in which the multiple perspectives of the mourners would create “a pervasive sense of an interrelated community with multiple truths” (178); a simulation of the suicide that carefully defined the limits of the interactor’s powers to affect events, thus exploring the problematic of agency and destiny.

 

The third section of Hamlet on the Holodeck attempts to predict how the next century’s cyberbard will realize the potentials of the new media, which will be interactive in a way no other narrative form has been, and which will divide the concept of authorship between the creators of an environment and the users. Murray looks to oral-formulaic composition for a model. She suggests that basic building blocks, called “primitives,” that resemble verbal formulas used in oral verse will be have to be developed, as will the appropriate templates to organize these basic units into more complex structures. Primitives will evolve in the direction of simple actions facilitating interactions of increasing subtlety. Plot events may be based on generic conventions to constitute intermediate levels of organization resembling the oral-formulaic type-scene, and at the highest organizational level resources will be developed to permit the creation of multiform stories, much as oral narrative contains alternative versions within itself that allow each performance to vary significantly. Authors will develop story algorithms like those discovered in Propp’s morphology of the folktale, but with much greater complexity. Coherence will be maintained by “plot controllers capable of making intelligent decisions about narrative syntax on the basis of aesthetic values” (200). Character creation techniques will develop from current technologies such as “intelligent agents” (227) capable of changing priorities and behaviors in response to external changes and from “chatterbot” programs which can engage in convincing conversations with humans and which manifest the kinds of change and growth that seem to signify an inner self. Multicharacter improvisations could build upon techniques of the commedia dell’arte, which relies on a very basic plot scenario, stock characters, and rituals of interaction as the basis for continual improvisation.

 

A short final section of the book includes a chapter on the products that will likely emerge as the television, telephone, and computer industries converge in the next few decades to produce a unified digital communications system. Murray suggests that the TV serial will soon become the hyperserial. Virtual extensions of the fictional world will permit viewer participation between episodes and allow subsidiary narratives to branch out. The viewer will become “mobile,” able to choose from among various points of view how to experience a program. From this glance at popular media, Murray turns in a concluding chapter to a corollary issue: the question of whether emerging technologies will lead to “a cyberdrama that would develop beyond the pleasures of a compelling entertainment to attain the force and originality we associate with art” (273). She admits that “the notion of a procedural medium that provides the satisfactions of art takes some getting used to” (275), and anyone who has witnessed the banalities that vastly outnumber the genuinely creative and insightful productions of cyberspace has good reason for skepticism. She usefully reminds us, however, that “without those repetitive revenge plays that are now only read in graduate school, we would not have Hamlet” (278). Journeyman works establish conventions that can be exploited by the creative artist, and they also create the context for higher demands and aspirations. Can we expect a Hamlet to take shape on the twenty-first century’s rising holodeck? Janet Murray clearly thinks so. I believe that most readers will close Murray’s well-informed and compelling book and agree.