Overview
Stories define how we think, play, and understand our lives. In this comprehensive and readable book -- already a classic statement of the aesthetics of digital media, acclaimed by practitioners and theorists alike -- Janet Murray shows how the computer is reshaping the stories we live by.
Murray discusses the unique properties and pleasures of digital environments and connects them with the traditional satisfactions of narrative. She analyzes the dramatic satisfaction of participatory stories and considers what would be necessary to move interactive fiction from the formats of childish games and confusing labyrinths into a mature and compelling art form. Through a blend of imagination and techno-wizardry, Murray provides both readers and writers with a guide to the storytelling of the future.
(cloth published by Free Press, 1997)
Editorials
Hotwired
Hallelujah. This book elevates Murray to the front ranks of visionary culture and digital thinkers....A landmark book.Publishers Weekly -
Intelligent and carefully researched, this report from the more erudite side of cyberspace focuses on the impact of interactive media on the narrative (i.e., story-telling) imagination, and vice versa. Murray, a former programmer and a humanities professor at MIT since 1971, has taught electronic fiction writing since the early 1990s to the world's most hard-core hackers, finding herself "drawn to imagining a cyberdrama of the future by the same fascination that draws me to the Victorian novel." Here, she debunks the notion that nonlinear storytelling began with the point-and-click wanderings of hypertext, demonstrating the desire to tell multiple stories simultaneously in numerous writers from Homer to Tolstoy. She contends that because the "space" of the story and its outcome are dependent on the reader, however, electronic writing gives the reader the kind of "agency""the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices"previously found only in audience participation-based arts. Virtual characters like "Julia," who "lives" in chat rooms and responds to those who engage her in conversation, may just expand our definition of fiction. After musing over plot algorithms and speculating about cyberdrama, Murray ends with the heartening prediction that developments in fiction-writing software will increasingly allow those of us who are bored by war-related video games to experience the benefits of "a computer-based literature" that "might help us recognize ourselves in the machine without a sense of degradation." (July)Library Journal
There's something a bit threatening and yet more than a little thrilling about the idea central to Murray's work: Can we already be at the cusp of a bona fide new medium of communication, one that will marry the power of the narrative with the vast capabilities of the computer? Murray, a longtime humanities computing guru at MIT, insists that we are, convincing us that the attraction of writers for cyperspace is as irresistible as it is persistent. Already, she argues, numerous novelists, playwrights and filmmakers are poised for the move toward multiform stories, digital formats, and, of course, increased interactivity. Murray's ruminations are dramatic, compelling, and almost as hypnotic as drama itself, be it real (and steeped in tradition) or virtually imagined. Heartily recommended for scholars and all fanatics of the brave new world.-- Geoff Rotunno, Tri-Mix Magazine, Goleta, CA
James Coates
[A] brilliant look at the future of storytelling.-- Chicago Tribune
Stan Diehl
Hamlet on the Holodeck reaches beyond the scope of interactive narrative and encompasses the global possibilities of emerging technologies.--BYTE