Book Review: Hamlet on The Holodeck (Part One)© Mark Silcox
Jun 16, 2000
Janet Murray is an English Professor at MIT who used to work part-time as a coder for a software development company. In the charming, anecdotal preface to Hamlet On The Holodeck she describes herself as having surprisingly conventional tastes in English literature - Victorian novels and the criticism of Northrop Frye seem to have been the staples of her reading history. She first got into interactive design through the production of educational software for language instruction classes, but at the some point - perhaps, she suggests, the day she spent a whole fistful of quarters playing Mad Dog McCree at a video arcade with her son - the passion for IF kicked in. She's now the director of MIT's Program in Advance Interactive Narrative Technology (PAINT - cute, eh?), and this book, whose ostensible theme is "The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace," has become something of a bible for more reflective members of the interactive writing community. It's also very clear, well-written and engaging enough to be worth reading even by someone relatively new to the IF scene. It's a book that's well worth looking at in some detail, then, within the context of this site, and over the next few weeks I'll be giving it a fairly extensive, critical review here. Murray's aim in the book is to try to give readers a sense of what interactive media will come to look like in the future as its acquires mainstream popularity (we're all still waitin'..) and the technology improves. The central metaphor is that of the Holodeck familiar to Star Trek fans - a closed-off area of the ship in which crew members can act out their narrative fantasies in a fully immersive and responsive holographic environment. She begins her speculations by trying to describe what she takes to be the four 'essential' properties of digital media. The reader's experience of a story told in cyberspace is one of a medium that is "procedural," "encyclopedic," "participatory" and "spatial." This discussion is probably the least satisfactory part of the book, since each property is described almost entirely by reference to specific examples of interactive literature and visual art, without much in the way of useful generalization. The main idea seems to be that what distinguishes digital storytelling is that it requires input from the reader, follows universally unambiguous decision paths in response to this input, and provides access to huge quantities of information (I can't really tell exactly what 'spatial' is supposed to mean). Not exactly revolutionary insights, these.
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