Book Review: Hamlet On The Holodeck (Part Two)
Janet Murray is one of the world's optimists. She believes that digital media can to provide us with new ways to learn about ourselves, new prospects for making the everyday experience of beauty possible for ordinary people, and new inspiration for creative souls frustrated by the limitations of older forms of literary expression. The chief obstacle for anyone who wishes to sustain such a rosy view of the future of interactive writing is the plain fact that most of what most people end up reading on their computer screens today is just plain awful - not only in the sense of being poorly written and unimaginatively presented, but also in the sense of being degrading, manipulative and almost insanely violent. Murray's strategies accommodating this scarcely deniable fact, while offering the vision of a future world in which narratives delivered in cyberspace can be expected to enrich the lives of human beings, are fascinating and largely persuasive.
Her central claim about interactive storytelling in Hamlet on the Holodeck is that the computer represents what historians call an "incunabular" medium. This word is derived from the Latin for "swaddling clothes" and has been used to describe the sorts of documents that were printed on Gutenburg's press before 1501 - crude, experimental productions in a new medium that came before the public eye before the conventions of presentation that we now automatically associate with print media (e.g legible typefaces, paragraph and chapter divisions) were invented. The metaphor is a powerful one, but one wonders whether it can be made to work for the content as well as the form of stories currently being told through present-day digital media.
The most fascinating chapter of Murray's book consists for the most part of an extended discussion of the writings of Charlotte Brontë. This may seem a strange thing to find in a book that's ostensibly about computer-assisted storytelling, but by describing how Brontë's concerns shifted from the obsessions made evident in her juvenilia (the famous 'Angria' stories that provide a wonderful glimpse into the imagination of a gifted child) and the concerns expressed in her two masterpieces, Jane Eyre and Vilette, Murray provides us with a powerful analogy for how she sees the future development of interactive storytelling. The writers of the most successful interactive stories of the present day, she argues, have not yet made the transition from producing "progressive" rather than "escapist" stories. "The medium as a whole," she proposes, must "Make the shift that Charlotte made from adolescent rehearsal fantasies and toward the expression of more realistic desires."
Latest Articles