Janet Murray, "Immersion"

(In Hamlet on the Holodeck)

- Any medium can present an immersive "virtual reality" through narrative, but the effect is intensified by participatory media
- Computers as liminal, like stories
- Immersion must rest on the threshold between real (present) and imaginary (elsewhere/distant)
- Problem of seeing ourselves in the fantasy without disrupting it
- Problem of "finding our way back" (what is the fourth wall of digital media?)
- We just need to get used to new media
- Formalism/formal experimentation as a sign of maturity (Duck Amuck)
- Unlike older media, we are asked to transgress boundaries and enter the liminal space
- Screen/controller as threshold objects
- Active creation of belief (not passive suspension)
- Immersive stories invite participation
- Virtual objects become "real through use"
- Link between spectacle and immersion
- Avatar as mask that allows for participation in/on the threshold
- Move away from "gun-crazy" violent games
- Awareness of others can break immersion, but in MUDs and other similar games we only see the avatar, not the "real" person
- Well-defined rules/roles structure immersive environments and engender belief
- Game mechanics mediate/stand in for other actions/meanings (does that make them linguistic?)
- Experiences that are authentic, if not "real"

Janet Murray, "From Additive to Expressive Form"

(In Hamlet on the Holodeck)

- "Additive art form," ie: cinema as photography + theatre, conception indicates a form in its early stages (foreshadowing remediation again?)
- Move beyond the attraction of the medium itself to interested in the stories it tells
- What are the essential properties of the digital medium?
- ELIZA as the first computer character (believability)
- Essential properties of digital environments: they are procedural and participatory (interactive), and spatial and encyclopaedic (immersive)
- Procedural systems of rules should be recognizable "interpretations" of the real world
- Zork "programs the player" through trial and error
- Pleasure of testing limits of a system
- Dynamic participation, not binary
- Computers are spatial because we "navigate" them (seems like a chicken/egg thing... why do we conceptualize computer use as navigation to begin with?)
- Murray argues that there is transparency/immediacy in screen displays (I disagree, it is always mediated, but a question of degrees), that navigating a digital environment is "real" experience
- "Dramatic enactment of the plot" by the interactor
- Encyclopaedic, expansive fictions
- Tension between seemingly vast possibilities and the limited/ideologically determined roles available to us (importance of interpretation rather than uncritical acceptance)
- Importance of "systems thinking" in the 20th Century
- "The computer allows us to create objective correlations for thinking about the many systems we participate in, observe and imagine."
- Real knowledge can be gleaned from "fake" simulations/games
- Computers are uniquely suited to our era, in which we conceptualize the entire world and life itself in terms of systems

Janet Muray, "Harbingers of the Holodeck"

(In Hamlet on the Holodeck)

- Computers as a hybrid of all previous media/forms (sounds a lot like "cinema is an amalgam of all arts")
- New varieties of narrative entertainment (in their infancy)
- Storytelling as "continuous" throughout history, media
- Distressingly teleological view (earlier media foreshadowing later media as "proto" versions)
- Multiform stories, multiple versions/realities within one linear work
- 20th Century physics engenders a rethinking of narrative time: alternate realities, points-of-view
- 20th Century life as composed of parallel possibilities (computer can capture this)
- Roleplaying as "consensual reality," "holodeck experiences without the machinery"
- 3D movies ready for more intimate stories (definitely has not happened!)
- Tension between spatial immersion and linearity (and control/interactivity)
- Games as the most promising attempts so far
- Loosening of boundaries between game/story, narrative/drama, audience/author
- Murray hopes to determine the native properties of the computer (stop remediating)

Janet Murray, "Lord Burleigh's Kiss"

(In Hamlet on the Holodeck)

- Star Trek holodeck as a storytelling medium (employing familiar literary genres)
- Mostly game-like adventure stories, but the Victorian gothic story demonstrates a more "serious" approach
- Virtual/real distinction anxiety (like all new representational media)
- Huxley's Brave New World, Bradbury's Farenheit 451
- Limitations of print media as a positive thing (makes its illusions easier to resist)
- Computers and video games especially are the new source of anxiety (cyberpunk, etc.)
- Optimistic holodeck vs more dystopic visions
- Control over the medium (being able to turn it off or close the book) allows us to retain our humanity (simplistic understanding of control?)
- Link to the long human tradition of storytelling
- "Safe space" for exploring ourselves
- All media become transparent and irrelevant over time and only the "truth" contained within (ie: content, story) matters (?!)

Janet Murray, "Introduction: A Book Lover Longs for Cyberdrama"

(In Hamlet on the Holodeck)

- Ambivalence towards emerging media (exhiliration/fear)
- Cross-referencing in print media as proto-hypertext (similar to some of Aarseth's points)
- Importance of early hackers, pedagogical computing in the early days of digital humanities
- "Microworlds" as dynamic, fictional universes/narratives represented on computers for exploration and discovery (and learning)
- Digital media as a "thrilling extension" and an analytical, synthetic "tool for serious inquiry" that needs only to be domesticated
- Computer as counterpart, not replacement, for print media
- Pursuit of "a computer-based literary form"
- Digital storytellers: "half hacker, half bard"
- Cyberdrama as a new framework for storytelling

Espen Aarseth, "Conclusions: The Ideology of Influence"

(In Cybertext)

- Persistent myth of co-creation
- Ergodic works include "the rules for its own use" and distinguishes between sucessful/unsucessful users (always?)
- Anamorphosis: hide/code aspects of a work for viewer to uncover (through non-trivial effort) -> determinate cybertexts with a "final state"
- Three kinds of literature: Novels (including explorable hypertexts), anamorphic literature, metamorphic literature (in which the user has real influence)
- Broad issues: users vs creators, old vs new terms/theory, etc.

Espen Aarseth, "Songs from the MUD: Multi-User Discourse"

(In Cybertext)

- MUDs as discourse
- Can MUDs be texts? Literature?
- No author, publisher, markets, just writers communicating in a system of symbolic capital
- Closed, non-local social places (space for play, textual pleasure)
- Not a game, because (most) rules are socially enforced (perhaps it's just a different kind of game, or a hybrid?)
- MUDs are real communities, not "virtual" ones
- Written word, text, is paramount
- MUDs as paradigmatic of mediated social interaction
- Free experimentation with fiction, personality (unlike other forms such as e-mail or IRC)
- Site for emerging social/aesthetic modes of textual communication
- Levels of discourse in MUDs: Construction/Progression/Negotiation/Quasi-event/Event
- Analogy to jazz improvisation
- Metamedium (contains other forms)
- "Netiquette" is formulated by individuals? (Isn't it socially constructed? Also describes as a "contested behavioural envelope")
- MUD players as literary cyborgs
- MUD discourse as "meaningful, intelligible mode of literary communication"

Espen Aarseth, "Intrigue and Discourse in the Adventure Game"

(In Cybertext)

- Dungeons & Dragons as "oral cybertext" (also textual via rulebooks?)
- Adventure as folk art (Buckles)
- Elements of adventure games: Data/Processing Engines/Interface/User
- Sage advice: "study the various works that already exist and how they are played" rather than speculating/pontificating about the future aesthetic greatness of games
- Adventure has come to be understood as an ahistorical ur-text
- Alternative modes of discourse and pleasure (to traditional texts)
- Player prompts as keyholes, awaiting the right command (not "gaps" in the conventional sense)
- Aarseth seems to assume all adventure games feature some unnecessary elements or red herrings (surely some puzzle-like examples only include essential information/elements?)
- No story, only plot in adventure games (?)
- Intrigue: the player/"intriguee" must figure out the plot laid out by the intrigant
- Bizzare (and un-PC) analogy to autism?!
- Players willingly suspend capacity for normal language, abilities, etc. and accept the limited range of options offered by the game
- Intrigant (mediated by the "voice" or representation) is not the narrator or the (implied) author, rather the "whoever-it-is" in control behind the scenes, the "immanent adversary"
- Aporia/epiphany
- Adventure games take place between: Event plane/Negotiation plane/Progression plane
- "Puppet" seems to be Aarseth's proto-avatar (or at least, his proto-implied avatar)
- Aarseth overstates the difference (on a structural level) between textual and graphic adventure games - certainly some games (such as the LucasArts cycle of adventure games) are very different, but others, such as Myst, seem almost identical to text adventures beyond their audiovisual interface

Espen Aarseth, "Textonomy: A Typology of Textual Communication"

(In Cybertext)
- Attempt to establish a rigorous terminology (always suspicious)
- Downplays physical differences between media (highly dubious claim that the shift from LPs to CDs did not change the production or consumption of music - what about track-skipping and shuffle?)
- "Correspondence analysis"
- Text: "any object with the primary function to relay verbal information" that requires a material medium and is not equivalent to the information relayed (as opposed to the more agnostic/ridiculously broad definitions preferred in film studies and elsewhere)
- Scriptons: strings of signs as they appear to an ideal reader/user
- Textons: strings of signs as they exist in the text
- Elements of textonomy: Dynamics/Determinability/Transiency/Perspective/Access/Linking/User Functions
- Significant overlap between paper and electronic texts according to this typology (contra common assumptions, hypertext techno-utopianism)
- User activity is a central concern
- New media emulate features/functions of old media (curiously anticipating Bolter and Grusin's Remediation, evidently the later Bolter was paying attention to Aarseth's many scathing critiques!)

Espen Aarseth, "Paradigms and Perspectives"

(In Cybertext)

- Cybertext as a perspective, not an object
- Text as material machine (not just a syntagmatic chain of signifiers)
- Semiotics is insufficient
- How to approach a complex system with emergent behaviour (can it be a meaning-making system?)
- Look beyond the surface of sign/user and incorporate the "dual materiality" of cybernetic sign processes (code and presentation/expression/execution)
- Nonlinearity is an ambiguous, difficult concept
- Actual machines, not metaphorical ones (akin to Juul's "real rules?")
- Nonlinear vs multilinear
- Distinguish between the object/text and our experience of it (according to Aarseth, the object/text exists independently, while the experience is contingent)
- Books are not essentially linear, computers are not essentially non-linear (these are cultural-ideological conceptions)
- Interactivity is also problematic
- Cyborg aesthetics, texts as "cyborg fields" - who is in control?
- Control cannot be clearly located at any one point

Espen Aarseth, "Introduction: Ergodic Literature"

(In Cybertext)

- Cybertexts are not exclusively electronic/digital
- Non-trivial effort required
- "a machine for the production of variety of expression"
- Traditional reader simply does not have the same degree of influence
- Problematic conflation of fictional worlds and the mediated representation of that world in existing literary theory
- Struggle for (narrative) control
- Games actually are labyrinths and worlds, rather than representations
- Difference and overlap between games and narrative
- Cybertexts as synthetic, composite
- Unicursal vs multicursal labyrinths
- Metaphoric labyrinth (novel) vs actual labyrinth (game/cybertext)
- Digital database facilitates ergodic texts
- Critical of both existing literary theory approaches to digital media, and of radical techno-utopian approaches
- Whether or not cybertexts are "literature" is irrelevant, they should not be "colonized" by literary theory
- What is the actual difference, if any, between paper and computer texts? (We should not assume there is one)
- New media is only important insofar as it can tell us about human communication and culture
- "existing literary theory is incomplete (but not irrelevant)" - needs to be expanded
- "a perspective on all forms of textuality"
- Pluralist, not essentialist perspective on computer technology
- Cybernetic information feedback loop (key feature)
- Text vs reading/interpretation (understand the relationship between)
- Text exists between operator, verbal sign and medium (similar to Altman's pragmatic/semantic/syntactic model?)
- Text as machine with different parts, users
- Overlooked importance of the medium
- "redefine literature by expanding our notion of it" and literary aesthetics in turn

Patrick Crogan, "Gametime: History, Narrative and Temporality in Combat Flight Simulator 2"

(In The Video Game Theory Reader)

- Flight sims as exemplary of tendencies in games and digital media
- Relation between war/military technology and games (as part of peacetime culture more generally)
- Blurring of distinction between war and peace - Virilio's pure war, constant preparation for/anticipation of threats
- Logistics: the abstraction of reality in the management of a state or military, mapping out challenges
- "Military-entertainment complex"
- Reversal of military influence on games -> games influence military (appropriation of forms and technologies from entertainment for military purposes)
- Two way traffic between games and military is part of the pure war tendency
- Abstraction of historical events
- Aestheticization of information processing, mapping computer ontology/logistics onto all cultural activities
- Goals make us experience games as narrative (narrative reconstruction of "historical" events)
- Strong emphasis on authenticity in Combat Flight Simulator 2
- Comparison to Michael Bay's Pearl Harbour
- Narrativizing "unrealizes" events (makes them less real as an ordered temporal sequence)
- Historical narrative/representation as a secondary function or a motivation (similar to high concept/spectacle/special effects films)
- Abstraction of film-making processes due to CGI, emphasis on post-production (logistics), everything else secondary to the production of effects
- Narrative in digital media as a "plotting of a trajectory of tasks to accomplish"
- Narrative supports the presentation of tasks -> provides a contextual frame and an arrangement of the time spent playing (feedback loop)
- Time in games is the player's time, not the game's
- Games model problems in anticipation of the player solving them (like military logistics)
- Gametime is training to solve problems, transforms events in a simulation into "potential resources for the execution of [an algorithm]" (flow chart analogy)
- Level editor as play with logisitical conception of the world
- Gametime as "theoretical time"
- Instrumentalization of war -> airwar conducted at a distance (closely related to military simulation, logistics)
- Flight sims as recreational "anticipation machines"
- Anticipatory deterrence goes hand-in-hand with proliferation of threats
- Supplementarity of narrative in digital media as a form of multi-tasking
- Derrida: supplement is always significant
- Ethical positioning is replaced by control in this kind of historical representation/simulation

Bernard Perron, "From Gamers to Players and Gameplayers: The Example of Interactive Movies"

(In The Video Game Theory Reader)

- Interactive movies almost bridged the gap between games and movies, but failed
- Myst (a "movie game") as distinct from interactive movies
- Narrative and style in interactive movies is B-grade, game elements are more interesting
- Narrative interruptions for player decisions
- Interactivity in these games is perceived to be illusory
- There is always a player, and thus a mind/consciousness that accepts the rules
- Interactive movie players act as if/pretends that options are not limited, "creating belief"
- Shot-reverse-shot is rare in games but fairly common in interactive movies/movie games
- Menu-based adventure gameplay in movie games (click on objects, etc)
- Not about competition or action
- Repetition as punishment for bad choices
- What kind of player position do interactive movies create? Different from other kinds of games?
- Movie games: adventure/puzzles with live-action sequences
- Interactive movies: choices made at key points alter the story
- More about play than games
- Reactions, not actions (minimally interactive)
- Players might be disappointed, but do not "lose" in the conventional sense
- Play occurs within the rules of the game (same attitude as free-form play?), can undercut narrative coherence
- Determining a goal in the game shifts paidia to ludus, regardless of the type of game
- Games/texts that assume an ideal reader/player vs more open games
- Some players take an active role by developing in-game tricks, metagaming (expansive gameplay)
- Perron argues that we need to distinguish between players (paidia, exploring, proceeding through) gamers (ludus, competing, playing to win/succeed) and gameplayers (ludus, metagaming, exploring and creating rules)
- As Perron notes, these terms are easily confused and are generally seen to be interchangeable. Questionable utility?

Chris Crawford, "Interactive Storytelling"

(In The Video Game Theory Reader)

- "If we are to achieve interactive storytelling, we must concentrate all our energies on two factors: interactivity and storytelling." Enough said.

Gonzalo Frasca, "Simulation Versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology"

(In The Video Game Theory Reader)

- Against the narrative approach; simulation, not representation
- There are common elements, but different fundamental mechanics
- Ludology studies games in general and video games in particular
- Literature, film, narratological theory as a way of creating a coherent discipline by appealing to existing structures (but ill-suited)
- Games are not completely non-narrative, but are not structured like narratives, so formalism/structuralism is a necessary "first step" to understand their basic characteristics
- Representation-via-narrative is a powerful concept, simulation can be an alternative
- Not sequences, systems
- "to simulate is to model a (source) system through a different system which maintains (for somebody) some of the behaviours of the original system"
- "machines that generate signs"
- Frasca claims that examining the narrativized output/experience of a game is insufficient (questionable?)
- Video games are "the first complex simulational media for the masses"
- Narratives/narratology are "too familiar"
- "Advergames" are a means to an end, not just entertainment: a site for expanding the potential/our understanding of games (ie: serious games, newsgames)
- Frasca unironically juxtaposes the marketer-driven mainstream industry against advergames?!
- Game rhetoric vs narrative rhetoric
- Narratives are binary by nature (something happens or does not happen), with no modifications to the story (and yet he acknowledges that some kinds of narratives are variable, such as oral storytelling...)
- Knowledge/interpretation of a simulation requires repetition (I suppose?)
- Narrative is fixed, fated; simulation is variably determined
- The difficulty of a games can be a comment by the designer on the probability of change in the world (surely only sometimes?)
- Boal's game/theatre hybrids (repetition, variability)
- Narrative coherence, closure is incompatible with player freedom/experimentation
- Gratification of make-believe
- Ludus (goal rules) and paidia (rules that define parameters)
- Ideological critique of ludus games for having a beginning/middle/end structure (as opposed to open-ended games), evidently a value judgement
- Frasca assumes that the defined goal of a ludus game will be the ideologically preferred situation (ie: save the princess), but his formalism blinds him to the fact that it is perfectly possible for a game to have an ideologically undesirable goal in order to comment on that very ideology (certain war games, for example)
- "Manipulation rules" is a pretty weak term for what he is referring to (rules that define the possibility space)
- Three levels of ideology in games: surface representation (shared with narrative), "manipulation rules" and ludus/goal rules (Frasca clearly positions these on a simplistic heirarchy in which the meanings generated by goal rules always supercede other meanings, see note above about defined goals)
- Possible fourth level: meta-rules (level editors, etc.)
- Author always remains in control of all levels of meaning-making (total player freedom is impossible)
- Simulation is not a replacement for representation, an alternative
- Frasca claims that the basic assumption of a simulation is that change is possible, but this seems naive

Markku Eskelinen and Ragnhild Tronstad, "Video Games and Configurative Performance"

(In The Video Game Theory Reader)

- Video games as remediated traditional games
- "Games don't need audiences"
- Distinction between interpretive activity and "real" activity/play (non-trivial effort)
- Ergodic art exists between these two poles
- Pursue theory that fits games better
- Kaprow's Happenings, robotic art on a continuum with games
- Non-trivial work can be a means to produce something to be interpreted, but not in games
- Games are audienceless; games have variable sequences of action; games are a kind of performance/activity
- Eskelinen and Tronstad evidently presume a heirarchical relationship between activity and passivity
- Ludus rules determine win/end-game conditions; paidia rules determine the parameters of play
- Configurative, non-trivial work is a kind of performance
- "Matrixed" performances are separate from the real-world context in which they are performed, "non-matrixed" performances are a part of it
- Material investment breaks down the barrier between games and real life
- Eskelinen and Tronstad "don't expect to see the equivalent of avant-garde artists emerging from the game design community." (Um... yeah, about that...)
- After twenty pages of jargon-laden formalist taxonomies, Eskelinen and Tronstad appeal to a better understanding of the actual relationship between player and game, and the pleasure thereof

Mia Consalvo, "Hot Dates and Fairy-Tale Romances: Studying Sexuality in Video Games"

(In The Video Game Theory Reader)

- Sexuality is almost always present in one form or another in games, and can be manifest on two levels - the "surface" of representation and in the performance/activity of gameplay
- How to study sexuality in games? Using what theories? How to distinguish between different layers of games? How is sexuality expressed in games?
- Final Fantasy IX example
- Idealized, naturalized heterosexual romance in the narrative
- How does identification work in games?
- Simplification/abstraction (or perhaps complexity and realism, depending who you ask) allows the player to identify more easily (based on McCloud's hardly watertight theory of identification)
- Problem of the male player caring about a male character is solved by a homosocial erotic triangle between player/avatar/love interest
- Both male player and avatar "get the girl" (but also compete somehow, according to Consalvo) and thus the game validates heterosexual masculinity
- This whole argument, as well as Consalvo's conception of identification is extremely shaky
- A female player who is not hailed, and the system collapses, Consalvo claims?
- Role-playing: avatar as mask (experimentation with identities within the established system of the game, this makes much more sense than the strange erotic triangle argument)
- "normative construction of games [...] for male players"
- The Sims example
- Analysis of the game manual and how it puts forward heterosexuality as normal through images (not nearly enough of this kind of paratextual analysis in game studies)
- The text, however, uses gender-neutral pronouns leaving open homosexual possibilities
- Polygamy is more accepted than gay marriage in The Sims
- Sex/gender conflation in the game
- Sexualities are not essential in The Sims, rather it is a performed activity
- A "gay window" that allows gay interpretations without being overt (easily ignored by homophobic players)
- Consalvo notes that "options not explored will not surface," but in The Sims isn't it possible for two male characters to fall in love unexpectedly? Maybe only in later iterations.
- Consalvo seeks to judge games like The Sims based on how well they model reality and its complexities (a naive and unimaginative argument!)
- Openness in gameplay causes us to be less invested in our Sims, which Consalvo seems to think is a negative thing... but perhaps it also creates critical/reflective distance?
- Games can (always?) be subverted, queered