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