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"