Hamlet on the Holodeck

• Who is Janet Murray?• Worked at IBM– Suits and hackers– Musical printer

• Victorian scholar at MIT– Novel as ultimate form– Not into deconstruction– Into constructionist educational software

Hackers and Bards

• Complementary skills• “The spirit of the hacker is one of the great

creative wellsprings of our time, causing the inanimate circuits to sing with ever more individualized and quirky voices”

• “The spirit of the bard is eternal and irreplaceable, telling us what we are doing here and what we mean to one another.”

The Holodeck

• Janeway’s Holonovel– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UA2kXgv4Ai4

• A generally positive vision of the future of interactive narrative– How does it compare to today’s games?

• Stories were not always positive– As a replacement for the real world– Holoaddiction

Reaction to New Media

• Early reaction is generally negative– Fear of change

• Brave New World– Talkies, Movies, and Feelies

• Fahrenheit 451– Vision of reality tv?– “The televisors are evil because they create ‘an environment

as real as the world.’”– “Books are … better … their meager sensory input makes their

illusions easier to resist.”• McLuhan’s hot and cold

Reaction to New Media

• TekWar– Vision of virtual reality– “the source of addiction, destitution, bad trips,

overdose deaths, and gangster violence.”• Computer Games– A film critic complained that his sons quit reading

to play video games that “offer a kind of narrative, but one that yields without resistance to the child's desire for instant gratification.”

Utopian and Distopian Visions

• Bridging the Hopes and Fears– “enticing but not enslaving”– “Neither vision of the future refutes the other.”

• “Eventually all successful storytelling technologies become “transparent”: we lose consciousness of the medium and see neither print nor film but only the power of the story itself.”

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO7wE8snf2E

Computer as Meta-Medium

• Computers enable many existing forms of communication– Existing representations being digitized

• Typical of a new medium– Incunabula recorded prose and poetry of oral

storytelling– Movies were recordings of plays

• “At the incunabula phase of narrative computer”