Hamlet on the Holodeck Twenty Years Later

Highlights

  • though there is a tendency to think of the computer as “the enemy of the book,” it is in fact “the child of print culture,” a powerful representational medium of its own that promises to continue the evolution of storytelling and “reshape the spectrum of narrative expression.”
  • Books are good at delivering essentially linear stories, she insists, while computers are good at telling stories of a different kind: procedural, participatory, encyclopedic, and spatial. And they’re particularly good at telling stories that reflect the digital age—stories about fractured realities, complex systems, and networked ways of being in the world.
  • Murray became devoted to creating “incunabula,” a term meaning “swaddling clothes” that is used by book historians to describe awkward experiments produced just after the invention of the printing press.
    • She compares Myst, for instance, a seminal first-person adventure game from 1993, to the juvenilia of the Brontë sisters, who told stories to one another about tense dungeon-crawls in a “regressive, violent, overheated emotional universe.”
  • “walking simulator” was likely pejorative at first, rooted in a “misconception that there are two different categories, narrative and game, and you’re either one or the other.”
  • there is "a largely tortuous debate in game-studies circles between so-called ludologists Ludology and narratologists: people who wanted to study games as abstract systems, on the one hand, and people who wanted to study them as narrative experiences on the other."
    • the prominent video-game critic @ian-bogost, a colleague of Murray’s at Georgia Tech, assailed her book one more time—without naming her or it directly—in a widely shared piece that was provocatively, if misleadingly, titled Video Games Are Better Without Stories.
    • ludologists want Tetris—or Candy Crush, or perhaps the screen itself—to be a refuge from narrative, she argues, because they’re embroiled in too much narrative already.
    • For some, “objections to the possibility of deeply meaningful digital narrative forms” are rooted in “empty expressions of nostalgia for older media artifacts.”
    • But for others it seems to be something else: a need to keep digital technology away from “the cultural and narrative dimensions of representation” altogether, as if it could remain a realm of pure function.

Backlinks