Book Review

Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace

by Janet H. Murray
The Free Press, New York, New York
CAN$34.00, US$25.00

Reviewed by John Thurston, PhD

"Let's get Moff Rebus!"

"I'm too scared!" my son replied.

I allayed his fears and we went to hunt down the arch villain. By the time we found him, we were too weak to attack. We recharged ourselves and returned, but he had moved to another of his strongholds in the labyrinth. The search began anew.

The increasing dominance of computers in developed societies over the past fifteen years has been accompanied by another trend. Since 1984, when Sherry Turkle published The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, a growing number of books by thinkers trained outside of the computer sciences have focussed on the social and personal significances of those sciences. Recent publications, such as Dale Spender's Nattering on the Net: Women, Power and Cyberspace, Allucquère Rosanne Stone's The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, and Turkle's Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, extend the themes to encompass the merging of computing and communications. (Spender is a literary scholar, and Stone and Turkle studied anthropology and psychology, respectively.)

Although books by male authors could also be cited, books by women seem to define the field. This past year, Janet Murray, who has a doctorate in English, published Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, playfully announcing in her title the disparate elements that she unites.

A Cultural Studies Approach

All of the above-mentioned books forego the academic manner for styles more suited to their subjects. They mix popular culture and what is known as art, while retaining a sensitivity to the nuances and specificities of each. They are open to the culture of young males to an extent not usually associated with books by middle-aged academics. They take risks that, while not always successful, make for exhilarating reading. In Hamlet on the Holodeck, for instance, Murray brings together Homer and multi-user domains (MUDs), Jorge Luis Borges and electronic narrative, Don Quixote and immersive fiction. Her range of cultural reference is impressive in itself.

Perhaps because of this range, Murray's book has a blind spot similar to that found in some of the other books. The academic subculture of cultural studies is characterized by cross-disciplinary status and a refusal to accept the division between high and low culture. Murray could usefully draw on the theories that support cultural studies, but Hamlet on the Holodeck lacks explicit recognition of work in this area.

Murray's general thesis is that developments in the digital medium are preparing the way for new narrative genres. We are at a turning point in the evolution of narrative, comparable to the early days of the Renaissance theatre, the novel, the cinema. Hamlet on the Holodeck describes the conditions that are creating possibilities for this next stage and the work that is being done to explore the new possibilities. Murray speculates on the directions that narrative follow, as a result of new techniques that, by her account, are particularly suited to appropriation by writers — or whatever the creators of stories in the new medium will be called.

Murray compares the impacts of cultural technologies (the proscenium arch, the printing press, film, and the digital medium), showing how the impacts were similar and how they gave rise (or in the last case, give rise) to new types of narrative. She bases her discussion on works in each medium, providing an often breathtaking panorama of narrative production from Shakespeare's The Tempest to Rand and Robin Miller's Myst, the latter recognized as one of the most significant examples to date of participatory narrative. (To the uninitiated, Myst is known, if at all, as simply another computer game.)

Weaknesses …

The first and last sections of the book, where Murray's own analyses and speculations set the dominant tone, are the most successful. The two middle sections often drag, but for an unavoidable reason. The middle sections are expositions of the significance and direction of current experiments in the digital medium. To support her ideas, however, Murray must summarize experiments that are not available to the general public. Extensive discussion of stories never personally experienced can leave the reader cold.

Aggravating the problem is the fact that the effectiveness of a digital narrative depends heavily on experiencing it within the medium for which it was created. A plot summary of a novel or a movie can convey some of the meaning of the original work; a plot summary of Myst conveys almost nothing of the impact of the piece.

Although she grounds her discussions in a plethora of individual works, Murray generalizes overmuch. She is too ready to obliterate the differences to which her own analyses lead by collapsing them under words such as all, the same, always, and everywhere. Her absolutism sometimes weakens her argument. Her insistence, for instance, that all narratives seek to accomplish the same goal — expressing the deep, unarticulated concerns of the societies from which they arise — erases fundamental differences between narratives and societies.

When Murray anticipates the fulfillment of the narrative potential of the digital medium in the appearance of the next Tolstoy, Dickens, or Brontë, she sets the bar too high. Theorists of literary production have long accepted that the hero-artist is a concept specific to a historical moment that has passed. That Murray fails to account for the social and cultural significance of the absorption of the arts into the entertainment industries is also damaging. Mass-market appeal increasingly conditions our appreciation of the value of all creative production; this condition will apply with even greater force to the digital narrative medium.

… And Strengths

At other times, Murray's tracing of cultural and technological developments is persuasive. She alludes to how the scientific revolutions associated with Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud have decentered humanity's perception of itself. Dethroned, in succession, from the centres of the physical, biological, and psychological universes, humanity has taken solace in "our place in nature, our separateness from the increasingly mechanical world we are creating around us." But now, scientists are speculating that consciousness may be solely a physical process: "numerous unintelligent neurons all lighting up at just the right moment". (p. 246) Murray uses such attempts to model human-consciousness-as-a-system to support her contention that the computer may offer narrative techniques especially suited to contemporary shifts in the perception of what it means to be human.

Hamlet on the Holodeck delivers exciting insights and convincing arguments for altered perspectives. One of its controlling themes derives from the characterization of early books — those printed between 1455 (the invention of the printing press) and 1501 — as incunabula, "the work of a technology still in its infancy". Contemporary works in the new medium are also incunabula:

The garish videogames and tangled Web sites of the current digital environment are part of a similar period of technical evolution, part of a similar struggle for the conventions of coherent communication. (p. 28)

Hamlet on the Holodeck traces this struggle for conventions.

Meat for the Technical Writing Community

Murray teaches a course in interactive fiction writing in MIT's Film and Media Studies Program. She draws on her own experience with computers and writers to explore how the capabilities offered by the computer are related to narrative conventions in traditional media, and how they extend those conventions. She reveals new vistas for both narration and computing in her discussions of the computer's strengths in enabling user interaction, in following and representing procedures, in modelling systems, in presenting encyclopedic bodies of information, and in delivering immersive, virtual environments.

For technical writers, Murray's chapter on "Agency" hits home. The concept of "agency" resembles the more popular "empowerment":

Agency is the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices. We expect to feel agency on the computer when we double-click on a file and see it open before us or when we enter numbers in a spreadsheet and see the totals readjust. (p. 126)

Technical writers can gather insights from Murray's discussion of how users of computer applications achieve a sense of agency. Agency gives meaning to interaction. Technical writers provide the means to achieve agency. From the agency enabled by computer games, she develops a discussion about how digital narrative supplies agency.

Murray contends that "the most ambitious promise of the new narrative medium is its potential for telling stories about whole systems". (p. 280) Because the book is largely about forms of entertainment, many may find it difficult to take seriously. Murray's purpose, however, is serious indeed. The computer, she says,

is first and foremost a representational medium, a means for modeling the world that adds its own potent properties to the traditional media it has assimilated so quickly. As the most powerful representational medium yet invented, it should be put to the highest tasks of society. (p. 284)

Hamlet on the Holodeck does not argue that storytelling in the digital medium will make other forms of storytelling obsolete. Certainly, playwrights and novelists still exist, although writers of screenplays command larger audiences. Digital narrative may become the most characteristic form of storytelling in the next century, but penetrating stories will continue to be told in other forms — even if the digital medium absorbs them. We should welcome any expansion of our ability to tell stories about ourselves, especially if the new form is particularly suited to the period in which it arises. And if you are a writer who wants to reach a mass audience, you should read Murray's book.

Questions Still Unanswered

Hamlet on the Holodeck leaves unanswered fundamental questions about how technologies become available for narrative. Different technologies clearly enable different forms of narrative. Are the technologies driving the stories we tell, or do we humanize the technologies as we adapt them to telling stories?

The vignette with which I started this review really happened. It relates an experience that my son and I shared with a computer game. The medium had become transparent. The story was all that mattered. Murray predicts that this kind of experience will become common, as the stories available for us to experience in the digital medium

… suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.