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Beyond Myth and Metaphor: Narrative in Digital MediaRyan,
Marie-Laure, 1946-
Poetics Today, Volume 23, Number 4, Winter 2002, pp. 581-609
(Article)
Published by Duke University Press
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Beyond Myth and Metaphor:Narrative in Digital Media
Marie-Laure Ryan
Abstract The concept of narrative has been widely invoked by
theorists of digital tex-tuality, but the promotion of what is
described as the storytelling power of the computerhas often relied
on shallow metaphors, loose conceptions of narrative, and
literarymodels that ignore the distinctive properties of the
digital medium.Two myths havedominated this theorization. The myth
of the Aleph (as I call it) presents the digitaltext as a nite text
that contains an innite number of stories.The myth of the Holo-deck
envisions digital narrative as a virtual environment in which the
user becomesa character in a plot similar to those of Victorian
novels or Shakespearean tragedies.Both of these myths rely on
questionable assumptions: that any permutation of a col-lection of
lexias results in a coherent story; that it is aesthetically
desirable to be thehero of a story; and that digital narrativity
should cover the same range of emotionalexperiences as literary
narrative. Here I argue that digital narrative should emanci-pate
itself from literary models. But I also view narrative as a
universal structure thattranscends media.This article addresses the
question of reconciling the inherent lin-earity of narrative
structures with the multiple paths made possible by the
interactivenature of the digital text by distinguishing four forms
of interactivity, which resultfrom the cross-classication of two
binaries: internal versus external interactivity;and exploratory
versus ontological. Each of these categories is shown to favor
dier-ent narrative themes and dierent variations of the universal
narrative structure.
If we compare the eld of digital textuality to other areas of
study in thehumanities, its most striking feature is the precedence
of theory over theobject of study. Most of us read novels and see
movies before we consult
Poetics Today : (Winter ). Copyright by the Porter Institute for
Poetics andSemiotics.
tph
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582 Poetics Today 23:4
literary criticism and cinema studies, but it seems safe to
assume that avast majority of people read George Landows Hypertext
. () beforethey read any work of hypertext ction. Or to take
another example, weread full descriptions of what virtual reality
technology would mean forour lives and for art long before VR
became reality. (Even now its level ofsophistication is far from
allowing the immersive experience promised byits early prophets.)
In this article I would like to investigate one of the
mostimportant forms that this advance theorizing of digital
textuality has taken,namely, the use of narrative concepts to
advertise present and future prod-uct. I will approach this topic
in three ways: rst, through a critique of someof the (mis)uses of
the concept of narrative in advertising and theoreticaldiscourse;
second, through a taxomony of the various modes of user
par-ticipations in digital narratives; and third, through a
personal assessment ofthemost ecient way to exploit the resources
of hypertext, themost literaryform of digital narrative.As a
cognitive structure, narrative has such a grip on the mind that
the
popular success of a genre ormedium involving language is
crucially depen-dent on its ability to tell stories. It is because
knowledge was encoded astales that it was eectively transmitted and
remembered in oral societies;it is because of its narrative power
that the novel emerged as the dominantliterary genre of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and it is because itgave new
narrative dimensions to the novel and to the theater that
cinemabecame the art of the twentieth century. In recent years, the
concept ofnarrative has caught like re in cultural discourse, and
the software industryhas duly followed suit by turning the
metaphors of narrative interface andof the storytelling computer
into advertising buzzwords. To take a coupleof recent examples of
this free use of narrative terminology: Steven John-son concludes
his popular book Interface Culture () with the pronounce-ment: Our
interfaces are storieswe tell ourselves toward o
senselessness;Steve Jobs, the founder and CEO of Apple, talks about
the importanceof stories, of marrying technology and storytelling
skills (Auletta : );and the package of a computer game named
Starcraft advertises its capacityto let users tell their own
stories. What this phrase really means is thatthe user can create
new mazes and new levels of diculty, adding weaponsand characters
to the game by selecting items from a xed repertory.To promote the
narrative power of the computer, theorists of digital
media have either implicitly or explicitly relied on myths and
metaphors.The rst part of this essay proposes a critique of three
of these conceptual-izations: the metaphor of the narrative
interface, the myth of the Aleph (alabel of my own making), and the
myth of the Holodeck. The second part
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Ryan Beyond Myth and Metaphor: Narrative in Digital Media
583
presents my own view of the role, and of the possible mode of
realizationof narrative, in digital media.The terms myth and
metaphor, in my view, are not synonymous, though
they present some overlap. Metaphor is generally dened as the
transferof a concept from one domain to another. In this case it
means the use ofnarrative conceptssuch as plot, storyteller, or
characterto describe thedesign or mode of operation of a computer
application whose purpose isnot in itself the telling of stories.
By myth, on the other hand, I understanda theoretical model
borrowed from ction that describes the artistic poten-tial of a
digital form of narrative. This model is a myth not only becauseit
is an imaginary construct but also because it oers an idealized
repre-sentation of the genre it describes. My use of the term myth
has both posi-tive and negative connotations: positive, because the
pursuit of ideals is themost powerful of the forces that sustain
art, and negative, because idealsare by denition not reachable.The
myths I will evoke have served a usefulpurpose, since they
energized the publics imagination, but they did so bysetting
impossible or ill-conceived goals that raised false
expectations.Thismay lead to a loss of interest in new media when
these expectations turnout to be unfulllable.Before moving on
withmy discussion, let me sketch some of my positions
on the nature of narrative:
Narrative is not coextensive with literature, ction, or the
novel. Narrativity is independent of tellability. Narrative is not
limited towritten or oral storytelling. It is amental
rep-resentation that can be evoked bymanymedia andmany types of
signs.
Narrativity is a matter of degree: postmodern novels are not
nearly sonarrative as those of the nineteenth century.
As a mental representation, narrative consists of a world
(setting),populated by individuals (characters), who participate in
actions andhappenings (events, plot), through which they undergo
change (tem-poral dimension).
1. The Metaphor of the Narrative Interface
The story of interface design, since the advent of the
Macintosh, has beenshaped by a very simple and very powerful idea:
computers are ugly, fear-some, inhuman, and they make people feel
inadequate; it is thereforenecessary to hide them behind a metaphor
that will make them pass forsomething else. The best-known of these
disguises is the desktop conceptintroduced by Apple in the
mid-eighties. This family of metaphors associ-
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584 Poetics Today 23:4
ates the modules of a software package with familiar objects,
such as pens,les, folders, erasers, palettes, envelopes, and so
on.These objects are repre-sented on the computer screen by visual
icons that give the user a sense oftheir objectlike, physical
presence. But the desktopmetaphor has the unfor-tunate side eect of
limiting the computer to the role of a business machine.The next
logical step in the concealment of the computers true nature
istherefore the development of interface metaphors that suggest
play andentertainment, even when the actual function of the
software is the per-formance of professional tasks. All this
explains the popularity of narrativemetaphors with software
designers and Web page authors.The concept of narrative interface
was introduced in a handful of
articles gathered in a collection edited by Brenda Laurel, The
Art of Human-Computer Interface Design (). Some contributors
understand narrative ina diegetic way, while others advocate a
mimetic, or dramatic, applica-tion. The diegetic conception
presupposes the existence of a narrator orstoryteller addressing an
audience. If we apply this model to the case ofhuman/computer
interaction, the computer will be the storyteller, and theuser will
be the audience. In the mimetic or dramatic conception of
narra-tive, by contrast, there is no need for a verbal act of
narration, no need fora storyteller. Narrative comes into existence
not by being told but by beingenacted. More precisely, it comes
into existence in the mind of the spec-tator as an interpretation
of what is seen or heard. All it takes in this caseto produce a
narrative is agents who engage in an action that inspires theproper
interpretation in the mind of the audience. In the mimetic
model,the computer is not a storyteller but a character who
interacts with the userin such a way that the user will regard
their interaction as a story.The main proponent of the storyteller
metaphor is Abbe Don ()
in her contribution to Laurels anthology, Narrative and the
Interface.Though the article does not contain a systematic analysis
of the features ofthe storyteller, it is easy to see what makes the
metaphor so attractive tosoftware designers:
Oral storytelling is an inherently interactive situation.When a
parenttells a story to a child, for instance, the child can ask
questions or get theparent to expand some episodes (tell me again
how Little Red RidingHood got out of the wolf s mouth). The story
can be easily adaptedto the particular needs of the audience.
Storytelling, as a culturally universal phenomenon, provides
modelsof understanding that people have already mastered. If
software pro-grams exploit narrative structures, people will learn
to use themeortlessly.
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Ryan Beyond Myth and Metaphor: Narrative in Digital Media
585
Though each storytelling performance is uniquely adapted to
theneeds of the audience, the plot remains basically the same.
Similarly,when users operate a program, they may have their own
personalgoals, but a basic protocol and certain tasksmust be
fullled every time.
Storytelling creates a sense of solidarity among the members of
a com-munity. Operating a computer is a lonesome activity. The
metaphorhelps overcome this loneliness by suggesting the supporting
presenceof a user community.
The storyteller functions as the keeper and disseminator of
culturalknowledge. Storytelling stands for the idea of teaching
through enter-tainment. In oral cultures, information is
traditionally embedded in aspellbinding narrative action.The Iliad,
for instance, may have helpedmemorize the list of Greek tribes or
the parts of a warriors equipment.The metaphor of the computer as
storyteller means that the computeracts as a tutor and educator who
knows how to turn the frustration oflearning the complicated
operation of a program into a pleasurableexperience.
Storytelling provides an antidote to the cold indierence, rigid
deter-minism and unbending logic of the computer. It gives a human
faceto the machinethe face of compassionate computing.The
metaphoralso gives a voice to a widespread nostalgia for an age
when the tasksof everyday life could be performed through a set of
tools whose func-tioning people could easily understand.
Yet there is a limit to the analogy. By casting the user as
audience, thestoryteller metaphor ignores the dialogic nature of
human/computer inter-action. Storytellingmay depend on the audience
input, but it is essentially amonological form of discourse, with
the storyteller monopolizing the oorfor a lengthy turn.The dramatic
metaphors, with their implicit dialogism,seem therefore better
suited to model the dynamics of human/computerinteraction. Their
most inuential advocate is Brenda Laurel in her well-known book
Computers as Theatre (). Her analogy can be decomposedinto a series
of equivalencies:
The screen is a stage. The objects on the screen are the props.
The user is a character who plays a role on the stage by
manipulatingthe objects.
The interaction between the user and the objects produces a
plot.
To be truly pleasurable to the user, this plot should be
carefully scriptedby the system. Laurel recommends the adoption of
an Aristotelian patternthat guides the user through the traditional
dramatic curve of rise and fall in
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586 Poetics Today 23:4
tension. But she remains suspiciously vague on the question of
the practicalimplementation of her concept of plot as well as on
the kinds of applicationsthat lend themselves to a dramatic
experience.How do these ideas of the storytelling computer and of
the computer as
theater translate into concrete applications? At the present
time the narra-tive metaphor has inspired two types of design. One
involves the creationof a character and the other the creation of a
setting.The best-knownmanifestation of the creation of a character
is the Oce
Assistant of Microsoft Oce, a comic, friendly character selected
by theuser from a menu of several choices that include a paper
clip, a dog, a cat,and a cartoon version of Albert Einstein. What
does this Einstein charac-ter do? He rolls his eyes, aps his arms,
shakes his head, gets mad, quietsdown, nods approvingly. He remains
active as long as a time-consumingtask is going onsuch as saving,
opening, copying, or downloading a le.Through his cute antics, the
Oce Assistant fullls several functions, somedramatic, some
communicative, and some more narrowly narrative. Themost obviously
dramatic one is the Shakespearean function of comic relief.Even
when Einstein has nothing substantial to say, he alleviates the
serious-ness of the task performed by the user.The danger of comic
relief, of course,is that the routine is funny only the rst time
around; most of the people Ihave asked about the Oce Assistant nd
him a distracting nuisance. Thesecond function of Einsteina
communicative rather than strictly narra-tive oneis what Roman
Jakobson () has called the phatic function.This function consists
in maintaining contact with an interlocutor to makesure that the
channel of communication is still open, for instance, by
pipingmuzak over the telephone line while putting a customer on
hold.Throughhis little dance, Einstein entertains users and tells
them that the system is notdead when control has been taken over by
the machine for a lengthy periodof time. The third, and most
specically narrative, function of Einstein isthe helper function.
If the user tries to close a le without saving it rst, Ein-stein
gets upset and asks: Do you really want to lose your changes? If
theuser types Dear Susie, Einstein pops up in the corner and says,
It lookslike you want to write a letter. Do you want me to help?
Though a singlecharacter does not make a story, the gure of the Oce
Assistant suggestsan implicit scenario that puts the user in the
role of a hero of a Proppianfairy tale: as the user-hero I have a
task to accomplish; in order to do so, Imust tame a mean machine;
but along the way, I meet a friendly characterwho helps me conquer
the villainous system and fulll the mission.The other
concretization of the concept of narrative interface is the
design of a setting that encourages make-believe. This type of
metaphorplaces users in a role that conceals what they are actually
doing and dictates
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Ryan Beyond Myth and Metaphor: Narrative in Digital Media
587
a scenario that gives them a sense of purposeful action. My
example of nar-rative setting is the movie-making metaphor of the
program Director. Asthe name of the program suggests, the user is
cast as a lmmaker, the screenis the stage (the metaphor is somewhat
mixed between lm and theater),the objects that the user puts on the
stage are the members of the cast, theybehave according to scripts
written by the director, the pairing of scriptsand cast members is
called the score, and the end product is called a movie.As a
Director user, I can personally attest that I experienced an
exhilarat-ing feeling of power at the thought that I had become a
lmmaker, able tosummon actors on the stage and to dictate their
behavior. The metaphoralso greatly facilitated my understanding of
the various types of objects Iwas dealing with in the program.Those
who expect from the term narrative interface a spellbinding plot
with
lively characters and surprising twists will be deeply
disappointed by theserather trivial scripts and supercial
analogies. But it is precisely the banalityof the narrative
scenario that makes it ecient. In the design of software,narrative
is not an end in itself but a means toward a goal, and this goal
isto facilitate the operation of the program. Interface metaphors,
not unlikepoetic ones, fulll their rhetorical and pedagogical
functions by relating astrange new world to a familiar one.
2. Hypertext, and the Myth of the Aleph
Myth of the Aleph is my way of describing how the early
theorists ofhypertext conceived the narrative power of the new type
of text. The termcomes from a short story by Jorge Luis Borges (),
in which the scrutinyof a cabbalistic symbol enables the
experiencer to contemplate the wholeof history and of reality, down
to its most minute details. The Aleph is asmall, bound object that
expands into an innity of spectacles.The experi-encer could
therefore devote a lifetime to its contemplation. Though theydid
not explicitly invoke the model of the Aleph, the pioneers of
hyper-text theory conceived the new literary genre in strikingly
similar terms.For theorists such as George P. Landow, Jay David
Bolter, and MichaelJoyce, hypertext is a textual object that
appears bigger than it is becausereaders could spend hoursideally,
their entire lifetimesunraveling newstories from it. As Michael
Joyce (: ) puts it: Every reading . . .becomes a new text. . . .
Hypertext narratives become virtual storytellers.Likemany authors
before themProust,Mallarm, James Joycethe pio-neers of hypertext
dreamed their brainchild as the ultimate literary work,the sum of
all possible narratives, the only text the reader will ever
needbecause its meaning cannot be exhausted.
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588 Poetics Today 23:4
This conception of hypertext as amatrix that contains an innite
numberof narratives is particularly prominent in the work of George
Landow. Oneof the chapters of his seminal book Hypertext . () is
titled Recong-uring Narrative. Since the word narrative is
ambiguous between narrativediscourse and mental representation (the
technical story concept of nar-ratologists, in its opposition to
discourse), Landows claim can be under-stood in two ways. The rst
is the discourse sense: hypertext changes theway narrative
structures are encoded, how they come to the reader, howthey are
experienced in their dynamic unfolding. The feature that
enableshypertext to recongure narrative on the discourse level is,
evidently, itsinteractive design, a design that enables the reader
to select many dierentpaths through the narrative discourse and to
view its units inmany dierentorders. But this newway of presenting
stories does not mean that the storiesthemselves are radically
dierent from traditional narrative patterns.Therecould be one xed
story that comes to the reader in many dierent ways,depending on
which path is chosen through the network.But this rather tame
interpretation of reconguring narrative is not
what Landow (: ) has in mind: Hypertext, which challenges
nar-rative and all literary form based on linearity, calls into
question ideas ofplot and story current since Aristotle.
TheAristotelian ideas that hypertextchallenges are:
() xed sequence, () denite beginning and ending, () a storys
certain de-nite magnitude, and () the conception of unity and
wholeness associated withall these other concepts. In hyperction,
therefore, one can expect individual forms,such as plot,
characterization, and setting, to change, as will genres or
literary kindsproduced by congeries of these techniques. (Ibid.: ;
italics added)
When he writes that plot changes, does Landow mean that in
hypertextplot becomes something entirely dierent: a representation
in which eventsfreely oat in time rather than forming a sequence at
all? Or does he meanthat every reading resequences events, and that
plot consequently changesall the time, but within reasonably
constant parameters? The rst interpre-tation alters the concept of
plot beyond recognition: if events oat freelyin time, without
forming a xed sequence, time itself disappears, since oursense of
time is tied to a sense that moments and events succeed each
otherin an inexorably linear fashion. Without sequence, moreover,
there is nocausality and no logical coherence. How can one still
speak of plot and ofstory under these conditions?Let me therefore
consider the other option: hypertext challenges the
notion that there is only one sequence and one plot in the text
and thatreaders are done when they have reconstructed an event
trajectory that
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Ryan Beyond Myth and Metaphor: Narrative in Digital Media
589
leads from a beginning to an end. It is up to the reader to
rationalize everyreading, and consequently every arrangement of
lexias, into a coherentstory. In a hypertext environment a lack of
linearity does not destroy nar-rative. In fact, since readers
always, but particularly in this environment,fabricate their own
structures, sequences, or meanings, they have surpris-ingly little
trouble reading a story or reading for a story (ibid.: ). In
thisinterpretation, every traversal yields a possible story, in the
semantic sense,because it is the reader who constructs the story
out of the textual segments.Hypertext is like a construction kit:
it throws lexias at its readers, one at atime, and tells them: make
a story with this.Landow (ibid.: ) compares this situation to the
mental activity of the
speaker of a language who forms an innite number of sentences
out ofnite grammar: As readers we nd ourselves forced to fabricate
a wholestory out of separate parts. . . . It forces us to recognize
that the activeauthor-reader fabricates text andmeaning from
anothers text in the sameway that each speaker constructs
individual sentences and entire discoursesfrom anothers grammar,
vocabulary, and syntax. I nd this analogy fal-lacious, because it
hides an important dierence: the linguistic competenceof the
speaker is an internalized knowledge of the syntactic rules and
lexi-con of a language. To make a sentence, the speaker selects
patterns andwords from a knowledge base more or less completely
available to the mindbefore the speaker begins the sentence. But in
hypertext, lexias come one ata time; and the reader must create a
story on the move, without knowingwhat lexia will come next.Another
problem with Landows suggestion is that if we take literally
the claim that every traversal of the database produces a
dierent story, areader who encounters three segments in the order A
then B then C willconstruct a dierent story than a reader who
encounters the same segmentsin the order B then A then C. It is
only if sequence plays a crucial role indetermining meaning that
hypertext can be viewed as an Aleph that con-tains potentially a
large number of dierent stories. If the reader could placeA, B, and
C wherever narrative logic asks for in a developing narrative
pat-tern, it would not matter in which order A, B, and C are
encountered.Thisemphasis on themeaningfulness of sequence hits,
however, a serious logicalobstacle. Textual fragments are like the
pieces of a jigsaw puzzle; some teasily together, and some others
do not because of their intrinsic content,the narrative equivalent
of shape.The reader will admittedly do whatWolf-gang Iser () calls
ll in the blanks to construct a plot, that is, imagineuntold
episodes that glue the lexias together; but when we deal with a
typeof meaning as narrowly constrained as narrative, lling in the
blanks hasits limits. It is simply not possible to construct a
coherent story out of every
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590 Poetics Today 23:4
permutation of a set of textual fragments, because fragments are
implicitlyordered by relations, such as logical presupposition,
material causality, andtemporal sequence. What, for instance, will
I do if, in the course of myreading, I encounter a segment that
describes the death of a character and,later on, a segment that
describes the actions of this character when alive?Should I opt for
a supernatural interpretation, according to which the char-acter
was resurrected? This may be appropriate in certain contexts, but
ifthe text has so far created a realistic, everyday type of world,
the theme ofresurrection would threaten its thematic coherence.
Most readers, accus-tomed to techniques of ashback and ash-forward,
will construct a mentalimage in which being alive precedes being
dead; but if such rearrangementoccurs, readers will reconstruct the
same story regardless of the order inwhich they read lexias.If it
is unrealistic to expect that readers will be both willing and able
to
provide missing links to connect segments in a narratively
meaningful wayfor every dierent order of appearance, we must
abandon the Alephic con-ception of a new storywith every reading
session and replace it with amodelthat describes the readers
activity as the arrangement of textual segmentsinto a global
pattern that slowly takes shape in the mind.This model is thejigsaw
puzzle. Just as we can work for a time on a puzzle, leave it, and
comeback to it later, readers of hypertext do not start a new story
from scratchevery time they open the program but, rather, construe
a global representa-tion over many sessions, completing or amending
the picture put togetherso far.
3. Virtual Reality Narrative, and the Myth of the Holodeck
My second myth, the Holodeck, has been proposed by theorists as
a modelof what narrative could become in amultisensory,
three-dimensional, inter-active virtual environment. Its main
proponent is JanetMurray in her well-known book Hamlet on the
Holodeck (). But the concept of the Holodeckhas also been invoked
by Jaron Lanier, the visionary developer of VR tech-nology
(mentioned in Ditlea ) and by Michael Heim (), its no lessvisionary
theorist.All of these writers borrow theHolodeck idea from the
popularTV series
StarTrek.TheHolodeck is a kind of VR cave, to which the
crewmembers ofthe starship Voyager retreat for relaxation and
entertainment. In this cave, acomputer runs a three-dimensional
simulation of a ctional world, and thevisitorthe interactorbecomes
a character in a digital novel.The plotof this novel is generated
live, through the interaction between the humanparticipant and the
computer-created virtual characters. As Murray (:
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Ryan Beyond Myth and Metaphor: Narrative in Digital Media
591
) writes: The result is an illusory world that can be stopped,
started, orturned o at will but that looks and behaves like the
actual world. . . . TheStar Trek Holodeck is a universal fantasy
machine . . . a vision of the com-puter as a kind of storytelling
genie in the lamp. It enables crew membersto enter richly detailed
worlds . . . in order to participate in stories thatchange around
them in response to their actions.The rst chapter of Murrays book
describes a Star Trek episode in which
Kathryn Janeway, the female commander of the starship Voyager,
sneaksinto the Holodeck and becomes Lucy, the governess of the
children in anaristocratic Victorian household. Lucy falls in love
with the father of thechildren, Lord Burley, and they exchange
passionate kisses, but the veryresponsible Kathryn realizes that
this love for a virtual human is detrimen-tal to the fulllment of
her duties in the real world, and she eventuallyorders the computer
to delete the character. Murray (ibid.: ) interpretsthis action as
evidence that VRbased interactive drama can match boththe
entertainment and the educational value of literary narrative:
TheHolodeck, like any literary experience, is potentially valuable
in exactlythis way. It provides a safe place in which to confront
disturbing feelingswe would otherwise suppress; it allows us to
recognize our most threaten-ing fantasies without becoming
paralyzed by them. Some readers may bepuzzled by this use of a
science-ctional scenario tomake predictions aboutthe artistic
potential of what is supposed to become someday a real tech-nology.
Even more strangely, however, Murray bases her assessment of
thewholesome eect of Holodeck narrative on an episode in which,
precisely,the heroine is forced to shut down the system in order to
be able to func-tion in the real world. It is as if literary
narrative were only good for thosereaders who throw the book away
midway though their reading.The viability of the concept of the
Holodeck as model of digital narra-
tive is questionable for a number of reasons: technological,
algorithmic, butabove all psychological. These problems are evident
in Murrays descrip-tion of how she envisions aVRbased interactive
version of themovieCasa-blanca. The object of this version would be
to oer the interactor to havedierent adventures by assuming the
roles of several distinct characters, allof whom are pursuing their
own destinies in the French-controlled colo-nial city during World
War II (ibid.: ). We can ignore the question ofthe creation of the
setting, since it is primarily a problem of hardware andgraphic
design.The truly problematic issues are those of plot and
dialogue.Unlike most hypertext theorists, Murray has a fairly
strict idea of plot, andshe is not willing to leave responsibility
for its creation to the interactor orto chance. In her vision of
the Holodeck, plot and dialogue are controlledby the author and
users step into the roles of predened characters rather
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592 Poetics Today 23:4
than creating their own.Murray envisions the plot as a branched
or multi-form designmade ofmany prerecorded unitsepisodes, themes,
or mor-phemes, asMurray (ibid.: ) calls them in reference to
ProppsMorpholoof the Folktale ( [])that are activated by the system
in response tothe interactors actions. The many branches in the
plot correspond to thevarious decisions the interactor could make
in the situations presented bythe system. But how could the
interactor retain a reasonable freedom ofaction throughout the
performance without taking the plot in a directionfor which there
is no ready-made, logically coherent response stored in thesystem?
And howwould the system handle dialogue between the interactorand
the characters? Only an impractically large amount of
author-created,prerecorded dialogue could allow the system to
produce meaningful con-versation between the interactor and the
virtual characters.Thismeans thatthere will be no dialogue or that
the users freedom of speech will be lim-ited to something of the
scope of yes/no responses. Or perhaps even thatthe system will take
full control over dialogues and generate the words ofthe
interactor.But even if all these problems could be resolved, even
if the right bal-
ance could be struck between user freedom and system control,
even if thesystemmanaged to coax, rather than coerce, the
interactor to take dramati-cally optimal paths, an important
question remains. What kind of grati-cation will the experiencer
receive from becoming a character in a story?It is important to
remember at this point that, even though interactors areagents and
in this sense coproducers of the plot, they are above all the
bene-ciaries of the performance. The entertainment value of the
experiencedepends on how the interactors relate to their avatars.
Will interactors belike actors playing a role, innerly distanced
from their characters and simu-lating emotions they do not really
have, or will interactors experience theircharacter as their own
self, actually feeling the love, hate, fears, and hopesthat
motivate the characters behavior or the exhilaration, triumph,
pride,melancholy, guilt, or despair that may result from the
characters actions?If we derive aesthetic pleasure from the tragic
fates of literary charac-
ters such as Anna Karenina, Hamlet, or Madame Bovary, if we cry
forthem and fully enjoy our tears, it is because our participation
in the plotis a compromise between identication with the character
and distancedobservation. We simulate mentally the inner life of
each character, wetransport ourselves in imagination into the mind
of each, but we remain,at the same time, conscious of being
external witnesses. But in the Star TrekHolodeck, which is of
course an imaginary construct, the interactor experi-ences emotions
from the inside, to use a concept proposed by KendallWalton (: ).
This is why Kathryn Janeway must delete the char-
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Ryan Beyond Myth and Metaphor: Narrative in Digital Media
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acter of Lord Burley: even though she experienced the fairy-tale
romanceof a poor governess conquering the love of a handsome
aristocrat, her lovefor him threatened her ability to fulll her
real-world mission as well as herrelationship to her real-world
boyfriend. Had she taken another course ofaction, she might have
run into a much less pleasant scenario: loving LordBurley but being
rejected, remaining cold to his passion and regarding hisadvances
as a nuisance, or experiencing nothing more than a strictly
busi-nesslike servant-master relationship. Interactors would have
to be out oftheir mindsliterally and gurativelyto want to live
these plots in therst-personmode. (By rst- and third-personmode I
do notmean the tradi-tional narrative voices but whatWalton calls
experiencing from the insideand from the outside.)Yet if becoming a
ctional character will often result in a rather
unpleasant experience, Murray does not place restrictions on the
kind ofstories that will be suitable for Holodeck-style enactment.
She takes greatpains to demonstrate that new media can express the
entire spectrum ofhuman emotions. Digital narratives will be as
good for gut-wrenchingdrama as for action plots. In her imaginary
Casablanca simulation, forinstance, she would like to oer the user
the choice of causing the deathof another character by denouncing
him to the Nazis. To rival the ethicaldimension of literary
narrative, the simulation should make the user con-scious of the
moral consequences of this action.This means inicting guilton the
despicable interactor.Murray (: ) imagines the following end-ing
for the traitor scenario: You could nd yourself sitting at a table
with anewspaper report of the death lying in front of you next to a
bottle and glass.You would be able to pour the liquor and raise the
glass but not get up fromthe table. This enforced immobility would
suggest the despair of a personabout to drink himself to death.
This is a very moral ending indeedbutwill interactors actually feel
guilt, or will they respond by thinking: Thepoor devil feels
guilty, and he sure deserves it. This reaction would meanthat users
relate to their avatars in the third-person mode.The user will
bemore a puppet master who makes decisions for a certain character,
moti-vated by the curiosity of nding out what will result from
these decisions,than a human being existentially, emotionally,
andmorally caught in a cer-tain situation. By maintaining a safe
distance between reader and charac-ters, literature has been able
to explore the whole spectrum of human emo-tions without inicting
intolerable suering on the reader. Any attempt toturn empathy,
which relies on mental simulation, into emotions felt fromthe
inside would in the vast majority of cases cross the fragile
boundarythat separates pleasure from pain.Only selected types of
emotional experiences, and consequently selected
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594 Poetics Today 23:4
types of plots, lend themselves to a rst-person perspective. If
we con-sider the whole gamut of ctional characters, which ones
would we reallylike to impersonate? Given the choice, would we
identify with somebodylike Hamlet, Emma Bovary, Gregor Samsa in The
Metamorphosis, Oedi-pus, Anna Karenina, and Brutus in Julius
Caesar, or would we rather enterthe skin of the dragon-slaying hero
of Russian fairy tales, Alice in Won-derland, Harry Potter, and
Sherlock Holmes? If we pick a character fromthe second list, this
means that we prefer becoming a rather at characterwhose
involvement in the plot is not aective but a matter of exploring
aworld, solving problems, performing actions, competing against
enemies,and above all dealing with objects in a concrete
environment.This kind ofinvolvement is much closer to playing a
computer game than to living aVictorian novel or a Shakespearean
drama.Toward the end of her book Hamlet on the Holodeck, Murray
(ibid.: )
writes rather cryptically: Narrative beauty is independent of
medium.This statement can be interpreted in two ways, one that I nd
profoundlytrue, and the other profoundly false. The false
interpretation claims thatsince narrativity is a cognitive pattern
or mental representation indepen-dent of medium, all media are
equally equipped to represent a given plot.This means that in some
distant and very questionable future, when AI issuciently advanced
to generate coherent plots in response to the usersaction, and to
do this in real time, we will have an interactive version ofHamlet,
or one of any other imaginable plot. Digital media will oer
anenhanced version of literary classics, and theywill truly become
the art formof the twenty-rst century.This interpretation not only
ignores the idiosyn-cratic features of each medium, it also assumes
rather presumptuously thatwhat digital technology adds to existing
media is necessarily a dimensionthat enhances narrativity.The other
interpretation, the one that I endorse,says that the abstract
cognitive structure we call narrative is such that it canbe called
to mind by many dierent media, but each medium has
dierentexpressive resources and will therefore produce a dierent
concrete mani-festation of this general structure. Put in simpler
words: there are plot typesand character types that are best for
the novel, others are best for oral story-telling, and yet others
are best for the stage or the cinema. The question,then, is to
decide which types of stories are suitable for digital media.
4. Narrativity and Interactivity
The answer to this question is crucially dependent on what
constitutes thetruly distinctive resource of digital media, namely,
the ability to respond tochanging conditions in the global state of
the computer.When the change
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Ryan Beyond Myth and Metaphor: Narrative in Digital Media
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in conditions is determined by the users input, we call this
resource inter-activity. By singling out this one feature, it may
seem that I am neglectingothers, such as the realism and uidity of
digital images, the sense of spacethat comes from navigating a
virtual world, the dramatization of time thatoccurs when players
compete against moving objects in computer games;or the immersive
nature of virtual worlds. But all these features can betraced back
to the responsiveness of the system to the actions of the user.It
is because the display adapts itself to the position of the cursor,
whichstands for the body of the user, that digital environments
convey the experi-ence of movement; it is in turn the experience of
movement that leads toa heightened sense of time, of space, and of
the presence of the environ-ment.The interactive nature of digital
worlds is the true foundation of theirimmersivity (Ryan ).For the
purpose of my argument I would like to distinguish four
strategic
forms of interactivity on the basis of two binary pairs:
internal/external andexploratory/ontological.These two pairs are
adapted fromEspen Aarseths(: ) typology of user functions and
perspectives in cybertexts,which is itself part of a broader
cybertext typology. But I use dierent labelsthat shift the emphasis
toward the users relation to the virtual world. Thepoint ofmy
discussion of these categories, however, is not to revise
Aarsethstypology, but to show howdierent types of interactivity
open dierent pos-sibilities on the level of narrative themes and
plot conguration.
4.1. Internal/External InteractivityIn the internal mode, users
project themselves as members of the ctionalworld, either by
identifying with an avatar or by apprehending the virtualworld
froma rst-person perspective. In the externalmode, users are
situatedoutside the virtual world.They either play the role of a
godwho controls thectional world from above or they conceptualize
their own activity as navi-gating a database. This distinction is a
matter of degree: there are digitaltexts that situate the user at a
variable distance with respect to the ctionalworld or that locate
the user at the periphery, not quite in, not quite out.The
dichotomy internal/external corresponds roughly to Aarseths
(: ) distinction between personal and impersonal perspective:
aworld-internal participation will logically result in the users
personica-tion, since worlds are spaces populated by individuated
existents, whileworld-external involvement does not require a
concrete persona.The onlypotential dierence between Aarseths labels
and mine is the case of a userwho is projected as a powerful gure
external to the playing eld and whomakes strategic decisions for
the participants, such as the commander inchief of an army, a
sports coach, an author writing a novel, or a specic god.
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596 Poetics Today 23:4
4.2. Exploratory/Ontological InteractivityIn the exploratory
mode, users navigate the display, move to new observa-tion points,
alter their perspective, or examine new objects in order to
learnmore about the virtual world. But this activity does not make
ctional his-tory, nor does it alter the plot; users have no impact
on the destiny ofthe virtual world. In the ontological mode, by
contrast, the decisions of theusers send the history of the virtual
world on dierent forking paths.Thesedecisions are ontological in
the sense that they determine which pos-sible world, and
consequently which story, will develop from the situationin which
the choice presents itself. This distinction is much more
strictlybinary than the preceding one: the user either does, or
does not, have thepower to intervene in the aairs of the ctional
world.In his own taxonomy, Aarseth (: ) comes up with two roughly
simi-
lar categories, but his exploratory and congurative are part of
a longerlist of user functions that also comprises the opposition
textonic andinterpretive: textonic means the ability to add
permanent elements to thetext; interpretive, the lack of this
feature. I view these last two categories asdierent ways to fulll
the exploratory and ontological functions.Whereasthe merely
interpretive stance is compatible with both an exploratory andan
ontological involvement, textonic participation presupposes
ontologicalinvolvement, since the text added by the user
contributes to the shaping ofthe ctional world. My dichotomy also
bears some resemblance to BrianMcHales (: ) distinction between an
epistemological dimension,dominant in modernist literature, and an
ontological one, dominant inthe postmodernist era. Exploratory
interactivity is clearly dictated by epis-temological concerns,
since its purpose is to learn more about the ctionalworld. But my
ontological category is far less metaphysical than the lit-erary
dominant described by McHale. It is a largely nonreexive way
ofperforming world-creating actions rather than a questioning of
the natureof being.The cross-classication of the two binaries leads
to four combinations.
Each of them is characteristic of dierent genres and aords
dierent nar-rative possibilities.
Group 1: External-exploratory interactivity. In the texts of
this groupmostly classical hypertexts, such as the novels of
Michael Joyce, StuartMoulthrop, orMark Amerikathe user is external
to both the time and thespace of the ctional world. Interactivity
resides in the freedom to chooseroutes across a textual space, but
this space has nothing to dowith the physi-cal space of a narrative
setting. The implicit map of the text represents a
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Ryan Beyond Myth and Metaphor: Narrative in Digital Media
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network of lexias, not the geography of a ctional world. In
classical hyper-text, the network is usually too densely connected
for the author to con-trol the readers progression over signicant
stretches. Randomness sets inafter one or two transitions. But
randomness is incompatible with the logi-cal structure of
narrative. Since it would be impossible for the author toforesee a
coherent narrative development for each path of navigation,
theorder of discovery of the lexia cannot be regarded as
constitutive of nar-rative sequence. The only way to preserve
narrative coherence under suchconditions is to regard the text as a
scrambled story that the reader putsback together, one lexia at a
time.This type of interactivity is external, because the text does
not cast the
reader as a member of the ctional world. Readers regard the text
less as aworld in which to immerse themselves than as a database to
be searched oras a construction kit for assembling aworld. If we
conceptualize the text as apuzzle, interactivity is exploratory,
because the readers path of navigationaects not the narrative
events themselves but only the way in which theglobal narrative
pattern (if there is one at all) emerges in the mind. Simi-larly,
with a jigsaw puzzle, the dynamics of the discovery dier for
everyplayer, but they do not aect the structure that is put
together. Moreover,just as the jigsaw puzzle subordinates the image
to the construction pro-cess, external-exploratory interactivity
de-emphasizes the narrative itselfin favor of the game of its
discovery. This mode is therefore better suitedfor self-referential
ction than for narrative worlds that hold us under theirspells for
the sake of what happens in them. It promotes a metactionalstance,
at the expense of immersion in the ctional world.This explains
whyso many literary hypertexts oer a collage of literary theory and
narrativefragments.
Group 2: Internal-exploratory interactivity. In the texts of
this category, theuser takes a virtual body with her into the
ctional worldto paraphraseBrenda Laurel (: )but her role in this
world is limited to actionsthat have no bearing on the narrative
events. She inhabits the space of thectional world but not the time
of the narrative events. (I am using the femi-nine form because it
is through texts of this type that the game industry istrying to
reach a female audience.)1 The user has a seat on the stage; shemay
even play an active role, such as that of a traveler, an explorer,
a his-torian, or a detective who tries to solve a mystery, but she
is not the hero ofthe action. In the words of Thomas Pavel (: ),
she is a non-votingmember of the ctional world. The user exercises
her agency by moving
. On this topic, see Cassell and Jenkins .
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598 Poetics Today 23:4
around the ctional world, picking up objects and looking at
them, viewingthe action from dierent points of view, investigating
a case, and trying toreconstitute events that have taken place a
long time ago.This type of interactivity lends itself to several
types of plot:
The mystery plot, in which two narrative levels are connected:
oneconstituted by the actions of the detective, the other by the
story tobe reconstructed. In this conguration, the second level is
predeter-mined, while the rst is created in real time by the
actions of the user.Example: the computer game Myst, in which the
user explores anisland and solves certain puzzles to crack
themystery ofwhat happenedin the past.
The parallel plot, or soap opera type, in which a large cast of
char-acters acts simultaneously in dierent locations, so that it is
necessaryfor the user to move from one location to another to
another to followevery thread in the plot. Example: the nowdefunct
Internet soap operaThe Spot, which followed the intersecting
destinies of several charac-ters. New episodes were posted
everyday, each written from the pointof view of one of the
characters. The user could follow one characterfor a while, then
switch to another. She could look at their letters anddiaries, and
in a possible variation, she could access a version of thestory
told in the third person.
The spatial narrative,whosemain theme is travel and
exploration.Thiscould be an electronic version of Alice
inWonderland, where Alice wouldnot really do anything but rather
stumble into the lives of the othercharacters and observe them for
a while.
The narrative of place, which is a combination of parallel plot
andspatial narrative.The purpose of the narrative of place is not
to travelacross vast expanses, as does the narrative of space, but
rather, toexplore in depth a specic location, to look at all the
objects containedin it, and to meet all of its inhabitants. An
example of this type isthe hypertext ction Marble Springs () by
Deena Larsen, a text thatinvites the reader to explore the map of a
Colorado ghost town andtells, in short poems, about the lives of
its female inhabitants. (The livesof the men are left to the reader
to write.) In the narrative of place,interest resides not in an
overarching plot, that is to say, not in a grandnarrative of the
macro level, but in the little stories that the userdiscovers in
all the nooks and crannies of the ctional world.
Group 3: External-ontological interactivity. Here the user is
like the omnip-otent god of the system. Holding the strings of the
characters, from a posi-
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Ryan Beyond Myth and Metaphor: Narrative in Digital Media
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tion external to both the time and the space of the ctional
world, theuser species their properties, makes decisions for them,
throws obstaclesin their way, and creates dierent destinies for
them by altering their envi-ronment. A classical example of this
type of interactivity is the interactiveDVD movie Im Your Man (,
directed by Bob Bejean. A Choice PointFilm).The movie involves
three characters: a villain, Richard; a fool, Jack;and a good girl,
Leslie. At one of the branching points, the movie asks thespectator
if Richard should kill Leslie or seduce her. At another point,
thespectator faces the choice of making Jack act like a hero or a
coward. Bymaking a decision, the spectator assumes an authorial
stance toward theprotagonists, since the choices aect their moral
characters, which in turndetermines their fates. This activity of
playing with parameters to see howthe system will evolve is
equivalent to the operation of a simulation system.Since the
operator of the narrative system is external to the ctional
world,he or she has no strong interest at stake in any particular
branch of its vir-tual history; gratication resides instead in the
contemplation of the wholeeld of possibilities. The individual
forking paths in the plot are thereforeless interesting than the
global system of their interconnections.From a thematic point of
view, this mode of interactivity lends itself to
what I would call, following Niall Ferguson (), virtual history
nar-ratives. In the newly fashionable eld of virtual history,
serious scholarsdebate such questions asto plagiarize Pascalwhat
would have beenthe fate of the world if Cleopatras nose had been
shorter. Themeaningful-ness of such exercises is rooted in the
belief that destiny is governed by smallrandom events that lead to
large-scale dierences, if the system is allowedto run its course
without further intervention for a long period of time.The same
idea underlies the so-called buttery principle of chaos theory:a
buttery apping its wings in Beijing aects the weather in
Corsica.The combination of ontological and external interactivity
would be illus-
trated by the conception of hypertext as an Aleph and of the
reader ascoauthor of the plot, if indeed it were possible to nd
narrative coherencein each particular traversal of a hypertextual
network. But as I have alreadysuggested, narrative coherence is
impossible to maintain in a truly complexsystem of links.We need
therefore simpler structures, structures with fewerbranches and
fewer decision points, so that every path can be
individuallydesigned by the author. Once the user has made a
choice, the narrativeshould be able to roll by itself for an
extended period of time; otherwise,the system would lead to a
combinatory explosionor fall back into ran-domness, the deathbed of
narrative coherence.The best-known example of a narrative system
with an ontological-
external type of interactivity is the series of childrens books
Choose Your
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600 Poetics Today 23:4
Own Adventure.The underlying structure of these stories is a
fairly simpletree-shaped diagram, on which each branch is kept
separate from theothers.This enables the designer to maintain a
strict control over the linearsequence of events.2
Another example of external ontological interactivity is the
simulationgame, such as Simcity, Simlife, Caesar, orThe Sims. In
these games, playersrule over a complex system, such as a city, an
ant colony, an empire, or afamily, and their decisions aect the
evolution of the system. Even in a gamelike The Sims, where the
player creates a number of individuals, the maincharacter in the
developing narrative is a collective entity, and this char-acter
has no consciousness of its own: it is just the sum of multiple
micro-processes. The range of possible developments at any given
point dependson the possibilities of action oered by the various
objects and individualswithin the ctional world. For instance, a
computer in The Sims aordstwo types of action: play games or look
for a job.The choice of one of theseaordances aects the life and
the options of several members of the c-tional world; for instance,
if the user decides that Betty inThe Sims will usethe computer to
get a job, Betty will earn money, and she will be able tobuy a
wider variety of commodities. This in turn may aect Bobs
feelingsfor Betty. The possibilities of action evolve during the
run of the program,and since aordances are determined by the global
state of the system, aswell as by the nature of the objects, the
users choices will always producea coherent narrative
development.While the operation of a simulation system requires a
godlike position of
power, many of the games mentioned above try to increase
dramatic inter-est by casting the user as a member of the ctional
world. In Caesar, forinstance, the user is the ruler of
theRomanEmpire; in Simcity, themayor ofthe city.Themayor or the
emperor are external interactors, because they donot exist in the
same space and time as their subjects.They rule the systemfrom
above, as the gods eye perspective of the graphic display
indicates,and they do not operate in a simulacrum of real time,
since they have all thetime in the world to make their decisions.
But they are also internal partici-pants, because their personal
fates are at stake in the way they govern.Themayor will be voted
out of oce if his or her administration of the city does
. The second-person form should not be taken to mean that the
reader is internalized ascharacter; the texts of the series are
usually told in the third person. Even when the text usesthe second
person, the reader relates to this you as if the reader were a he
or a she.In a branching story about Pinocchio, for instance, the
reader holds the strings of a puppetnamed Pinocchio and maintains
an authorial perspective over the plot that diminishes thereaders
emotional involvement in the current destiny of Pinocchio. A sane
reader will notfeel crushed if his or her decisions lead Pinocchio
to be turned into a donkey or swallowedby a whale: there will
always be another run of the system, another destiny to be
explored.
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Ryan Beyond Myth and Metaphor: Narrative in Digital Media
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not please his or her constituents, and Caesar will be dethroned
if the Bar-barians invade his empire. This combination of features
places the gamesin question halfway between categories and .
Group 4: Internal-ontological interactivity. If the Holodeck
could be fullyimplemented, this is where it would belong. In the
meantime, the categorywill have to be represented by computer games
of the action and adven-ture type, such as Doom, Quake, or
Half-Life. Here the players are cast ascharacters situated in both
the time and the space of the ctional world.The actions of the
players determine the fate of their character (avatar in
thetechnical jargon) and, by extension, the fate of the ctional
world. Everyrun of the system produces a new life and consequently
a new life story forthe avatar. This narrative is created
dramatically, by being enacted, ratherthan diegetically, by being
narrated.In this type of system, interactivitymust be intense,
since we live our lives
by constantly engaging with the surrounding world. Most players
are toodeeply absorbed in the pursuit of a goal to reect on the
plot that they writethrough their actions, but when people describe
their sessions with com-puter games, their reports typically take
the form of a story. Consider, forinstance, this review by Peter
Olafson () of the game Combat Mission,which simulates the German
campaign into Russia during World War II:
My two panzer IVG tanks got lucky. Approaching the crossroads,
they cleareda rise and caught two Sherman tanks out of position,
one obstructing the aimof the other. Concentrating their re, they
quickly took out the Allied units andthe surviving crews abandoned
the aming hulks and retreated into the woodsnearby.
After three paragraphs of such prose, the account of the session
concludeswith:
The computer commander knew it was licked. It began to pull
back, and I nallyallowed myself to breathe again. Its the rst war
game I can recall in which Iveresponded emotionally to a victory,
and I knowwhy. It felt as though I was there.(Ibid.)
As this retelling demonstrates, the narrativity of the action
game lies in thetrace of the actions performed by the player.Many
people will rightly argue that creating a narrative is not the
point
of adventure/action games.Computer games are played for the sake
of solv-ing problems and defeating opponents, of rening strategic
skills, and ofparticipating in on-line communities, not for the
purpose of creating a tracethat reads as a story. Few people in
their right minds will bother to recorda game session and watch the
replay as a movie. (Developers may do that,
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602 Poetics Today 23:4
but for a dierent purpose.) The drama of the game is only worth
experi-encing as an active participant; it is meant to be lived and
not spectated.Yetif narrativity were totally irrelevant to the
enjoyment of games, why woulddesigners put so much eort into the
creation of a narrative interface?Whywould the graphics be so
sophisticated? Why would the task of the playerbe presented as
ghting terrorists or saving the earth from invasion by
evilcreatures from outer space, rather than as gathering points by
hittingmov-ing targets with a cursor controlled by a joystick? The
evolution of com-puter games, since the early days of PacMan,
Tetris, or Paddle Ball, hasbeen toward greater visual realism,
which alsomeans toward greater narra-tivity, since in at least one
of its denitions, realism is the power to constructa coherent,
believable world that functions as setting for a dramatic
action.The narrativity of action games functions as what Kendall
Walton (:) would call a prop in a game of make-believe. It may not
be the raisondtre of games, but it plays such an important role as
a stimulant for theimagination that many recent games use lengthy
lm clips, during whichthe player can only watch, to enrich the
plot. (The fact that it is necessary totemporarily remove control
from the user to establish the narrative frameis a further
indication that interactivity is not a feature that facilitates
theconstruction of narrative meaning.)At present, the thematic and
structural repertory of ontological/internal
interactivity is quite limited. Adventure and role-playing
games3 imple-ment the archetypal plot that has been described by
JosephCampbell ([]) andVladimir Propp ( []): the quest of the hero
across a landlled with many dangers to defeat evil forces and gain
a desirable object.Some plots, however, deviate from the archetype
in two ways: the hero canlose, and the adventure never ends. In
most action games, the archetype isfurther narrowed down to the
pattern that underlies all wars, sports com-petitions, and
religious myths, namely, the ght between two sidesgoodand evilfor
dominance of the world.These plots are miles away from
thepsychological complexity of Victorian novels, Shakespearean
dramas, andeven Hollywood thrillers, whichMurray hopes to see
enacted on the Holo-deck.This predictability of the plot would
constitute a weakness if narrativewere an end in itself, but it is
an important asset in the case of games, sinceit allows the user to
jump into the ctional world and start playing rightaway, without
having to plod through tedious instructions.As was the case in
Propps corpus of Russian fairy tales, individual games
dier from each other in the concrete motifs that esh out the
archetypal
. This term refers to nondigital games, such asDungeons
andDragons, a game that inspiredmuch of digital culture.
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Ryan Beyond Myth and Metaphor: Narrative in Digital Media
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structure. In a predominantly visual medium, the element of
narrative thatoers the richest potential for variation is the
setting. This is why actiongames invest so heavily in the thrill of
moving through a landscape. Butthere is another factor that
accounts for the importance of spatial themes,a factor that also
explains why shooting plays such an important role incomputer
games. For an action game to be worth playing, the opportunitiesfor
action must be frequent, or the user would become bored. As I
suggestabove, living ones life is a matter of constantly engaging
with the world.Moreover, players want their actions to have an
immediate eect: nothingis more irritating in a game than clicking
and seeing nothing happen. Butto maintain the narrative on the
proper track, the range of actions must beseverely restricted.
Adventure games do not preplan each possible narra-tive
development, as do the Choose Your Own Adventure texts, but
theymake sure that options will remain within a certain range so
that the overalldestiny of the players avatar will not deviate from
the general line of themaster plot. In the case of shooting, the
users choices consist of selectinga weapon, aiming it, and deciding
when or whether to re; in the case ofmovement, the possibilities
correspond to directions, and they are limitedby the architecture
of the landscape: the player can run through hallwaysbut cannot go
through the walls.When players choose a direction, they seetheir
avatar move immediately, and this provides the sensation of a
highdegree of control. Shooting gives an even greater feeling of
power becauseof the instantaneous and dramatic result of pulling
the trigger. The pre-dominance of violence in computer games has
been widely attributed tocultural factors, but it can be partly
explained by a desire for immediateresponse.Moreover, of all human
actions, none is better simulated by click-ing on a control device
than pulling a trigger. It is not my intent to defendthe violence
of computer games; but the theme of shooting exploits with
afrightful eciency the reactive nature of the medium.
Conclusion
How, then, do I envision the future of narrative in cyberspacea
phrasethat Janet Murray uses as subtitle to her Holodeck book? I
will not proposea global answer to this question because digital
textuality, like literature, isa eld of many genres. A reasonable
coverage of the issue of digital nar-rativity should reect this
diversity. I will consider three forms of digitalnarrative: the
largely virtual genre of VR, or Holodeck narrative, andthe two very
real genres of computer games and literary hypertext.The rst
entertainment uses of VR technology will almost certainly
be action games. The playing eld will be a computer-generated
three-
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604 Poetics Today 23:4
dimensional environment that surrounds the player, rather than a
rectan-gular display restricted to the screen. VR games will
implement type (internal-ontological) interactivity, and they will
use a narrative frame-work as an incentive to play. But if
narrative is to become the center ofinterest in a VR environment,
the user should be placed in the role of theactive observer of
category (internal-exploratory). This role not onlypermits a wider
range of themes and emotional experiences, it is also muchmore
compatible with the detachment of aesthetic contemplation than
theexistential involvement of category . If digital narrative is
going to becomea signicant, and reasonably popular, art form in the
twenty-rst century,it will be as a movie that creates a heightened
sense of presence by open-ing its world to the body of the
spectator and by letting this body watch theaction from various
perspectives.The two other genres, computer games and hypertext,
stand at the oppo-
site ends of the cultural spectrum: one a widely popular form of
entertain-ment consumed for its own sake, especially by teenage
males, the other anarcane academic genre read mostly by theorists
and prospective authorsby people more interested in writing about
it than in reading it. (It is mainlyin this sense that hypertext
turns readers into writers.) Each genre, I believe,could expand its
territory by learning from the other. Though the motiva-tion of the
game player is not primarily aesthetic, the care given to
graphicsand to the construction of a narrative framework suggests
that users arenot indierent to artistic quality. But computer games
suer from the sameeconomic pressures as Hollywood movies; they are
expensive to produce,and the investment can only pay o if they
reach a wide audience. On theshelves of computer stores, there is
only room for the gaming equivalentof John Grisham and Stephen King
narratives. What is needed for com-puter games to fulll their
artistic potential (and of course will not hap-pen in todays
society) is an emancipation from the tyranny of the market.I can
imagine games in which users would be given a concrete task
butwould also be invited to take breaks in the action, during which
they wouldexplore the landscape and meet characters who would
entertain them withstories about the ctional world. But hardcore
game players would prob-ably resent these narrative interludes as
aggravating interruptions of theforwardmomentum of the game and as
temporary loss of control over theirfates. The competitive
involvement of the game player is basically incom-patible with the
detached contemplation of the aesthetic experience, andmy proposal
will only be viable if the works I am imagining are able to fos-ter
a new attitude in the user, namely, the willingness to switch back
andforth between the contemplative and the active stance.While the
narrative variety of games has been limited by the need to
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Ryan Beyond Myth and Metaphor: Narrative in Digital Media
605
court a popular audience, the popularity of hypertext has suered
from theideological contempt of its authors for the closure and
coherence of classi-cal narrative. The early practitioners and
theorists of hypertext thought ofthe genre as the novel of the
future, but in the postmodern area, novelis more likely to mean the
subversion of narrative than lengthy liter-ary narrative prose
text. Since most hypertext authors aim at the highend of literary
culture, they take a deliberately experimental approach tothe new
writing technology.The dominant pattern of early hypertexts wasthe
scrambled narrativewhat Espen Aarseth (: ) calls a game
ofnarrationbut in recent years hypertext has turned toward
nonnarrativetypes of meaning, such as atemporal lyrical structures,
musical structures ofthemes and variations, collage of various
genres, unstructured lists, visualeects, animation, and
self-erasing text. It is indeed as conceptual art thathypertext has
carved out for itself a modest place in contemporary
literaryculture.4 The danger with the conceptual route has been
clearly seen byUmberto Eco (: ): once readers have grasped the
basic concept,they may feel that reading is no longer necessary. It
is far from my intent todiscourage conceptual art and experimental
literature, but as long as hyper-text authors limit themselves to
this route, they should not be surprised tosee the medium conned to
a narrow cultural niche.Hypertext cannot live forever in the
academic cocoon. It will not y on its
own until it broadens its audience beyond academic circles, and
it will notbroaden its audience until it learns to satisfy, rather
than frustrate, narrativedesire.This does not mean that it should
try to be a novel but, rather, that itshould discover narrative
modes and themes more suitable to its interactivenature and
multimedia capabilities. Here I must fundamentally disagreewith
Robert Coover (), who thinks that the golden age of digital
lit-erature came to an end when hypertext ceased to be purely
verbal. To methe future of digital narrativeor more broadly, the
future of digital textu-alitylies in the enhancement of verbal
storytelling with visual and audiodocuments. An author who plays
masterfully with the newly acquired sen-sory dimensions of digital
environments is M. D. Coverley in Calia ()and The Book of Going
Forth by Day, an electronic novel in progress. Thesetexts are far
less fragmented than the purely textual hypertexts of the
rstgeneration (e.g., Michael Joyces Afternoon), because hyperlinks
can now beused to move from one medium to anothertext, pictures,
musicratherthan to jump across the text.The result is a much more
sustained narrative
. The Norton Antholo of Postmodern American Fiction makes room
for hypertext in the post-modern literary canon by including
printed excerpts from two hypertext ctions: Afternoon:A Story () by
Michael Joyce and I Have Said Nothing () by J. Yellowlees
Douglas.Does this amount to an ocial acceptance of hypertext, or is
it a token gesture?
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606 Poetics Today 23:4
interest. The literary model for this new type of digital
narrative is not themulticursal5 novel, such as Mark Saportas
Composition No. () or Milo-rad PavicsDictionary of the Khazars (),
but the artists book,6 such asTomPhillipss A Humument, or recent
literary works that propose an original dia-logue between text and
picture, such asThe Emigrants () by the GermanauthorW. G. Sebald.
In order to take full advantage of the reactive natureof its
medium, hypertext could also seek inspiration from playful art
formsand artifacts that stage the act of reading as a journey lled
with manysurprises: pop-up childrens books, Advent calendars, and
art CDROMsthe last illustrated by the work of Norie Neumark, Agnes
Hegeds, or Jean-Louis Boissier.The digital medium can give the
tactile pleasure of mousingover hot spots (invisible hyperlinks)
and of making images or text unex-pectedly appeara pacist
alternative to the thrill of pulling the trigger inshooting games.
It can tell stories in many modes and layers, by makingthe
individual episodes expandable into other media or into more
detailednarrations. And nally, it can handle mini-stories that ll
the screen. Froma cognitive point of view, small stories are more
ecient than large nar-rative patterns that need to be chunked up,
because this chunking necessi-tates constant interruptions and
digressions that make it very dicult forthe reader to hold onto a
thread.I personally wish to see these design strategies put in the
service of
projects with a do-it-yourself, cottage-industry quality that
would give freerein to self-expression: projects such as building
an autobiographical scrap-book, reconstructing a family saga,
exploring local history, or preservingcultural memory. These
projects lend themselves particularly well to thenonlinear browsing
of hypertext, because the story of a life or a communityis not a
dramatic narrative aimed at a climax and built on suspense butan
epic narrative made of many self-sucient episodes that can be read
inmany orders. Thanks to multimedia hypertext programs, such as
Flash orDirector, and to the design tools of the Internet, it is
now possible to tellour personal stories, or the stories of our
communities, through text, music,and pictures without incurring the
exorbitant costs of making a documen-tary movie or publishing a
glossy illustrated book.What I am calling for isabandoning the
hegemonic dream of turning newmedia narratives into the
. As Aarseth (: ) observes, a multicursal labyrinth is one that
can be solved (i.e., exited)through more than one route. Similarly,
a multicursal novel allows many itineraries throughthe text..
Artists books are visual artworks that present themselves as a
collection of illustrated pagesbound together in book form. Some
are meant to be printed, while others remain originalmanuscripts.
In either case, the work reveals itself to the spectator through
the activity ofpage turning, and this dynamic mode of apprehension
becomes a source of artistic eects.See on the topic Drucker and
Hubert and Hubert .
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Ryan Beyond Myth and Metaphor: Narrative in Digital Media
607
art (read: the highbrow, avant-garde art) or into the
entertainment form (read:the mass entertainment form) of this new
century and seeking for these narra-tives a less glamorous, but no
less important, place in culturea place thatwill represent a true
democratization of digital textuality.
The claims made in this essay can be summarized by three
seeminglyincompatible statements:
. The truly distinctive feature of digital media is
interactivity.This fea-ture enables the user to choose her or his
way through the text atrun time.
. Interactivity does not make it easy to tell stories, because a
narrativeinterpretation is a response to a linear structure that is
built into thetext, not a type of meaning freely created by the
reader out of any setof data.
. Yet without some degree of narrativity, digital media cannot
becomea major presence on the arts and entertainment scene.
Digitality is a uid environment; narrative, as a type of
meaning, is a solidstructure. To reconcile the two, some compromise
will be necessary. Nar-rative will have to learn to share the
spotlight with other types of sensorydata; to accept a subordinate
role, as in games, or limit itself to certain plottypes.
Conversely, the medium will have to give up some of its uidity
toallow narrative meaning to solidify in the mind of the reader.
This meanslimiting the range of possible actions, channeling
interactivity, and neu-tralizing the threat that it poses to
coherence by orchestrating periods ofuser activity and periods of
system control. If digital narrative is goingto be more than a new
mode of diusion for texts that could be material-ized in print,
such as the works of Stephen King, it cannot be a freewaythat takes
the reader through the landscape, as do standard novels. But ifit
is to keep narrative desire alive, it cannot be a wilderness, where
linksare so numerous that the reader is lost in a thicket that
looks the same fromevery position. To borrow a metaphor from Mark
Bernstein of EastgateSystems (), the compromise between being lost
in the wilderness andbeing sucked onto the freeway is to be invited
into a gardenwithmany care-fully designed paths. These paths guide
users through the narrative land-scape and enable them to see it
from various points of view without losingtheir sense of
orientation. But rather than making the experience fully
pre-dictable, the paths reveal unexpected, delightful features at
every turngazebos, follies, grottoes, statues. This combination of
designed space andserendipitous discovery, mapped trails and
surprise attractions, containedarea and expanding vistas make the
garden look much bigger than it reallyis.This may be the closest
one gets to the mythical Aleph, without entering
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608 Poetics Today 23:4
a jungle where narrative meaning chokes in the brambles of
uncontrollablemultiplicity.
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