Notes on Hamlet on the Holodeck
I Antecedents
Immersion
Star Trek
Brave New World
Fahrenheit 451
print pre 1501 - incunabula: "swaddling clothes", technology in its infancy (Link to Bolter)
prefiguring of film in 19th century lit - Bront‘, Dickens, Tolstoy
contemporary films, novels, plays prefigure mature cyber art
It's a Wonderful Life
Garden of Forking Paths (see Moulthrop)
P. 34. Contemporary physics: "How do people live in a world where they are conscious of the world splitting in three at every decision point, a world in which there are infinite alternatives to every situation? Alan Lightman - Einstein's Dreams
Milorad Pavic - Dictionary of the Khazars
Comparison of Groundhog Day and It's a Wonderful Life: Phil's educational simulation holds the town constant while the protagonist changes while George Bailey gets the opposite.
P37-38: The Twentieth Century: "To be alive in the twentieth century is to be aware of the alternative possible selves, of alternative possible worlds, and of the limitless intersecting stories of the actual world. ... To truly capture such cascading permutations, one would need a computer."
Italo Calvino If on a winters night a traveler
Immersive films
Across the sea of time
Wings of Courage (features internal monologue )
puzzle games
Planetfall (Floyd the robot has personality, loyalty)
Myst
Story webs
lexia - little windows of text or chunks of information
Roland Barthes S/Z, George Landow Hypertext:The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology
Talmud
The Spot
Eastgate
Afternoon
VR
Placeholder world laurel and strickland
(see clicking in)
ALIVE Project MIT Media Lab
intelligent agents
OZ group at Carnegie Mellon (Joseph Bates)
ELIZA Joseph Weizenbaum
Four essential properties of digital environments
Procedural
Participatory
Spatial
Encyclopedic
Procedural
computer executes series of rules
can embody compex, contingent behaviors
Participatory
We can induce behaviors, interact
Zork
programmed in LISP - early object oriented design
Spatial
represent navigable space ie, the desktop, PacMan
Archetecture Machine Groups Aspen movie map
Encyclopedic
storage capacity
links to web, etc
Victory Garden (gulf war theme)
SimCity
Issue of hidden assumptions, e.g. what constitutes successful society?
Data structures
Vannevar Bush as we may think
Ted Nelson Xanadu
Murray contrasts Bush as rational, practical , Nelson as quixotic, hummingbird mind
Objective Correlative TS Eliot clusters of event capture emotional experience.
Immersion
Don Quixote
Susan Langer Feeling and Form (didn't like Peter Pan talking to audience)
Umberto Eco "hyperreal" quality of american life
Border between realtiy and fiction
Avatars
Lve action role playing games (LARP)
P.126 Agency
Agency is the pleasurable sense of power over the world of the computer. participation based on limited interaction
interactivity not necessarilly agency - busy work interaction having no real effect One can interact with a computer in the sense of acting and seeing an effect, but "the actions are not chosen and the effects are not related to the player's intentions." A game like chess may have fewer interactions, but a "high degree of agency, since the actions are highly autonomous, selected from a large range of possible choices, and wholly determine the course of the game." {However, the player can't go outside the rules and move a rook like a knight or tip the board over.}
Navigation
Mazes
Exploring a maze or complex environment is a pleasure in itself.
Kafkaesqe city
Rhizome
any point may connect to any other point
post modern hypertext "rejects authoritarian, Ôlogocentric' hierarchies" (Moulthrop)
postmodernists are priviledging confusion itself (Murray)
the fact that the plot will not be resolved means that no irreparable loss will be suffered (Murray)
"violence hub" at center of a webb of related narratives
Journey stories
problem solving - puzzzles should not take the player out of the virtual world
Games into stories
Myst - losing endings are more satisfying than winning one
Tetris - metaphor for overtasked 90's American life
games are rehearsals for life
Contest game "agon"
Constructivism
MUDs evloved out of dragon slaying games into a shared social space
where people can indulge in imaginative play
MUDs have problems maintaining plot flow - LARPs have gae master to create enticing world and situations
authorship vs. interactioin:
playing a creative role within an authored environment
authorship is procedural: writing rules governing the interactor's environment and narrative possibilities
Player experiences agency: power over plastic materials, but not authorship
Transformation
kaleidoscopic narrative
Mosaic v. linear communication (McLuhan)
stories on newspaper page
frames of a film
TV channels
Narrative devices: film cuts, flashbacks etc
computer combines all of these mosaics
ways of negotiating mosaics
following characters in and out of story lines
at intersections of multiple story lines
TV shows allow society to work out novel or distrubing realities and assimiliate them into "our national consciousness"
after workng through various sumblimated versions of the fantasy, the basic fantasy is encated or baldly stated, the story loses it's tension but the underlying issue has ben assimilated
enactment in psychoterapy toovercome phobias, etc
MUDs as incubators of social skills - or virtual antisocial behavior
escapist, wish fulfillment fantasy - repetitive
progressive - constructivist environment, poss of transformation and remodeling
Refused Closure
closure may be the answer to a puzzle or the experience of learning the work's structure
Tragedy
poss treatments of suicide:
modeling mind as tragic labrynth
following the reactions of other characters
simulation - player s "god" in character's life
Story construction
formulaic patterns
Ronald Tobias' list
Quest
Adventure
Pursuit
Rescue
Escape
Revenge
the Riddle
Rivalry
Underdog
Temptation
Metamorphosis
Transformation
Maturation
Love
Forbidden Love
Sacrifice
Discovery
Wretched Excess
Ascension
Descension
Afred Lord the singer of tales: Yugoslavian bards
primitives of story construction:
actions of interactors as structured by author
often outside of frame of story, such as menus of commands, sliders, button etc.
use dramatic gestures, such as a hand on characters shoulder, clenched fist, etc
limited vocab - best driven by story content, such as secret code
players know the basic primitive actions demanded by the genre (detective, western, horror, etc)
more subtle patterned activities (giving crayons to child, breakfast to lover) could drive stories of textured relaitionships
Vladimir Propp
essential morphemes
villan causes harm of injury
member of family lack or desires somehting
hero leaves home
hero is tested
hero aquires magical agent
h and villain join in combat
hero defeats villain
hero is branded ?
intitial lack of misfortune resolves
false hero presents unfounded claims
hero is given task
hero performs task
hero returns
false hero exposed
villain ounished
hero married, crowned
Propp established rules for storytelling: some morphemes are always paired, or always in same order
Marvin Minsky and frames (object oriented story telling)
Oz group - Lyotard, the housecat
intelligent agents as improvisational actors: a Lazzo is a formal pattern which can worked into different scenarios
emergent behavior: a system can function in ways not predicte by the programmer
Forster's "word masses" describing characters