Chapter 2: Harbingers of the Holodeck
Hamlet on the Holodeck:
The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace
Overview
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Computers as a meta-medium
The Multiform Story
The Active Audience
3D Movies, Riding the movies
Storytelling in Games
Story Webs
Computer Scientist as Storytellers
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Computer as Meta-Medium
• Computers enable many existing forms of
communication
• All the major representational formats of
the of human history have now been
translate into digital form
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Computer as Meta-Medium
• Typical of a new medium
– Incunabula recorded prose and poetry of oral
storytelling
– Movies were recordings of plays
– Complex use of flashbacks, panoramas that
dissolve into close up vignettes of single
soldier.
• “At the incunabula phase of narrative
computer”
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The Multiform Story
• Multiform stories often reflect different
points of view of the same event or portray
multiple alternative realities
• Books are well suited for linear story
experiences
• Cinema is also a linear medium, yet
inspires non-linear narrative through films
by directors such as Kurosawa, Tarantino
– Rashomon, Pulp Fiction
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The Multiform Story
• Rashomon (1950) by Kurosawa
– chronicles a crime on a rural road in ancient
Japan. In recounting the crime to the
authorities, the different characters involved
tell different stories.
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The Multiform Story
• It’s a Wonderful Life
– With and without George Bailey
• The Garden of the Forking Paths
– Multiplicity of alternatives
• Groundhog Day
– Repeating time
• Dictionary of the Khazars
– No linear narrative – story is constructed in
the reader’s mind
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The Multiform Story
• The Man from Earth (2007)
– Plot advances through intellectual arguments
– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mOIxyRT
Y5I
• Source Code (2011)
• Cloud Atlas (2012)
– Multiple plot set across six different eras
• Continumm (2012-2015)
– Origin of multiple timelines
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Multiform Narratives
• Multiform narratives attempt to give a
simultaneous form to these possibilities to
allow us to hold in our minds multiple
contradictory alternatives
– Alternative possible selves
– Alternative possible worlds
– Limitless intersection stories of the actual
world
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The Active Audience
• When the writer expands the story to
include multiple possibilities, the reader
assumes a more active role.
– Changing the author-reader relation
– Authors talking about their decisions
– Authors changing earlier decisions
– Readers remixing content or writing new
content
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The Active Audience
• New forms based on author’s world
– Live-action role-playing (LARP)
– Players are both actors and audience for one
another
• Live theater
– Participatory dinner theater
– Whose line is it anyway
• MUDs, MOOs, MMOG, and MMORPG
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3D Movies
• Early examples
– Used motion, fright
– Included jarring effects
• Now there are many more examples
– What have we learned
• The potential for 3D sound and images to
present external and internal content
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Riding the Movies
• Riding the movies (limited simulation)
– The rider is placed on a hydraulically
controlled movable platform or seat that , tilts,
twists pitches, and shakes in synch with
moving images and environment sound
– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQLF06rw
zVE
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Drama in Games
• Many games include narrative in cut
scenes between player
activities/challenges
• Floyd the robot in Planetfall
• Myst – the role of sound
• What are some more recent examples?
• Max Payne, Half Life, Tomb Raider/ Indiana Jones
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Story Webs
• Hypertext
– Set of documents of any kind (images, text,
charts, tables, video clips….) connected to
one another by links
– Lexias or reading units
– More than one entry, Many internal branches,
no clear ending
– Reader gets to choose
– Make your own story books
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Story Webs
• Hypertext formats are not new
– Dictionary of Khazars, multiform text is a printbased hypertext
• Afternoon (Michael Joyce)
– “I want to say I may have seen my son die
today.”
– Reader confusion to match character
confusion
– http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/pm
af/hypertext/aft/
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Computer Scientists as Storytellers
• Technology is now common
– Shared virtual worlds, avatars, force
feedback, more natural interaction, agents
• Magic Mirror
• CMU’s OZ group
– AI techniques to storytelling
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Future?
• Film makers move toward multiform
stories and digital formats
• Computer scientist move towards creating
fictional worlds
• Audience move towards virtual stage
• Expect to loosening of traditional
boundaries between games and stories,
films and rides, narrative and dramatic
forms
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