P. 273: "Will the stories brought to us by the new representational technologies 'mean anything' in the same way that Shakespeare's plays mean something...?"
P. 273: "...narrative beauty is independent of medium."
P. 274: "The real literary hierarchy is not of medium but of meaning."
P. 275: "...once we understand simulations as interpretations of the world, the hand behind the multiform plot will feel as firmly present as the hand of the traditional author. With familiarity we will come to realize that the procedural author can shape a juxtaposition or a branch point in a multiform story as artfully as a traditional author shapes a speech in a play or a chapter in a novel."
P. 276: "Future audiences will take it for granted that they will experience a procedural author's vision by acting within the immersive world and by manipulating the materials the author has provided for them rather than by only reading or viewing them."
P. 276: Murray advances Shakespeare as the artist-hero, but admits that he wrote no books; it's the stories that matter (she says), not the medium.
P. 280: "the most ambitious promise of the new narrative medium is its potential for telling stories about whole systems. The format that most fully exploits the properties of digital environments is not the hypertext or the fighting game but the simulation: the virtual world full of interrelated entities, a world we can enter, manipulate, and observe in process."
P. 282: "A computer-based literature might help us recognize ourselves in the machine without a sense of degradation."
P. 283: "...in a global society we have outgrown our ability to contextualize. We are tormented by our sense of multiple conflicting frameworks for every action. We need a kaleidoscopic medium to sort things out."
