Chapter 6: Transformation
P. 155: "How can a writer tell a connected story in so fluid an environment? How will the interactor know when it begins and ends? Just as we need to define new narrative conventions for entering the immersive world and for exercising agency within it, so too do we need a new set of formal conventions for handling mutability. These conventions will arise as we get a clearer understanding of what kinds of pleasures we will seek from a literature of transformation."
P. 157 ff.: Murray sketches "conventions" for signalling multiplicity within the contexts of novel and film.
P. 159: "...every narrative will have to signal the reader very carefully about what is allowed in order not to raise inappropriate expectations."
P. 161: "The kaleidoscopic power of the computer allows us to tell stories that more truly reflect our turn-of-the-century sensibility. We no longer believe in a single reality, a single integrating view of the world, or even the reliability of a single angle of perception. Yet we retain the core human desire to fix reality on one canvas, to express all of what we see in an integrated and shapely manner. The solution is the kaleidoscopic canvas that can capture the world as it looks from many perspectives--complex and perhaps ultimately unknowable but still coherent."
PP. 162 ff.: Murray's discussion of the juvenilia of the Brontë children, from which only Charlotte departed into "realism."
P. 174: "...electronic closure occurs wehen a work's structure, though not its plot, is understood. This closure involves a cognitive activity at one remove from the usual pleasures of hearing a story. The story itself has not resolved. It is not judged as consistgent or satisfying. Instead, the map of the story inside the head of the reader has become clear. Such a map does not necessarily feel inevitable or appropriate, the way the solution to a puzzle does. It may not be beautiful or shapely in any way. There is no emotional release or perception of fittingness, just a sense of going from the unknown to the known. This is very different from and far less pleasurable than our more traditional expectations of closure, arising from the plot of the story and marking the end point of an action."
P. 175: "The never-ending, ever-morphing cyberspace narrative is a place to revel in a sense of endless transformations, but in order for electronic narrative to mature, it must be able to encompass tragedy as well."
Chapter 7: The Cyberbard and the Multiform Plot
P. 192: "Genre fiction is appropriate for electronic narrative because it scripts the interactor. ...In a Western adventure I can be counted on to try to shoot at the bad guys, and in a horror story I will always enter the haunted house."
P. 193: "...new genres of electronic stories that focus on textured relationships rather than on puzzles and gunfights."
P. 194: Oral-formulaic poetry--the work of the original "bards"--as strong model for emerging interactive forms.
P. 201: "The challenge of all such ambitious schemes [of computer-generated drama] is in giving the computer enough knowledge of the story elements to decide what constitutes an Aristotelian recognition scene or a suspense-generating event."
P. 204: "A story is an act of interpretation of the world, rooted in the particular perceptions and feelings of the writer. There is no mechanical way to substitute for this and no reason to want to do so. Our question instead should be, How can we make this powerful new medium for multiform narrative as expressive of the writer's voice as is the printed page?"
P. 207: "Stories have to have an equivalent 'moral physics,' which indicates what consequences attach to actions, who is rewarded, who is punished, how fair the world is."
PP. 212-213: "The technological resources of the gamemakers are directed toward rapidly transforming visuals rather than expressive storytelling. The self-conscious webs of the postmodernists and the link-happy exhibitionism of the Web soaps send us hopping from screen to screen in search of a coherent story. The more filmic CD-ROMs offer more extended story segments but embed them in a shallow branching structure that frustrates our desire for participation and agency. The MUDs offer extensive opportunities for participation in formulaic narrative environments, but the collectively generated stories are diffuse and repetitive. None of these formats puts the processing power of the computer directly into the hands of the writer."
