Chapter 8: Eliza's Daughters
P. 222: "Computer characters who can carry on persuasive conversations could be an expressive narrative genre in themselves, as well as compelling elements in a larger fictional world."
P. 226: "Although Colby's work ["Parry," the simulated paranoid] is meant as science, it is more persuasive as literature. Both Parry and Neurotic Woman stand as tantalizing examples of a computer-based character who is modeled not as a collection of surfae behaviors but as a layered personality."
P. 231: "A Tolstoy of the next century could hardly model Anna Karenina's conflict between her love for the passionate Vronsky and her love of her son by setting a panel of sliders and filling in a template with her goals and standards."
P. 232: Shrimp the Woggle and his unprogrammed head-banging behavior: glitch into personality trait.
P. 233: "...we must start by building authoring systems that will put the abstraction expertise of the precise computer scientist into the interpretive hands of the quirky artist."
P. 240: "Emergent systems," which are so complicated and dynamic that they cannot be described by top-down or abstract models. The system is its own description.
P. 243: "...characters who display randomly surprising behaviors are unvoncinving; they are merely flat characters pretending to be round. A truly round character would surprise the interactor by acting in a way that is consistent with its known behavior but that takes it to a new level. Its emergent behavior would have to come from a set of possibilities intentionally put there by the author, like a handful of seeds sown and then left to the vicissitudes of weather and environment to either flourish or die."
P. 247: Murray suggests that narrative may be part of the project of "domesticating" the machine, as early humans once domesticated the animal world.
Chapter 9: Digital TV and the Emerging Formats of Cyberdrama
P. 252: "At the same time that legions of new Web surfers are busy debating politics or posting digitzed pictures of the family schnauzer for the enjoyment of distant dog lovers, media conglomerates are trying to carve up cyberspace into revenue-producing fiefdoms.... the shape of narrative art and entertainment in the next few decades will be determined by the interplay of these two forces, that is, the more nimble, independent experimenters, who are comfortable with hypertext, procedural thnking, and virtual environments, and the giant conglomerates of the entertainment industry, who have vast resources and an established connection to mass audiences."
P. 254: Murray says the future of interactive narrative is the serial drama.
P. 256: "Compared to today's television writer, the cyberdramatist could explore the consequences of actions over longer periods of time and could create richer dramatic parallels, knowing that viewers would be likely to juxtapose events told months or even years apart."
P. 257: "...two kinds of audiences--the actively engaged real-time viewers who must find suspense and satisfaction in each single episode and the more reflective long-term audience who look for coherent patterns in the story as a whole."
P. 260: The "mobile viewer."
P. 265: Role-playing: getting left behind on the ice planet Hoth.
PP. 271-72: The inevitable transparency of medium: "at some point we will find ourselves looking through the medium instead of at it."
