Hamlet on the Holodeck

Intelligent and carefully researched, this report from the more erudite side of cyberspace focuses on the impact of interactive media on the narrative (i.e., story-telling) imagination, and vice versa. Murray, a former programmer and a humanities professor at MIT since 1971, has taught electronic fiction writing since the early 1990s to the world's most hard-core hackers, finding herself ""drawn to imagining a cyberdrama of the future by the same fascination that draws me to the Victorian novel."" Here, she debunks the notion that nonlinear storytelling began with the point-and-click wanderings of hypertext, demonstrating the desire to tell multiple stories simultaneously in numerous writers from Homer to Tolstoy. She contends that because the ""space"" of the story and its outcome are dependent on the reader, however, electronic writing gives the reader the kind of ""agency""--""the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices""--previously found only in audience participation-based arts. Virtual characters like ""Julia,"" who ""lives"" in chat rooms and responds to those who engage her in conversation, may just expand our definition of fiction. After musing over plot algorithms and speculating about cyberdrama, Murray ends with the heartening prediction that developments in fiction-writing software will increasingly allow those of us who are bored by war-related video games to experience the benefits of ""a computer-based literature"" that ""might help us recognize ourselves in the machine without a sense of degradation."" (July)