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The
Plot Thickens
Janet H. Murray on the interactive narrative
Digital storytelling does not signal the end of traditional narrative,
argues Janet H. Murray, MIT professor, Educom Medal winner, and author
of Hamlet on the Holodeck. Instead, as the following interview
reveals, it marks the development of a new kind of literature that can
make sense of our complex world.
EDUCOM REVIEW:
You
open your book with quotations from Marshall McLuhan and Sven Birkerts.
Why them?
JANET H. MURRAY:
I start my book with McLuhan and Birkerts because together they express
the polarities that people are torn between nowadays: on the one hand,
McLuhan, saying that technology is an extension of our humanity and that
we express our humanness through the things we make; and on the other,
Birkerts, saying that the created world is necessarily bad and that only
the natural world-or only the portion of the created world that is familiar
to us from birth-is an expression of humanity. Anything new is somehow
a violation of our humanity.
ER:
Anything technological?
MURRAY:
Well, he takes that position. But what does technological mean? It means
the things we create. So where do they come from? They are not made by
turtles or rocks! They are made by us. They are expressive of human nature.
ER:
Do you think that people in the humanities in general feel threatened
by computers? Or are they making peace with them?
MURRAY:
Well, some people--and not just in the humanities; people even in the
sciences--feel threatened by computers. At MIT in the 1980s it was easier
to do educational computing projects in the humanities than in some of
the sciences, because the scientists were hostile to computers--some of
them did not even want to trade in their sliderules for calculators. A
new invention allows us to rethink the way we do things, and so the people
who have been the most welcoming of computers are people who have been
trying to do things for which existing technologies were not adequate-like
foreign language teachers wanting to bring authentic video to their students,
but needing the computer to provide interactive vocabulary aids. If you
focus on how this technology allows you to pursue the same goals that
you've been pursuing with older technology, I think you can't help but
be excited by computers. The problem is that people often confuse the
enterprise with the format; so they would, for example, regard Shakespearean
scholarship as somehow located in books even when the enterprise, like
making a variorum edition of Shakespeare, is really too large for the
capacity of a book. We have to learn how to separate the important human
enterprises--humanistic and scientific--from the particular formats in
which we've carried them on up to now.
ER:
Let's consider a traditional work; following your example, let's take
Hamlet itself. If a Hollywood producer today did a version of Hamlet
that was more or less the same except that he tacked on a happy ending,
most critics would be horrified. And so some would ask: Now what if an
interactive Hamlet were done where audiences tacked on a happy
ending. Would the same critics--or would you--be equally horrified?
MURRAY:
Yes, of course, I would be horrified. It would be a violation of the work
and it would not have the same human resonance. But you ask a very good
question because it identifies a common misconception. People think digital
storytelling will destroy the meaningful forms of traditional narrative.
But I would argue that new media offer us a new repertoire of meaningful
formats. The fact that a story is in a digital form, like hypertext or
simulation, does not mean that it is arbitrarily told. Digital stories
are told in ways that maximize the expressive properties of this medium-just
as you can tell a different story with a film camera or a novel than you
can with a bardic lyre.
ER:
Are you changing the whole role of the artist or the author and various
other instantiations of that word by the interactive role? Is authorship
important anymore?
MURRAY:
Authorship is vitally important. Authorship is the single most important
thing, as always.
ER:
What about authorial control?
MURRAY:
The author does have control. One way I like to think about linear versus
digital authorship is to think of the difference between a painting and
a sculpture. We appreciate a painting, we take in the painter's vision,
by standing in front of it. But to take in the sculptor's vision, we have
to walk it. The artist is no less in control because we walk around that
sculpture in order to see all the parts of it. It's the same thing with
an interactive story. The author has shaped the way we move through it,
shaped the choices we make and the effect of those choices, so the work
reflects not just the authoring of the images and of the words, but the
authoring of the rituals of participation. It is a procedural authoring,
and people do not realize-even people who practice interactive fiction
have sometimes not fully understood-that authorship in this medium is
procedural. It is writing the rules by which things work.
ER:
Let's talk about some other art forms--like jazz and dance. Apply those
principles to the music.
MURRAY:
Well, I think dance is a very good analogy in that you can think about
the procedural author as a choreographer. And you can think of the interactors
as dancers. You can't have the dance without the dancers. The dancers
instantiate the dance, but they have been programmed by the choreographer,
who's the author of the dance. That's not an exact analogy, but that's
certainly a good way of thinking about how one can be a participant without
being an author.
ER:
Some authors, and some playwrights, feel a need for an enormous amount
of control and others don't. Does that say anything about them?
MURRAY:
Well, I think authors always want control. The question is, how do they
exercise control in a participatory medium? In order to be a successful
author in this medium, you have to be able to switch back and forth between
roles of author and interactor. You have to try out your creation, work
through its range of behaviors, just the same way that a programmer will
try out code. And you then have to revise it, based upon how people are
going to move through it. But you also have the opportunity as an author
in this medium to be delighted by this creation in a new way-to be surprised
by behaviors that you may not have specifically anticipated but which
you created nonetheless. For instance, Robert Pinsky, the current poet
laureate of the United States, wrote an interactive story called "Mindwheel"
in the 1980's, in the form of a poetic text-adventure game. Pinsky speaks
very charmingly about his pleasure at seeing a magical frog in his story
play a role that surprised him, even though he had programmed it. He was
going through the fantasy world with his child and found himself stranded
up a tree, so he called upon the frog to fetch something for him that
got him out of the situation. He was rescued by a combination of behaviors
that he had not anticipated when he invented the frog--he was surprised
by his own creation. Of course it is not a wholly new experience for an
author to be surprised by his inventions. But what we're just learning
now is how to enjoy the familiar powers and pleasures of authorship in
this new behavior-based medium.
ER:
Some arts, of course, have always been more collaborative and fluid than
others. If you compare theater to novels there's a lot more collaboration
and interaction and change and surprise, but relatively little in traditional
novels or traditional poetry.
MURRAY:
Yes, except that when Dickens published his fiction he published it in
serial form and he was very much aware of how his readers were responding
to particular characters. There was definitely a feedback loop, just as
there was with the original singers of tales, the oral bards, who were
face to face with their audiences. So I think that authorship is always
an interactive process. This medium just makes it more explicit.
ER:
You mentioned the poet Robert Pinsky, who of course recently published
a highly regarded new verse translation of Dante's Inferno. Which
suggests the question: How would a Dante living today do the Inferno?
MURRAY:
Well, he'd do it as a virtual reality that you would move through. We
would all be following Virgil through Hell--or at least that would be
one possibility.
ER:
But we wouldn't want to get lost from the tour group, I guess.
MURRAY:
Well, that's another important thing we have to learn in the medium--how
to orient people in a navigational medium--one in which you have to get
through the story by navigating. And we therefore have to learn navigational
rituals that make sense and that become transparent. We talk about how
the language of cinema developed as something filmmakers invented and
viewers came to read automatically. We have all learned that if we see
an exterior shot followed by an interior shot, we should assume that they
represent the same building. Well now we have to establish and get used
to a similar set of conventions for orienting ourselves as we navigate
through fictional spaces on the computer.
ER:
What have you learned in your own classes? Tell us what you are teaching
these days.
MURRAY:
I'm teaching a course in interactive narrative and I just had our annual
Eliza contest in which students write interactive characters. I have an
authoring system that lets them make interactive characters similar to
Joseph Weisenbaum's classic parody of a therapist, Eliza, which he wrote
in 1966, and in which the computer plays the "therapist" and turns all
the statements made by the "patient" into supposedly probing new questions.
In my authoring system students can make this kind of interactive character
without being programmers. And we just had a contest to test which of
the characters could sustain a coherent conversation for the longest number
of exchanges. One of the characters that did very well was a character
called Elmo, who was based on a Sesame Street character. I just
had one of my colleagues bring two little girls in to play with this character,
and Elmo at one point said, "Tell me a secret." So one of the little girls
told him that she had once peed in her pants, and then she said to Elmo,
"Now you tell me a secret." But Elmo did not know how to understand and
began talking about the beach. This little girl is now convinced that
Elmo does have an embarrassing secret about the beach that he is too shy
to tell her. This points up a common problem with interactive worlds--users
have a hard time telling what the boundaries are, how far the illusion
will go. For these little kids, this character was truly Elmo, and so
the trick in making interactive characters is to make them sustain this
marvelous sense of dramatic immersion without arousing expectations that
they cannot fulfill. That is part of the fun of this kind of authorship--figuring
how far you can get with a limited amount of programming just by setting
up a familiar dramatic situation in which people know what it is they
are supposed to do and in which their expectations are fitted to the capabilities
of the world.
ER: Do
you think that art is evolving--will it continue to evolve to be more
game-like. Is that a true statement?
MURRAY:
No, I don't think so. I think that games will get more story-like, but
I think there will be games and there will be stories. I think we will
learn to associate things that we now think of as game-like with dramatic
experiences. For instance, one of the best stories that was written in
my course this year was about a diving accident where you navigate from
one point of view to another among a group of five people who are diving,
and you are as caught up in these points of view and in the minds of the
characters as you would be in any novel. You want to find out what is
happening in the other people's minds, because you can see all these dramatic
events taking place that arouse your curiosity. So you move from one point
of view to another drawn by the power of the dramatic action, not from
a desire to solve a mystery or because you are trying to get game points.
We have to learn how to segment stories and set up the navigation so that
we increase this kind of dramatic concentration. We should be making every
movement in an interactive story have that strong dramatic pull to it.
ER:
Substituting the word tragic as it used to be defined for the word dramatic,
can you imagine a classic tragedy played out in interactive story-telling?
MURRAY:
Absolutely. I think that tragedy has to do with a world in which losses
are irreversible. A false assumption people make is that interactive stories
trivialize the action, that they are game-like, and therefore cannot convey
a sense of irreversible loss. I think this is a very compelling medium
for capturing irreversible losses from multiple points of view and for
taking people through an event that is devastating, like a diving accident
or an automobile accident, or a suicide, and navigating through all of
the forces that led up to that event. Now I think one of our gains in
the twentieth century is that we can see things from complex, multiple
perspectives, and we are increasingly accustomed to understanding events
as part of a whole system of interrelated causes; and we need a medium
that is large enough to hold that kind of knowledge of life, to let us
capture the sense of tragedy that is always a part of life but that at
the end of the 20th century seems to have outgrown our traditional formats
for expressing it.
ER:
Going back to your students--what sorts of students do you have?
MURRAY:
I have a mixture of undergraduate and graduate students, and some of them
are primarily writers, and some of them would not identify themselves
as writers. Some of them are media studies students. Some are graduate
students at the MIT Media Lab. It's a real mixture, but what we focus
on is the structure of the story, how to make coherence and expressiveness
in this medium. And one of the difficulties in doing that is that it is
hard to give them models of a medium that doesn't exist yet. So I often
use examples from more mature media where the story-telling is more compelling,
but where you can see that the author has been trying to express a vision
that is too complex for the linear format. I think of these stories as
pictures that are struggling to leap out of the frames into three-dimensionality.
One of my favorites lately is a trilogy of plays by Arnold Ayckbourn,
The Norman Conquest.
ER:
Which is hilarious.
MURRAY:
Yes it is funny, like a French bedroom farce, but with more verbal wit
and without the sex, since it is British. It makes a wonderful exercise
for thinking about how to navigate through a simultaneous story. In fact
I've been doing some research with a group at IBM on how to represent
that story so that viewers could navigate through it without losing track
of where they are and what's happening. Ayckbourn sets it up so that you
are constantly wondering what's happening in the other rooms, so you are
pulled from one space to the other to see multiple events that are happening
at the same time. It makes an interesting model for the future of interactive
television.
ER:
As you pointed out, the medium doesn't truly exist yet. So how do you
train interactive designers?
MURRAY:
One of the things that teaching people how to write interactive narrative
has made clear to me is that we don't have the right discipline in place
for training students in how to design in this medium. In my other life
I am a designer of interactive educational applications, and I'm constantly
working with people who are trained as programmers, or as graphic artists,
or filmmakers and who are improvising interactive design out of those
different disciplines. But in writing Hamlet on the Holodeck one
of the things I did was articulate the properties of the digital medium
itself, and it made me realize that what we really need is a discipline
of interactive design that would teach people how to maximize the use
of the properties of this particular medium. For instance, when you work
with producers on media projects who have a background in video or film,
they will often talk about the product they are making as a "show"; and
when you work with people who are trained in graphic design they often
want to minimize color in order to fulfill certain minimalist aesthetics
that come out of graphics design, or they do not make the difference between
chosen and unchosen choices clear enough, because are thinking about the
screen as a static poster rather than a changing locus of interaction.
There is a pressing need to train professionals to think about the design
issues specific to this medium, such as how to best segment a scene so
that it can be juxtaposed to another scene, how to present information
in the form of a simulation, or how to structure interaction so that users
have the right level of expectation. Right now nobody is teaching that.
So the thing I am thinking about next is creating a course-and it's also
the subject of my next book-on principles of interactive design.
ER:
Well, let's close by speculating on the future. Thinking back to the 1920s
or so, some people then were betting that what Joyce had done and others
had done would change the novel forever. Well, it sort of did, but it
also sort of didn't--in the sense that the traditional novel somehow kept
going and going and going. What do you think is likely to happen in the
future?
MURRAY:
Well, I'm not afraid that books will disappear or that movies will disappear,
but I think there will be new formats. I think that digital television
offers the most intriguing possibilities in the immediate future. With
the merger of the Internet and broadcast television we are going to see
the development of stories that take place over multiple seasons that
can be navigated from different story threads. For instance, when some
day all the seasons of Seinfeld are available in a digital archive,
some people will probably want to navigate it by following all of Elaine's
jobs or all of George's girlfriends. So if you are to make the next Seinfeld
or the next ER then you would have such an archive in mind from
the start. You'd be thinking about the multiple ways in which a viewer
might navigate the story. And I think that when TV writers start thinking
in those terms it will make for more textured imaginary worlds with many
coherent and well-developed story threads. So perhaps one effect of the
growth of digital media will be to make storytelling on television more
consistent over a longer periods of time, with more evenly developed story
threads.
ER:
Let's take a specific example. Twenty-five years, fifty years from now--you
pick a date--when they remake Titanic, what will we see?
MURRAY:
Well, Titanic is a wonderful example because the film is made as
a simulation, and even includes a computer simulation as one of its plot
devices. It marks one of those moments when the existence of a new medium
changes the shape of an older medium. You just could not have the current
Titanic movie without all of us understanding what a simulation
is, because it is our sense of the sinking as a valid simulation that
gives the depiction of the disaster elements such devastating authority.
And I think if you were going to do the story again in 50 years, then
you would take it even further. The audience would feel even more immersed
in the moment-to-moment experience, through the use of 3-D technology,
the ability to move around the ship, and to follow the stories of every
single passenger and crew member. Digital media would create an expectation
of encyclopedic detail beyond even James Cameron's ambitions.
ER:
Would there be a role for Leonardo DiCaprio?
MURRAY:
Well, there will always be love stories, just as there will always be
shipwreck stories, whatever the medium. There are certain classic plots
that have to do with the essentials of human experience. And no matter
what medium we choose to make art in, we will always be driven to tell
those stories over and over again.
ER:
This is a perfect place to end the interview. Thank you.
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