Murray First Person 2-11

8/3/2019 Murray First Person 2-11

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From Game-Story toCyberdramaJanet MurrayIs there a game-story? think this is the wrongquestion, though an inevitable one for this moment.

In our discussion here,game-storymeans the story-rich new gaming formats that are proliferating indigital formats: the hero-driven video game, theatmospheric first person shooter, the genre-focusedrole-playing game. the character-focused simulation.Allof these are certainly more storylike than, say. checkers.But, as Celia Pearce has pointed out, not more storylikethan chess or Monopoly. Games are always stories, evenabstract games such as checkers or Tetris,which areabout winning and losing, casting the player as theopponent-battling or environment-battlinghero.But why are we particularly drawn to discussion ofdigital games in terms of story? And why is so muchstorytelling going on in electronic games? First of all,the digital medium iswell-suited to gaming because it isprocedural (generating behavior based on rules) andparticipatory (allowing the player as well as creatormove things around). This makes for a lot of gaming.Secondly. it is a medium that includesstill images,

moving images, text, audio, three-dimensional.navigable space- ore of the building blocks ofstorytelling than any single medium has ever offeredus. Sogamemakers can include more of these elementsin the game world.important structures, and so resemble one anotherwhenever they emphasize these structures. The firststructure is the contest, the meeting of opponents inpursuit of mutually exclusive aims. This is a structureof human experience. of course, from parenting tocourtship to war, and as a cognitive structure i t mayhave evolved as a survival mechanism in the originalstruggle of predator and prey in the primeval worldGames take this form, enacting this core experience;stones dramatize and narrate this experience. Moststories and most games include some element of thecontest between protagonist and antagonist.seen as a contest between the readedplayer and theauthor/game-designer. n a puzzle story, the challengeis to the mind, and the pacing is often one of open-ended rearranging rather than turn-based moves.Mystery stories are puzzles, and are often evaluated asgames in terms of how challenging and fairlyconstructed they are. In fact, it makes as much sense totalk about the puzzle-contest (Scrabble) as it does to

Furthermore, games and stories have in common two

The second structure is the puzzle. which can also be

Response by Bryan Loyal1In her essay, Janet Murray paints a compellinglandscape of the varied forms of cyberdrama andpresents criteria for their creation. Especiallyinteresting to me is the replay story . and its ability todraw attention to the ramifications of the stream ofchoices each of us takes for granted each day.

One property of Murrays three main examples isthat the participant is consciously aware of the storyand actively manipulating it. These forms givepowerful ways to tell new types of stories, but for me.one of the joys of a story is when I forget about it beinga story. I am simply there. The experience is dense andpowerful, and I like the characters. or hate thecharacters, or am disturbed by them.

I would like to extend Murrays landscape with

another form that has this property, and, following herlead then suggest criteria to guide its creation.

The form I would like to add is one that combinesthe high interactivity and immersion of manycomputer games with the strong story and charactersof traditional linear stories. Viewers can enter asimulated world with rich interactive characters, besubstantially free to continuously do whatever theywant, and yet still experience the powerful dramaticstory that the author intended My colleagues and I atZoesis Studios and the Carnegie Mellon Oz Project callthis form interactive drama, and we have been workingto create it since the late 1980s.impossible.As Murray points out, there are those whosay that games and stories are opposed, and what

Some have argued that this combination is


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I. Cyberdrama

talk about the story-game. Most stories and mostgames, electronic or otherwise, include some contestelements and some puzzle elements. Soperhaps thequestion should be, is there a story-game?Whichcomes first, the story or the game? For me, it is alwaysthe story that comes first, because storytelling is a corehuman activity, one we take into every medium ofexpression, from the oral-formulaic o the digitalmultimedia.

Stories and games are also both distanced from thereal world although they often include activities thatare done "for rea l in other domains. The stock market,for example is a betting game, but real world resourcesare exchanged and peoples out-of-gameor out-of-trading-floor lives are profoundly changed by eventstaking place there. Baseball, on the other hand is run asa business and has economic and emotional impact onthe lives of the players and observers. but the hits-and-misses on the field are in themselves only game moves.Similarly, a dramatization of a murder may beproblematic in many ways to a community, but it doesnot directly result in anyone's death. A story is alsodifferent from a report of an event, though we areincreasingly aware of how much about an event isinvented or constructed by the teller, even when theintention is to be purely factual. Stories and games arelike one another in their insularity from the real world,

the world of verifiable events and survival-relatedconsequences.has come to seem increasingly gamelike, and we areaware of the constructed nature of all our narratives.The ordinary categories of experience,such as parent,child lover, employer, or friend, have come to bedescribed as "roles and are readily deconstructed intotheir culturally invented components. Therefore theunion of game and story is a vibrant space. open toexploration by high and low culture, and in sustainedand incidental engagementsby all of us aswe negotiatethe shifting social arrangements of the globalcommunity and the shifting scientific understandingsof our inner landscape. The human brain, the map ofthe earth, the protocols of human relationships, are allelements in an improvised collective story-game, anaggregation of overlapping, conflicting. constantlymorphing structures that make up the rules by whichwe act and interpret our experiences.

We need a new medium to express this story, topractice playing, this new game. and we have found it inthe computer. The digital medium is the appropriatelocus for enacting and exploring the contests andpuzzles of the new global community and thepostmodern inner life. As I argued in Hamlet on theHolodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (1997).

In a postmodern world, however, everyday experience

____ . --makes a good story makes a bad game and vice versa.Yet, we and others working to create interactive dramathink this combination is possible.As evidence for ourposition let me describe a working implementation.(An interesting side note pointed out by thisimplementation is that interactive drama does notrequire computers to exist.)is to allow a single person to participate in aninteractive drama. The actors each have a role to play,and the author writes a story that places theparticipant directly in the center of the action. Thedirector is able to communicate privately to the actorsthrough radio headsets. The director's job is to watchthe flow of action, particularly what the participantdoes as the central character, and give direction to the

Imagine collecting an acting company whose sole job

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actors to subtly guide the flow of activity toward theauthor's story.

Interactive dramas such as this have been created.One of best-documented versions gave the participantthe experience of witnessing the evolution of amugging, having the power to stop it, and facing thecontinually arising questions of how to react in such asituation as it unfolds (Kelso. Weyhrauch. and Bates1993).

One obvious problem with this implementation,though, is that not everyone can afford their owndedicated acting troupe. The main advantage thatcomputers give us. once we learn how to makesimulated interactive characters and interactivedirectors for specific stories, is the ability to distributeinteractive dramas widely, and thereby encourage their


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From Game-Story to CyberdramaJanet Murray F IRSTPERSON

we can see a new kind of storytelling emerging tomatch the need for expressing our life in the twenty-first century. The first signs of this new storytelling arein the linear media, which seem to be outgrowing thestrictures of the novel and movie in the same way thatwe might imagine a painting outgrowing the frame andmorphing into a three-dimensional sculpture. Storieslike gorges The Garden of Forking Paths (1962) andfilms like GroundhogD q 1993) are harbingers of theemerging new story form. The term story-game ssimilar to the term photoplay that was used of earlymovies, as if the new format were merely the additionof photography to theater. We need a different termand a different take on the emerging form, one thatrecognizes it as moving beyond the additive into ashape unique to its medium. Neal Stephenson, in hisscience fiction novel The Diamond Age (1995). proposesthe term ractive,which is a contraction ofinteractive. In Humlet on the Holodeck, I reluctantlycoined the term cyberdrama.emphasizing theenactment of the story in the particular fictional spaceof the computer. Espen Aarseth (1997) uses the term-ergodic literature,which he defines as open,dynamictexts where the reader must perform specific actions togenerate a literary sequence, which may vary for everyreading.Some such term is needed to mark the changewe are experiencing, he invention of a new genre

altogether, which is narrative in shape and tha t includeselements we associate with games.

The forms of cyberdrama tha t I described in Hamleton the Holodeck have proliferated since the book waspublished in 1997. Role-playinggames have blossomedinto a new genre, the Massively Multiplayer OnlineRole-Playing Game. starting with Ultima Online (1997).reaching a usership of over 400.000with Everquest(1999), and perhaps reaching over a million with StarWu rs Galaxies. which as of this writing is planned forrelease in the summer of 2003. Interactive charactershave also become wildly popular, starting with theTamagotchi, which came out in the United States at thesame time as my book, and moving to the current mostpopular game in digital form, Will Wrights imaginativeThe Sims (2000).which is like a novel-generatingsystem. If there is to be a Charles Dickens or CharlotteBronte of the digital medium, then Will Wright is surelyone of his or her key antecedents. In The Sims. Wrighthas created a multivariant world of rich events andcomplex character interactions that is open to endlessexploration and extension. The Sims embodies anambivalent vision of consumerism and suburban lifeinside a structure that seems simply to celebrate it. Itengages players in building up households in a fictionalworld that has its own momentum and generates itsown plot events. Duplicitous neighbors and morbid

creation. (Computers also allow for a wider range ofworlds and characters, but this is secondary to theDractical enablement of the form in the first dace.)

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1 response.1. Otto 4ndlns.ccm. (Zoesis)

We believe widely distributable interactive drama willbecome a reality, and as it does it will be important tofind criteria to guide the work of creators.I would liketo describe some of the criteria we have used whiletrying to create interactive drama, focusing on criteriatha t illuminate relations to traditional games andstories.cyberdrama, and it is central to effective interactivedramas as well. I t is a core part of the freedom Imentioned earlier- nd, like game designers, we focusour interactive dramas on the participants constraintsand options to help enable agency.

Another important property for interactive dramathat comes from its definition is one Murray mentionsin her book: immersion. Two related criteria apply to

Murray suggests agency as a criterion for all forms of


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Cyberdrama > M u m y Loyal1 AarsethPertin Wright VesnaMateas Laurel FrascaI. Cyberdrama

clowns come to visit and destroy the happiness of thehousehold The time clock pushes relentlessly forward,with every day a workday, with carpools to meet andchores to do for those at home. The world of The Simshas its own moral physics: education leads to jobsuccess; a bigger house means more friends; too manypossessions lead to exhausting labor; neglect of a petcan lead to the death of a child The losses in The Simsare oddly poignant. with neighbors joining in theprolonged and repeated mourning process. Lookingback one hundred years from now, The Sims may beseen as the breakthrough text of cyberdrama. just asDon Quixote (1605)was for the novel or The Great TrainRobbery (1905) was for the movies.

The Sims offers strong evidence tha t a new genre titleis needed and it persuades me that cyberdrama sprobably the best one currently proposed The Sims isneither game nor story. It is a simulation world drivenby a new kind of synthetic actor, an actor authored byWill Wright, but also (in the case of the protagonists)instantiated by the interactor who sets the parametersof the characters personality. The actions of the worldare also a collaborative improvisation, partly generatedby the authors coding and partly triggered by theactions the interactor takes within the mechanicalworld. I t is a kind of Rube Goldberg machine in which awhimsical but compelling chain of events can move in

many ways. The story of The Sims is the collective storyof all its many instantiations, and users share theirevents in comic strip albums- creenshots withcaptions tha t narrate the events of the simulated worldThey also trade characters and will soon be able to sendtheir characters on dates together. I t is a simulation, astory world, opening the possibility of a DavidCopperfieldor Middlemarch or Wa r and Peace emergingsome day, built around other compelling experiences ofthe global community: not just consumerism in thesuburbs, but survival struggles among the underclass ofthe industrialized nations or postcolonial or ethnicallydivided countries.

Another community of practice that has grown since1997 is in the domain of interactive video.As televisionand computing converge, there are increasingexperiments in interactive storytelling, includingseveral prototypes sponsored by the Corporation forPublic Broadcasting, or emerging from the Hollywood-based Enhanced TV Workshop of the American FilmInstitute (which has convened yearly since 1998). orfrom the Habitat program of the Canadian Film Centre.Of course, our assumptions about the hardware fordelivering interactive video have also changedsignificantly since 1997. and the situation is far fromresolved In spring 2001 there were fewer than fivemillion homes in the United States with set-top boxes,

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the characters. For immersion to take place, thecharacters in the world need to seem real to theparticipant. This means that they need to be believableenough that the participant cares about them (whetherthat caring is l i n g hem, hating them or beingdisturbed by them). Further, we have found tha t theyneed to be real enough that the participant respectsthem. If the participant feels that she can do whatevershe wants to the characters (as though they are toys tobe played with), then the stakes of the experience andthe ability of the characters to seem alive are bothweakened

Our most recent system,OttoAndlris.com,is anattempt to create a world that has these properties (seefigures l.response.l-4). It is a playful space that onecan enter to play games with two characters, Otto and

Iris. Otto and Iris treat you as an equal, as one of them.Even though you are special in the sense that the wholeexperience is for you as the participant, the characters

l.response.2. O~toAndlns.com.(Zoesis)
http://ottoandlris.com/http://ottoandlris.com/http://ottoandlris.com/


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From Game-Story to CyberdramaJanet Murray FIRST ' ' * ' '

but as many as sixty million homes in which thetelevision and the computer were in the same room.

Ford Motor Company sponsored a set of interactivecommercials in Spring 2000 in which viewerscontributed dialog suggestions and voted on branchingchoices for a four-episode story broadcast live within asingle hour of prime-time network television. In thefirst episode a couple (chosen from among severalpossible characters over the internet) leave on a blinddate for the surprising destination of the laundromat.The audience is invited to submit a flirtatious remarkby which the nerdy male can retrieve the situation.Suggestions poured in over the internet and werescanned on the set during the S m i n u t e ntervalbefore the next episode aired. A witticism about "staticcling' was selected and credited to a viewer. Audienceswere then asked to guess the number of dirty shirts inthe trunk. and later to choose whether the hero shoulduse his last quarter to buy his date a trinket from avending machine or to pay the parking meter. Eastcoast audiences paid the parking meter and west coastaudiences opted for the more romantic plotline. Thedirecting of the story by the audience in real time on amass stage is similar in its way to the sharing of storiesfrom The Sirns. It offers us a public stage for remotelycontrolled actors in structured situations. Most of all. itoffers us the sense of a world in which things can go

more than one way.personally: from MIT (where I was directing projectsaimed at educational uses of the digital medium andteaching a single undergraduate/graduate course ininteractive narrative), to Georgia Tech, where I nowdirect the Information Design and Technology Program(IDT). IDT is the oldest humanities-based graduateprogram in interactive design in the world- lthoughit is still only ten years old- nd welcomes aroundtwenty graduate s tudents a year. Here we are beginningto see a community of practice arise among thestudents, including considerable work in newstorytelling genres. One of the most promising aspectsof this practice, which I have been actively encouraging.is a subgenre I have begun to think of as the replay story.pleasurable and characteristic structures of computer-based gaming in particular, which is usuallyaccomplished by saving the game state at regularintervals (before and after each major decision point inthe game "script"). n a procedural world, the interactoris scripted by the environment as well as acting upon it.In a game, the object can be to master the script, toperform the right actions in the right order. (This isalso an aspect of harbinger storytelling- s inGroundhqq Day or Back to th e Future or Run lola Run. in

SinceHamlet on the Hobdeck came out I've also moved

Replay isan aspect of gaming. one of the most

have their own egos. For example,if you spend too longignoring Iris, Iris will lose interest in you and leave.Similarly, if you are repeatedly mean to Otto by not

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I.response.3. 0ttoPrdTns.com. (Zoesis)

letting him play, he will mope, and stop trying to playwith you. I f you want him to play again. you will haveto wait for his sadness to subside, try to cheer him up.

1.response.i. 0 t r oA ~ dI ns . c om .Zoesis)
http://0ttoprdtns.com/http://0ttoprdtns.com/


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Cyberdrama Murray Loyal1 Aarseth I. Cyberdrama

which the protagonist inexplicably gets the chance of ado-over n the real world.) But it also can reflect oursense of the multiple possibilities of a single moment,the pullulatingmoment, as Borges called it, in whichall the quantum possibilities of the world are present. Areplay story world allows the interactor to experienceall the possibilitiesof a moment. without privilegingany one of them as the single choice.

One successful version of such a replay story is SarahCooperb Reliving Last Night, initially created as amasters project for the IDT program in spring 2001. InCoopers interactive video. a woman wakes up confusedabout who is in bed with her. The rest of the story is aflashback of an evening in which an acquaintancecomes over for a study date and an almost-ex-boyfriendshows up hoping to reconcile. The interactor can tracethe events of the evening, changing three parameters:what she wears, what beverage she serves, what musicshe chooses.All of the outcomes reflect thepersonalities and previous experiences of thecharacters, and taken as a whole they present a fullerunderstanding of who they are individually and of theintriguingly rich space of possibilities within aseemingly simple encounter. The story works becauseof the careful segmentation of the drama in to parallelmoments, and the well-framed navigation. which allowsthe interactor to change only one parameter a t a time.

Figure l.sidebar.1:The areas of game and story have both independent andoverlapping features, and for our discussion the areas of contestand puzzle are equally relevant.We could call Reliving Las t Night a game-story or a

story-game. because it contains elements of gaming. Wecould call it new media,which is an increasinglypopular term, although both words are problematic:newbecause it is too vague and ephemeral, andmediabecause the computer is a single new medium.Or we could call it ergodicor ractive or cyberdrama.The important thing, to my mind is to encourage it.The computer is the most powerful pattern-makingmedium we have available to us, and it includes thelegacy patterns of oldmedia, but i t is not merely

or try to coax him into playing again.Informal reactions from participants suggest that

such strong egos add to. rather than detract from,participants feeling of immersion and belief in the lifeof the characters. In an early version of the system, kidstesting it drew pictures afterwards of Otto as acrybaby, nd kept talking about the time he refused tosin.9. The refusal was a bug that caused part of Ottosmind t o completely freeze. We thought the bug hadruined the test, but to the kids it showed Ottos strongwill and made him seem more alive.

Another criterion we have found important forinteractive dramas is that they have compressedintensity. It is important that the story move at areasonable pace and never get stuck.This is at oddswith many games based on solving puzzles. If the

participant can get stuck, then the story doesntprogress, and the compressed intensity that is ahallmark of many traditional stories suffers.

Compressed intensity can be achievedby sharing theadvancement of the story between the participant andthe world In a prototype interactive drama system, The

l.response.5. The Penguin Who Wouldnt Swim. (Zoesis)


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From Game-Story to CyberdramaJanet Murray FIRSTPERSON

Survivor

Just as there is no reason to think of mystery novelsor role-playing games as merely versions of chess, thereis no reason to think of the new forms of story tellingas extensionsof filmmaking or board games, thoughthey may include elements of all of these. Storytellingand gaming have always been overlapping experiencesand will continue to be so. Human experience demandsevery modalityof narration that we can bring to it. Thestories we tell reflect and determine how we thinkabout ourselves and one another. A new medium ofexpression allows us to tell stories we could not tellbefore, to retell the age-old stories in new ways, toimagine ourselves as creatures of a parameterized worldof multiple possibilities, to understand ourselves asauthors of rule systems which drive behavior and shapeour possibilities.

The computer is a medium in which the puzzle andthe game, the instantiated artifact and the performedritual, both exist (see sidebar). I t has its ownaffordances, which I describe in chapter 3 of Hamlet on

Figures l.sidebar.2 - l.sidebar.3. Thinking about nondigita loverlap cases, in muttipie directions, may be a particularlyfruitful activity.limited to these patterns. I t is not merely "new" mediaor "multimedia" or story-gameor game-story. I t isredefining the boundaries of storytelling andgameplaying in its own way.

rhe Holodeck.The computer is procedural, participatory,encyclopedic, and spatial. This means it can embodyrules and execute them: it allowsus to manipulate itsobjects; it can contain more information in more formsthan any previous medium; and it can create a worldthat we can navigate and even inhabit as well asobserve.All of these characteristics are appealing for

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Penguin Who Wouldn'tSwim (1999). the participant is apenguin who is trapped on a chunk of ice with twoother penguins. drifting out to a dangerous sea (seefigures l.response.5-7). One of the penguins wants to

stay, and the other wants to try to swim back to shore.The participant is always free to do as she uishes in thesituation. To adjust the pacing, there is a dramaticguidance system that continuously estimates the

l.response.6. The Penguin Who Wouldn't Swim. (Zoesis) l.response.7. The Penguin Who Wouldn't Swim. Zoesis)


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I. Cyberdrama

Figure l.sidebar.4. When we get to the di gita l medium, we find amedium tha t can accommodate the features of all thesenondigital examples.

gaming; all of these characteristics are appealing forstorytelling. Gaming and storytelling have alwaysoverlapped. They are both being expanded at thismoment as authors take advantage of these newaffordances, and they have increased opportunities todevelop in their areas of overlap. But there is no reasonto limit the resulting form to the dichotomies betweenstory and game, which are more rigidly established inlegacy media. We can think instead of matters ofdegree.A story has greater emphasis on plot; a gamehas greater emphasis on the actions of the player. Butwhere the player is also the protagonist or the god ofthe story world, then player action and plot event beginto merge. The task before us, to my mind, is not to

Figure l.sidebar.5. We can also thi nk of the game/stoty axis as aplayer focus/plot focus axis.

Figure l.sidebar.6. But what i f we take a step back, and reconsiderthe notion th at game and story represent two directions of anaxis? An interesting temtory may open.

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participants subjective feeling of pacing. If that pacingis good. the system does nothing. leaving space for theparticipant's actions. When the subjective pacing is ba dthe system acts to advance or slow down the story asappropriate, using the characters and other activeelements. (As this is going on, the dramatic guidancesystem is also acting to guide the flow of events towardthe author's story.)All of these criteria are related to those of traditionalstories and games, yet many are different in importantways needed for interactive drama. Murray urges us tonot be limited by the dichotomy between stones andgames, but rather to recombine and reinvent theirprimitive elements. In working to build these systemswe have found that this is not just useful, but necessary.Interactive drama allows us to tell stories that we

couldn't tell before. It combines strengths and elementsof stories and games, and is both and yet neither. If weare to reach the potential of expression that it offers,we must work directly in the new medium to explore,experiment and build.


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From Game-Story to CyberdramaJanet Murrayenforce legacy genre boundaries, but to enhancepractice within this new medium.

The question that most often arises, in one form oranother, in new media practice, is how do we tell agood one from a bad one? How do we make it better ifwe dont know what it is? Too often, the criteria ofdivergent disciplines or genres are set against oneanother. We hear, for example, that games and storiesare opposed and what makes a good story makes a badgame and vice versa.

But the more useful question is. how do we make abetter cyberdrama? One criterion that I have founduseful is the concept of dramatic agency. Agency is theterm I use to distinguish the pleasure of interactivity,which arises from the two properties of the proceduraland the participatory. When the world respondsexpressively and coherently to our engagement with it ,then we experience agency. Agency requires that wescript the interactor as well as the world, so that weknow how to engage the world and so that we build upthe appropriate expectations. We can experience agencyin using a word processing program. when our directmanipulation of the text makes it appropriately changeto italics or boldface, for example. In an interactivestory world, the experience of agency can be intensifiedby dramatic effect. If changing what a character iswearing makes for a change in mood within the scene,

if navigating to a different point of iiew reveals astartling change in physical or emotional perspective,then we experience dramatic agency. Dramatic agencycan arise from a losing game move, as when we wind upimprisoned at the end of Myst. I t is the fittingness ofthe result to the action taken that makes it satisfymg.

Critique of the game-story or story-game or ergodic-ractive-cyberdramawill be most useful when it helps usto identify what works, especially what works in newways. A new genre grows from a community of practiceelaborating expressive conventions. I would argue thatwe stop trying to assimilate the new artifacts to the oldcategories of print- or cinema-based story and board- orplayer-based game. We should instead think of thecharacteristics of stories and games and how theseseparable characteristics are being recombined andreinvented within the astonishingly plastic world ofcyberspace.

From Espen Aarseths Online ResponseThat the problematic, largely unreplayable. story-gamehybrid will dominate the future of digitalentertainment seems no more likely than a future withonly one kind of sport. While there might be a futurefor narrative and new forms of storytelling in thiscornucopia of new digital and cultural formats, thelargest potential seems to be in new types of games.forms that blend the social and the aesthetic increative ways and on an unprecedented scale. As a newgeneration of garners grows up, the word *gamewillno longer be as tainted as it is today. Theneuphemisms such as story-puzzles nd 7nteractot-swill no longer be necessary. Gameswill be games andgarnerswill be garners. Storytelling, on the other hand,

still seems eminently suited to sequential formats suchas books, films, and e-mails,and might not be in needof structural rejuvenation after all. If it aint broke, whyfix it?http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/aarsethrl

Murray RespondsIn the end, it does not matter what we call such newartifacts as The Sirns. Facade. or Kabul Kaboom:dollhouses, stories. cyberdramas.participatory dramas,interactive cartoons, or even games. The importantthing is that we keep producing them.
http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/aarsethrlhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/aarsethrl


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Cyberdrama > Murray Loyal1 Aane th':pr;:c I*;- Z ~ t i ~ e ~ q sMateas ?;)(!re: F v x a

Note1. Parameters can, however, be changed a t any tim e - nd theparameter choice controls are always exposed on th e interface ofRehing Lost Night. As Noah Wardrip-Fruin points out, this allowsfor contin ual "at-will" switches between alternate versions durin gth e f.ow of the story. This is different from most game replay, i nwhich seeing another version requires restoring to a previous gamestate and then making new choices from th at poin t forward. Onlyby recording several play-throughs of different game options andrunning these recordings in parallel could the continual, in-flowcomparisons of Reliving Lost Night be achieved.

I. Cyberdrama

References: LiteratureAarseth, Espen (1995). "Le Texte de VOrdinateur est i MoitieConstruit: Problemes de Poetique Automatisee." I n Litterature etInformotique, edited by Alain Vuillemin and Michel Lenoble. Arras:Artois P Universite.Aarseth, Espen (1997). Cybertext: Perspectiveson Ergodic Literoture.Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Borges, Jorge Luis (1962). "The Garden of Forkin g Paths." InFicciones, ed ited by Anth ony Kerrigan. New York: Grove Press.Kek o, Ma rgaret Thomas, Peter Weyhrauch, and Joseph Ba tes(1993). "Dramatic Presence." Presence: The Journol of Teleoperotorsond Virtuol Environments 2, no.1 (Winter 1993).Murray, Jane t (1997). Homlet on th e Holodeck. The Future ofNonorive in Cyberspoce. New York: The Free Press.Stephenson, Neal (1995). The Diamond Age: 01. Young Lody'sIllustroted Pn'rner. New York: Spectra.References: GamesKobul Koboom. Gonzalo Frasca. 2001..New Y3rk Defender. Uzinagaz. 2001.

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