Hamlet on the Holodeck Who is Janet Murray? Worked at IBM – Suits and hackers – Musical printer Victorian scholar at MIT – Novel as ultimate form – Not into deconstruction – Into constructionist educational software

Hackers and Bards Complementary skills “The spirit of the hacker is one of the great creative wellsprings of our time, causing the inanimate circuits to sing with ever more individualized and quirky voices” “The spirit of the bard is eternal and irreplaceable, telling us what we are doing here and what we mean to one another.”

The Holodeck Janeway’s Holonovel – A generally positive vision of the future of interactive narrative – How does it compare to today’s games? Stories were not always positive – As a replacement for the real world – Holoaddiction

Reaction to New Media Early reaction is generally negative – Fear of change Brave New World – Talkies, Movies, and Feelies Fahrenheit 451 – Vision of reality tv? – “The televisors are evil because they create ‘an environment as real as the world.’” – “Books are … better … their meager sensory input makes their illusions easier to resist.” McLuhan’s hot and cold

Reaction to New Media TekWar – Vision of virtual reality – “the source of addiction, destitution, bad trips, overdose deaths, and gangster violence.” Computer Games – A film critic complained that his sons quit reading to play video games that “offer a kind of narrative, but one that yields without resistance to the child's desire for instant gratification.”

Utopian and Distopian Visions Bridging the Hopes and Fears – “enticing but not enslaving” – “Neither vision of the future refutes the other.” “Eventually all successful storytelling technologies become “transparent”: we lose consciousness of the medium and see neither print nor film but only the power of the story itself.”

Computer as Meta-Medium Computers enable many existing forms of communication – Existing representations being digitized Typical of a new medium – Incunabula recorded prose and poetry of oral storytelling – Movies were recordings of plays “At the incunabula phase of narrative computer”