Additive to Expressive Form The early days of film Cradle Films – – Invention of major elements of filmic storytelling – Close up – Chase scene – Feature length Movement of camera, changes in focus, cut up and assembly of film Photoplay = Photography + Theater

Computational Media Are we at the incunabula stage? – Early stories on the web were pretty bad But what about the computer as a meta- medium? Exaggeration: every start-up is trying to create a new medium.

Computer-based Characters Eliza – Many versions of this story What does this story tell us? Limitations of Eliza as model for characters?

Digital Environments Interactive 1. Procedural 2. Participatory Immersive 3. Spatial 4. Encyclopedic Eliza is procedural in that it has a procedure for selecting response based on the most recent and prior comments by the user. – Coming up with those procedures can be difficult.

Participatory The user must participate in the story Zork – Text-based adventure game – Modeled on understood type of world (fantasy) – “The computer was programming the player.” – Not NLP but more natural than before Lessons?

Spatial The myth of PARC – First graphical user interface? Well, not quite. Aspen movie map – Tour of Aspen that gives a sense of presence Zork (again) – Imagined world with imaginable layout Space can be abstract – Victory Garden – intersecting lives during the 1 st gulf war “The event is happening now. The event is happening to you.”

Encyclopedic Computers have huge capacity. Value in narrative? – Think of Tolkien's Middle Earth or the Star Trek universe – Others? Negative effects? Simulations – exposing the assumptions – “the interpretive framework is embedded in the rules by which the system works and in the the way in which participation is shaped”

Digital Structures of Complexity Memex – “human knowledge is a solvable maze, open to rational organization” Xanadu – “hummingbird mind”, “all things are deeply intertwingled” Time steps – the game of life – Emergent structure/behavior