1. Chapter 3: From Additive to Expressive Form Hamlet on the Holodeck:
The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace

2. Additive to Expressive Form
The early days of film
Cradle Films
As in printing press, the invention of camera lead to a period of incunabula of “cradle films”
Includes several examples, see 3:05 and 4:25

3. Moving Beyond Cradle films
Invention of major elements of filmic storytelling
Close up
Chase scene
Feature length
Unique physical properties of film
Movement of camera,
Lens; open, close, change focus
How celluloid processed light
Cut up and assembly of film

4. Photoplays
By aggressively exploring and exploiting these physical properties filmmakers change a mere recording technology into an expressive medium.
Narrative films were originally called photoplays first thought of as a merely additive art form
Photoplay = Photography + Theater
Camera with the cellluloid rolls………….

5. Photoplays to Movies
Photoplays gave way to movies when filmmakers learned,
To create suspense
To create character and mood by visual means
To use “montage” of discontinuous shots to establish a larger action
Some critics passionately opposed sound and color as superfluous distractions
Camera with the cellluloid rolls………….

6. Digital Environments
New content creators are finding ways to move beyond the incunabula stage in digital environments.
Characteristics of digital environments:
Interactive
1. Procedural
2. Participatory
Immersive
3. Spatial
4. Encyclopedic

7. Computer-based Characters
Eliza
1966 Joseph Weizenbaum
Many versions of this story

8. Computer-based Characters
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.
What does this story of Eliza tell us?
Role of user expectations and experiences?
Limitations of Eliza as a model for characters?

9. Participatory Computers are interactive Zork
They create an environment that is both procedural and participatory
The user must participate in the story
Zork
Text-based adventure game
“The computer was programming the player.”
Not NLP but more natural than before

10. Participatory
Key to compelling storytelling in a participatory medium lies in scripting the interactor
Challenge is to invent scripts that are formulaic enough to be easily grasped and responded
Flexible enough to capture a wider range of human behaviours

11. Spatial
The new digital environments are characterized by their power to represent navigable space
Linear media such as books, and films can portray space either by verbal description or image
Only digital environments can present space that we can move through

12. Spatial The myth of PARC Aspen movie map Zork (again)
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
“The event is happening now. The event is happening to you.”
The challenge for the future is to invent an increasingly graceful choreography of navigation to lure the interactor through ever more expressive narrative landscapes

13. Encyclopedic
Computers have huge capacity – more than prior methods of representing content
Value for narrative?
Wealth of detail to represent the world with both scope and particularity
Stories from multiple vantage points, offer intersecting stories that form a dense and wide-spreading web
Negative effects?
Long-windedness
Formlessness in storytellers
Outgrowing broadcast delivery and too big…….
Game of thrones

14. Encyclopedic Simulations – exposing the assumptions
“the interpretive framework is embedded in the rules by which the system works and in the way in which participation is shaped”
What combines spatial, participatory, and procedural elements with encyclopaedic coverage?
One example: MMORPG, others?

15. Digital Structures of Complexity
Memex
“human knowledge is a solvable maze, open to rational organization” – clear cut trail
Xanadu
“hummingbird mind”, “all things are deeply intertwingled” – twisting web
Time steps – the game of life
Emergent structure / behaviour

16. Computational Media Are we still at the incunabula stage?
Early stories on the web were pretty bad
Computer presentation would allow pleasure that are unattainable in broadcast soaps
Sub plots
Audio as an integral part of the plotline
Exaggeration: every start-up is trying to create a new medium
But not many focus on narrative