Better, cheaper, and faster technologies make it easier for people to access holodecks. As time passes, technology builds upon itself building something that is both brand new yet familiar in it’s functions. This trend is prominant in the history of entertainment (manuscript to novel; novel to film).
Murray delves into the concept of new technologies giving birth to the multi-form novel. This new medium is a brand new and freely accessable tool for artists seeing emergence into the digital world. The multi-form novel form allows creators and audiences to view different aspects of a single plot, experience multiple possible realities, and discover “what could have been?” or “what should have been?” This medium is “an expression of the anxiety aroused by posing such choices to oneself” (Murray 33).
The rest of Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, studies the various aspects of the present “holodeck” and it’s shift into the future. The section on active audiences (feeling as if you are actually IN the story) brought various examples to mind:
- IMAX
- Movie Rides
- Movie-like Games
- Hypertexts
All of these attractions/mediums are interactive mediums, that literally pull the audience into the action. What more could make an experience more consuming?
And with the development of interesting technologies such as Eliza, video games, and “Choose Your Own Adventure-esque” concepts, artists are given the opportunity to make intimate impressions upon our senses.
Is this a dangerous power? In a way, yes. Many people become so immersed in a fictional situation that they begin to blur the thin line between fact and fiction. Regarding the story Don Quixote, Murray says, “The story has become a legend because it discharges the anxiety aroused by the fear that Weizenbaum (a scientist who created a program that could textually interact with people in a human-like fashion) had gone too far, that he had created a being so much like an actual person that we would no longer be able to tell when we were talking to a computer and when to a human being. This is very much like the fear that people would mistake film images for the real world” (70).
June 3, 2009 at 6:00 pm
I noted what you said about many people not having a clue of the difference between the real world and the world of fantasy. I have heard stories of MMORPG players who become so engrossed into their gaming, that they come to beleive that they are the character they created.
And don’t get me started on LARPing.
June 15, 2009 at 9:25 pm
I do think you hit on the key to Murray: meaningful expression in a uniquely digital expression and not just trite garbage. I find her chapter on audience choice particularly astute.