chapter 1

[start]

This is an academic study and a narrative about stories and their mediums [1]. [4] If you choose, you can decipher the puzzle and connect the links; if not, you can read straight through [5]. [3] Links in and between the digital and analog are keyed through repeated symbols (colors, words, numbers, images, etc.) creating a rhizomatic web [4]. [2] Images, colors, words, numbers and links are used to code and layer this chapter [3]. [5] Either way, stories are related and experienced [repeat]. [1] You can experience the story and play with the ideas as you puzzle through the words and images [2].

link

from here to there: an introduction

Throughout my academic life I have become increasingly interested in the structure and process of the stories we tell each other. From a structural point of view, I have been exploring the methods and media of storytelling, looking at the way we use words, images, sounds, etc. to relate stories. From a perspective of process, I have been examining the interaction between the sender and receiver of a story, the dance through which meaning occurs. In talking of structure and process, I am essentially discussing form and function. Or in other words, structure is the architectural building, the medium, and process is the creation of that building and then the interaction within it. And when we tell stories, I am more than aware that these terms blur quite nicely.

It seems that we stitch the fabric of our lives together with and through narrative; it's how we make sense of our world(s). And there are so many different ways that we can tell stories; through various media with different audiences we strive to communicate and narrate our stories to each other. Although each form of media (television, novels, performances, movies, paintings, hypertexts, comics, etc.) has its strengths and weaknesses, I am particularly interested in stories told across multiple media. Yes, novels are made into movies and movies are made into CD-ROM games, but some stories now travel across many mediums and these narratives evolve by experiencing/reading/playing with each medium incorporated. As McLuhan is famous for saying, "the medium is the message" (Understanding Media, 7). The structure shapes the process of the story. So, given that each medium adds to the experience of a narrative in a different way, can we not complementarily combine media together to relate and experience a new type of story?

I believe that such a combination of multiple media would create a unique form of narrative in which the story is linked among mediums through the echoing of words, images, characters and environment. To get the story, the reader has to play within and among the various mediums. Granted, the stories we have heard, seen and read in a single medium have not lacked impact, but incorporating several mediums offers a whole new experience. Also, I am not advocating that we supplant or replace older forms of media with new ones, but instead that we use old and new together and see what they have to say about each other and how they allow us to gather the best of each to offset the worst of each. New developments in technology may give us new mediums that change our conceptions of what a story is and can do, but older forms of storytelling still work quite well. Computational media does bring a whirlwind of new potential, but a good old book is still a nice thing with which to curl up. Using multiple mediums to relate a story would give us varied structure and process; the sender(s) and receiver(s) would be involved with each medium in different ways. This would not only refine our understanding of the subject at hand, but also refine our awareness of the structural and processual narrative strengths and weaknesses of the incorporated mediums themselves. Thus, we would understand more about the narrative itself and the components (the mediums) through which it was expressed. The computational revolution is happening, we have the chance to make an informed choice about how we use this new medium by seeing how it relates to preceding media.

purpose of study

My research focuses on the structure and process of narrative in various mediums and explores the potential applications of combining multiple media to tell stories differently. In other words, I will look at how a story is told and received in a given medium in comparison, contrast and combination with other mediums. It is my belief that the process of the narrative will change because the structure has changed. The narrative phenomenon of Myst, my main object of study, occurs in books, comics and hypermedia. Similarly, I will be talking about these three mediums as I see what, if anything, about narrative is being changed by the technological advances connected to the computer.

This blending of old and new media will be accompanied by a blending of old and new narrative theories - meta-stories about how stories are shared and understood. Since Plato, scholars and philosophers have explored and debated how meaning occurs between artists and audiences. As new mediums are developed, new theories have been formed as well. The scholars proposing these newer theories are exploring whether a new medium raises new questions, or if the questions of narrative that prior scholars have posed are still pertinent. Richard Lanham argues that literary study must come to terms with how technology changes the face of narrative (through digital reproduction and replication) in order to truly comprehend contemporary stories (26). And Janet Murray believes that immersive simulations are the most problematic and promising issue of narrative in hypermedia, allowing us completely into worlds which may, or may not, be worth visiting (280). The computer allows us to have almost infinite worlds in which we virtually enter and act.

In this study, I will incorporate a range of theoretical viewpoints from Plato to post-modern to represent how the nature of narrative has changed with the development of hypermedia. And hypermedia itself has several layers to consider. While Myst and MitterNachtSpiel are stories captured on CD-ROM, the hypermedia story of Ultima OnLine, another of my objects of study, takes place on the internet. The internet is a vast network of connected computers and it is a new and different arena for a story to be related and experienced, one that is highly flexible and ephemeral. By analyzing the new, hyper-hybridity of hypermedia, the older hybridity of sequential art, and single texts, I will explore and express the structure and process of narrative. In other words, I will hypertextually show and tell you a good story.

def•i•ni•tion(s)

Before I undertake this exploration of stories and their media (and mediums and their narratives), I should define some of the key terms. Hopefully, this will decrease any potential confusion when these terms are used throughout this study. I have defined the following terms; narrative and story, story grand and storyline, hypertext and hypermedia, representation, media and genre, text and context, and performance.

narrative & story

story grand & storyline

In the flow of our lives, it is through and with narrative that we construct meaning for ourselves. Walter Fisher states that human beings primarily make and use symbols to create narratives (63). We use stories in order to contextualize what we are saying so that our audience gets a sense of time and space. As Miller notes, plot is the most important feature of narrative (66, "Narrative"). It is the plot of the story, from beginning to middle to end, that helps us follow it.

There are many different perspectives from which we can consider narrative - formalist, Bakhtinian dialogical, Chicago Neo-Aristotelian, psychoanalytical, hermeneutic, phenomenological, structuralist, semiotic, tropological, Marxist, sociological, reader-response, post-structuralist, and deconstructionist (67, Miller, "Narrative"). I will not go into detail about all of the above, but I believe that such perspectives should be noted if only to show that the meaning and place of narrative in our lives has been, and continues to be, studied intensely.

To best conduct this study of narrative, I need to make some distinctions between the terms narrative, story, storyline, and story grand. Narrative and story are easily confused and closely linked. In this dissertation, story is the signified, the narrative content of a text (Genette, 27). Narrative is the signifier, the formal discourse of the text itself (27). In addressing narrative, I will consider four key characteristics; setting, character, plot and theme. The setting is where the story occurs, the characters are the personalities within the setting, the plot is the course of action and the theme is an overall meaning found within the story. The story grand refers to the whole story that occurs across several mediums or texts. The storyline refers to the specific story occurring in a particular medium or text. So, narrative changes from medium to medium and text to text across the story grand, and the story grand is a story composed of several storylines from various mediums and texts.

hypertext & hypermedia

If this study is going to discuss hypertext, the first place to go is to the writings of George Landow. In his books, Hypertext (versions 1.0 and 2.0), Hyper/Text/Theory, and Hypermedia and Literary Studies, Landow and others look at the potential of the realization of a post-structuralist theory of reading. Hypertext does not necessarily kill authors, but it does make readers authors unto themselves. That being the case, Landow puts his money where his mouth is and advocates that we use hypertext to express ourselves in ways that were not possible before (Hyper/Text/Theory, 36). Like I do in this dissertation, Landow tries to make use of the medium itself as well as to analyze it through traditional textual writing. Now, looking at texts in other media (film, print, audio, etc.) one can talk of how they inter-relate in a hypertextual manner and how any open-ended and intertextual reading is hypertextual as well. Unless I note differently, I will be using the term hypertext to refer to the electronic, computational medium with active links.

Hypertext as an electronic medium started in 1945 with Vannevar Bush's memex system (Berk and Devlin, 13). For Bush, memex is an associative storage system similar in function to how our brains store information and how we remember things. In the early Sixties, Douglas Engelbart, like Bush, conceived of an electronic medium with links between texts that could augment our intellectual capabilities (13). In 1965, Theodor Nelson coined the term "hypertext" and invented the hypertextual operating system, Xanadu (14). In the late sixties, Andries Van Dam worked with several hypertextual systems at Brown University in order to help teach classes. His latest project is called Intermedia (14). In the early seventies, ZOG was developed at Carnegie-Mellon and was one of the last of the first generation hypertext systems that ran on mainframes only (14). In the early eighties there was the emergence of second generation, workstation-based hypertext products, such as Intermedia and KMS (a new version of ZOG) (14). The faster computers allowed more people to utilize hypertext technology. In 1985, Peter Brown introduced hypertext to personal computer users with Guide (15). A year later, Xerox released Notecards that supported graphics and animation as well as text (as did Intermedia and KMS at this time) (15). The next year, Apple bundled Hypercard with all its Macintoshes, allowing millions the chance to explore hypertext documents (15). In the nineties the explosion of the internet and the hypertext-based world wide web has opened the floodgates to a plethora of products and browsers that allow users to read and write in hypertext (15).

Landow notes that hypertext is composed of words, images and sounds linked by multiple paths in an open-ended perpetually unfinished form (Hypertext, 3). In general, hypertext occurs on a computer. Words and images are not only a part of the "page" in front of you but can serve as a link to another page and so on and so forth. You follow these links by pointing and clicking with a mouse or some other input device. A seminal example in hypertextual storytelling is Michael Joyce’s "Afternoon: A Story" in which readers click on words to work their way through the story. Harry Goldstein quotes Stuart Moulthrop in noticing that there are two kinds of hypertextual documents, "exploratory and constructive" (131). In exploratory, you follow alternative paths or links while the hypertext, "retains its fundamental identity under all transformations" (132). In constructive, you add your own words to the hypertext, so readers become writers (132).

Hypermedia and hypertext are two closely related terms with a subtle difference. Hypermedia refers to dynamic multimedia objects that have hypertextual aspects. As Landow and Delany note, hypermedia is a multimedia extension of hypertext that is more complex and interactive, integrating visual and auditory experiences as well as texts and links to give a more contextual synthesis of the information explored (7). For example, a web page with just regular HTML links is a hypertext even if it has graphics, a little video and plays some music. But a web page with java scripting and interactive graphics, videos and sounds is more of a hypermedia object. Myst is hypermedia, because it has an immersive environment with sight and sounds galore and many different potential (hypertextual) actions to take. But a DVD that has a movie with lots of action and adventure and some other trivia added on, but has few active choices for the viewer, is a multimedia piece. Hypertext offers the reader a myriad of associative links, multimedia combines graphics, sounds and such; hypermedia is hypertextual multimedia. The user is immersed in a world and can interactively explore it. The performative nature of hypertext and hypermedia on computers has led Brenda Laurel to look at computers as theatre. For Laurel, computers have the "capacity to represent action in which humans [can] participate" (1).

representation

Representation plays a large role in the relating and experiencing of stories. The act of representation has two aspects pertinent to this study. The first is the idea of symbolism, using signs and symbols to represent an object and/or idea. In the performative aspect of representation, an object or idea is being presented again, or re-presented each time a spectator engages the symbols and signs. It is a performance in the moments of engaging. A performance itself is a means of representation, but every means of representation has a performative aspect. As David Summers notes, the process of representation has three factors - an object, its actual image, and a mental image (3). The mental image is the performative interpretation by an audience member and is a representation itself (3). Each time an audience engages a text, whether a CD-ROM, book, comic, etc., the representation occurs again but with present interpretations of the representation. So, representation is not only a symbolic act of portrayal and description, but is also a performative moment that lives in the present(ation) again and again.

WJT Mitchell states that the process of representation occurs in three forms: iconic, symbolic and indexical (14). Iconic representation stresses resemblance by association (14). For example, the folder icon on a Macintosh or Windows screen is more than an image of a folder, it resembles a real folder in that you can put (electronic) documents into it. A symbolic representation is more of an agreed upon, arbitrary and associative stipulation; no resemblance is specified (14). The word "dog" is accepted as a symbol for an actual dog. It doesn’t look or act like a dog, but the word represents the dog for us. An indexical representation stands for an absent object. In terms of cause and effect, the existence of the index indicates the presence of the absent object (14). A great example is a footprint. The footprint is an index of the passing foot, illustrating the existence of the absent object. Representations can share and combine the characteristics of an icon, symbol and/or index (14).

According to Mitchell, Aristotle "defined all the arts as modes of representation" and went further to make "representation the definitively human activity"

("Representation," 11). As humans, we use and manipulate symbols and signs - things that "stand for" and "take the place of" something else (11). Mitchell’s graph (above) illustrates the process of representation with the two bisecting axes of communication (maker and beholder) and representation (stone and dab of paint) (12). He points out that the intersection of these two axes shows how communication occurs through representation and that representation can also be a "barrier to communication, presenting the possibility of misunderstanding, error or falsities" (12). Plato worried that a representation was merely a substitute for reality and at worse a "false or illusory substitute" (14). So, representation is a "means and obstacle," a necessary part and problem of the process of communication (13).

Aristotle notes that representations can differ in three ways: object- what is represented, manner- the way it is represented, and means- the materials used to represent (13). The stories related and experienced in this study will be represented differently in manner and means. As Mitchell so eloquently states,

media & genre

The dance between the medium and the genre is an intricate and interlocking one. Aristotle states that representations can differ in three ways: object, manner and means (Mitchell, 13). The means of literature is language. Words are the materials, but the manner of using these words can be different–poetry, short story, essay, etc. The subtle difference between means and manner is the distinction between medium and genre (14). The choice of a medium calls for another choice to be made as well: what form, or genre, to use.

When I refer to media, or a medium, I am referring to a process using specific techniques and materials through which communication occurs. For example, painting is a medium; so is film, print, etc. I am less interested in the political ramifications associated with media in terms of a mass form of communication than in the structure and process of communicating through a medium, whether it is a book, film or performance. There is a subtle, and often blurred, distinction between media and mediums that should be made here. The term media is more abstract and refers to variety of mediums as a whole. The term mediums is more concrete and is used to discuss two or more particular mediums a part from each other. So in a media studies department, the multiple mediums of film, text and theater can be discussed specifically, while the value of multimedia can be debated as well. This is a multimedia study that has several mediums in it.

Mediums matter. As McLuhan has said, "the medium is the message" and has a vital part in the meaning of a story related through it (Understanding Media, 7). David Miles looks at how a medium has the shape in the meaning of a story when he examines how a new medium borrows heavily on older, more established mediums in his article, "The CD-ROM Novel Myst and McLuhan's Fourth Law of Media: Myst and Its ‘Retrievals.’" According to Miles, the hypermedia of the CD-ROM leans on aspects of film, stage and the novel (4). Even so, Walter Benjamin notes how a new medium can tell a story like never before. In, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Benjamin notes that the introduction of a new medium, specifically film, has the potential to change the world because it allows us to see things that we have not been able to see before (226).

Working within a medium necessitates some type of form with which one shapes the message to be communicated and thus genre is involved. Genre is a type or category of composition within a medium. So, the medium of discursive text is filled with genres: poetry, short story, fiction, non-fiction, novels, essays, etc. And painting has still lifes, landscapes, portraits, etc. Film has documentaries, dramas, action-adventure, comedies, etc. In dealing with media, one also has to deal with the genres of the media. Genres have certain conventions that set up expectations for the readers. And it should be noted that genres can cut across mediums. For example, we can talk about the genre of fantasy (with expectations of magic and mysticism) as it applies to film, fiction and painting.

All of this is fairly obvious, but I find it important to discuss genre and media because the two are so closely linked. When examining a medium in and of itself, it helps to note the genres of that medium and to know that looking at a certain genre with a medium will color the exploration of that medium. So by looking at the medium of texts and only citing poetic examples, the textual medium's expressive capabilities are not being fully explored. Also, when examining a new medium, it helps to look at the genre employed. Both medium and genre matter. To conduct this study, I need to be aware of the intertwining differences of the old and new forms of them.

text & context

Like medium and genre, text and context are intimately related to each other. Text and context are like the old chicken and egg conundrum. You can’t really have one without the other. Mitchell states that the process of representation occurs in relation to a whole network of signs, in a context of systems of symbols together (13). The meaning of a story comes out of the relationship between text and context. Aspects of space and time form a context around a text. There is the time and space when the author wrote, and there are the repeated performative moments when readers engage the text. The reception of a text occurs within a context, within the many different spaces and times that a text is engaged. It should be noted that I am working with the post-structuralist notion that almost any object can be a text and that I will be exploring the distinctions between discursive and non-discursive texts, looking at the different forms of symbolism and interpretation. So, a text can be found in a variety of mediums. To avoid undue confusion, I will specify what type of text (CD-ROM, book, discursive or non-discursive) I am referring to in a given example.

I am concerned with the process of how the meaning of a story is related and experienced through and within text and context. M.M. Bakhtin explores the process of how meaning occurs between text and context. In his book, The Dialogic Imagination, he talks about how the meaning of a given text is fostered by an open experience between the reader and the author of the text. The text has "an indeterminacy . . . a living contact with unfinished still-evolving contemporary reality (the open-ended present)" of the reading experience (7). So, there is a reciprocated dialogue occurring between both parties involved across the text and the meaning comes out of this conversation.

Similarly, Roland Barthes has written many books exploring the ways a text can have meaning for its reader(s). In S/Z, he defines two types of text; writerly and readerly (4). Both of these terms apply to what a text in relation to the position of the reader. A writerly text can be rewritten in the act of reading. The reader is "the producer of the text." Meaning comes forth in the reading (4). A readerly text is one that is simply read and not rewritten. It is a "classic text" that is read (4). In his poetic books, Roland Barthes and The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes attempts to give the reader writerly texts.

Like Bakhtin and Barthes, Arnold Berleant is also interested in studying one's contextual experience with an object rather than the interpretations of that object. In The Aesthetic Field, he looks to examine the process of experiencing a text itself. Likewise, Hayden White is concerned with the questions of how the form of a text means something for a reader. In his book The Content of the Form, he looks at the types of narratives we use and how these types, or genres, help us fill out the content of the story. The context of genre is a vital part of the medium of the text. Genre gives an intertextual framework to a narrative's elements that form the text.

In their article, "Reading Intertextually: Multiple Mediations and Critical Practice," Beverly Whitaker Long and Mary Susan Strine do an excellent job of delineating a process that they call intertextuality. Intertextuality is the process of drawing on one’s experience with a myriad of texts and making connections between these various texts and the present text being experienced (468). It is the context of other texts that help us to experience a new text. This intertextual context with a text exists on a continuum between unique and universal. There are our own personal and unique experiences that we bring to bear and there are the more universal and critical dialogues found in other related and critical texts. One type of intertextuality is not necessarily more valid than the other, they both contextually add meaning to a text. Long and Strine illustrate how the process of experiencing a text necessitates that the audience brings an intertextuality to bear in order to understand the text being experienced. So, when we read a book, we bring our intertextual experiences of all the other books we have read to play with the current text itself, and from this playfulness we garner a deeper meaning of the text(s) involved. The stories I am examining and telling are related through texts and experienced in context. Bringing an intertextual awareness to bear will help to fully understand and explain and these stories.

performance

The complexities of performance as a means for interpretation have allowed me to better understand and represent the process of narrative. There are a myriad of conflicting perspectives on what exactly constitutes performance. Below is an explanation as to why the lens of performance is helpful when looking at stories in different mediums, particularly hypermedia.

Stern and Henderson define performance at its most fundamental as an act that is "interactional in nature and involving symbolic forms and live bodies" (3). It can be an act that involves the interactions between a performer and a text, an audience and a performer, and/or two people talking. The symbolism occurs at the "intersection between text and context," with the text being anything ranging from a script to a social norm for interaction. This intersection is where and how the page is brought to life on the stage through the performed gestures and actions, and where a conversation comes to life through the interaction of the two participants. The context of these occurrences is the "social, political, historical, psychological and aesthetic factors that shape the way we understand the text" (17). Context is the culture in which the audience is influenced. A performance is thus positioned within the cultural discourse of its place and time (Auslander 8). So, when and where it occurs influences how and what occurs. The context shapes and limits the possible meanings of a performance that the performers and the audience can interpret. So, whether it be a conversation or a stage play, it occurs within its context of time and space.

The intersection of text and context is a site where scholars begin to expand the parameters of performance, exploring beyond the stage and into the various activities of our lives (like reading) and examining the fact that a performance is an event that exists in the present, in the here and now. It cannot be reproduced; it can be repeated, but then it is a different production (Phelan, Unmarked 146). Each production is a (re)presentation of the event. It is a different conversation, a different play. Each performance varies from the last, each affected by the present time and place. Each is filled with the unique potential of its present. It is happening in the here and now. This immediacy of performance is one of its biggest strengths, but it is a weakness as well, for documentation and reproduction are virtually impossible. It is a presence "imbued in performance" through the knowledge that "it will occur this way only this time" (Vandon Heuvel 12).

Looking more closely at the event of a performance reveals another characteristic. In any performance, more than one type of presence exists. There is the enduring presence of the performative event itself, and there is "the series of presents which constitutes whatever 'present' meaning" the audience has of the performance (Sayre, Object 19). In other words, the performance exists and endures along with the current meaning(s) found in the audience's responses, whether detailed or fleeting, which create and sustain a process of presents and presence. So, every (re)presentation, every new conversation, takes place within the rubric of an experience of past plays and past conversations. The performance of here and now is built on the preceding and continual process of performance(s).

Thinking of the process of performance opens up yet another facet. One can look at a performance as metonymic, an "additive and associative" process that works on "contiguity and displacement" (Phelan 150). To borrow Peggy Phelan's example, "'The kettle is boiling' is a statement that assumes water is contiguous with the kettle. The point is not that the kettle is like water," as in a metaphor, "but that the kettle is boiling because the water inside the kettle is" boiling (150). Bert States discusses performance as metaphor, but I prefer to use the term metonymic. A metaphor has a substitutive function, while a metonym is additive. Performance does not simply substitute the text, it metonymically adds to it and to itself at the same time. It is metonymic in the sense that a performance echoes that from which it springs forth and echoes the process of performing itself. It simultaneously represents the text on stage and itself as well. This idea is analogous to Sayre's example that "the spoken breath is identical with the event that it describes because it is the event" (Object 16). In the process of performing, both text and performance are (re)presented. The embodied orality of the performance opens up its metonymic potential. There is the presence of the text and the presence of the participants in the here and now. Whether they are conversational or theatrical, these performances occur within a dynamic with bodies together in time and space.

To push this trope, several levels of metonymy can be identified that help to highlight the complexity of the spectator-performer dynamic and the context of performance itself. First, metonymy in performance itself exists as described above. Second, metonymy occurs in an audience's experience, which "involves the active role [of] the audience . . . in creating the emergent meanings" of the event (Stern and Henderson 406). The viewers reinterpret a performance within each experience they have of it. In other words, they themselves are a type of performer, creating meaning in their interpretation of an aside made in a play or a conversation. In his article, "How to Rescue Literature," Roger Shattuck goes so far as to say that readers should actually become performers. He espouses that a text needs not only to be experienced but experienced aloud. Shattuck strongly believes that for the reader to better bring the text to life, the reader should perform it aloud, letting the words out of the pages through our bodies. Third, the viewers become aware of this present interpretation to the performance, becoming "spectators of their own performances, becoming a kind of performer" (Phelan 161). The audience becomes introspectively aware of its response(s) to a performance. In other words, they know what they believe it means. In this awareness, the performing audience members are engaging their present experience of a performance within their collected experience(s) of it (Sayre, "Performance" 103). The audience members are simultaneously representing a performance in their performative viewing as well as representing their interpretation of it. Or, more simply, the audience/listener is helping to make meaning just as the performer/speaker is. Within this dynamic the power of meaning becomes the meeting of both parties, together the performer and audience create the meaning that occurs within that time and space. Without one or the other, there would be a lot less to talk about.

The above discussion of the variations of metonymy expands the definition of performance. One can look at any present iteration of any event as a performative moment, a moment that can be represented, but will never be reproduced again. So, ideas of performance do not have to just be relegated to staged productions or conversations. We can look at the performative elements of how a reader reads a text; the meaning of a text comes out when someone performs a reading, one that will only happen this way, this time. It is in the performative moment that the meaning of a text is fully realized, for both parties (author and reader) are now involved together. Sayre sees the potential for acknowledging and adapting the playful energy of performance within the pages we write and read ("Performance," 103). Vandon Heuvel also focuses a performative lens upon books. Specifically, he looks at the spontaneity of performance in relation to the stability of written texts. In the interstices of these two mediums, new meanings arise for the readers and viewers (23). Auslander looks at how performativity need not be solely on the stage as well. He notes that we live in a mediatized world and that performance has spread across media, infecting the other mediums with performative spontaneity from both performers and audiences (53).

So, the kaleidoscope lens of performance is an apt one to use in this study. I will be examining and using the structure and process of stories in three different mediums. I will be performing as a scholar and as an artist as I look and see how meaning is created and performed in the relation and experience of these stories. The structure of each medium allows for a different performance and these processes are how the meanings of stories are created and shared.

objects of study

To help focus my analysis and illustration, I will use the narrative phenomenon of Myst as the main object of study. The story grand of Myst occurs across three different mediums: hypermedia, traditional novels and a comic book. With this study I intend to look at the strengths, weaknesses, differences and similarities of these three mediums. To do this, I will examine each medium involved in the story grand of Myst. And each medium will have objects of study that are thematically related to the mediums involved. In other words, since text is a singular medium, there will only be one object of study, the Myst trilogy discussed textually. But comics incorporate two mediums (text and graphics) and there will be two objects of study, the Myst comic book as well as Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. And the explosion of mediums within hypermedia will be explored through the Myst and Riven CD-ROMs and also Richard Garriott’s Ultima OnLine gaming experience as well as Kveta Pacovska's MitterNachtSpiel and many more as the study concludes. Granted these categories of media do blur and I will use this as I analyze these mediums throughout this study.

Before I begin, let me describe the phenomenon of the Myst story grand. Myst is an award-winning "immersive environment" that occurs on a CD-ROM, but the story grand progresses and continues in several books and web sites with hints and clues (to help you get through the CD-ROMs if you get stuck), a subsequent trilogy of novels, a comic book, as well as a second CD-ROM, immersive environment, Riven, also a theme park and movie are in the works (although I am not sure how these will add to the narrative) (Carroll, "(D)Riven" 3). Exploring how the narrative of Myst has developed over multiple media will allow me to pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of the media involved in the narrative. Also, I will be able to use Myst as a window into the theoretical issues of narrative, multiple media, structure and process, and come out the door with an idea of how they might be applied to better tell stories in general and also be used to help improve the academic endeavor and the classroom environment.

The narratives of Myst, Sandman, Ultima OnLine and MitterNachtSpiel serve not only as objects of study, but as inspiration as well. Learning from these narratives and incorporating them within my own will help me to tell how we can utilize multiple media, theories and stories to better express our own. These chosen objects of study will in a large part shape this study. Other objects would more than likely lead to a different study altogether, but I have carefully chosen objects that will offer up the most to my examination.

I chose Myst for several reasons. It is the landmark CD-ROM that first gave us a glimpse of what a hypermedia CD-ROM is capable. Riven is even more elaborate and better realized than Myst. At present it is illustrates the best in CD-ROM storytelling. It shows how "image, sound and narrative [are] woven into a new form of experience" of storytelling (Miles, 4). Also, it is by far the best and most contemporary example of a story that progresses across several media.

I chose Sandman because it is simply the best comic book series on two levels very pertinent to this study. Frank McConnell notes that the Sandman series is "one of the most extraordinary events in the history of comics" with a complex story related through images and words (1). Gaiman and many different artists have effectively and gracefully used the dance between images and words to tell these stories. Sandman is a great example of how two mediums can be blended into a new one. And Gaiman, as primary creator, has skillfully woven several older myths into his contemporary story, adding depth and resonance to the stories incorporated. He is blending older stories and myths within his new frame.

Ultima OnLine was chosen because it is one of the most dynamic and interactive stories that really does not evolve without the socially constructive participation of its audience. Myst and Riven have more lush and immersive graphics and atmosphere, but Ultima immerses the participants into a thriving environment in which they interact with others to shape the course of events. It is a "brilliant breakthrough" that shows how we will be "playing - and perhaps learning - in cyberspace" as we interact with others online (Kim, "Ultiman Online"). The stories are related and experienced, and the world is constantly changed, through the participants' performances within the Ultima story grand.

MitterNachtSpiel is one of the best examples of interactive art and narrative bar none. It uses the interface and the context to open up and encourage exploration. As J.C. Herz notes, this is how interactive pieces should be ("Making Art..."). It deftly weaves sounds and images together and uses iterations of both to build a thematic story arc.

Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic book series and Origin’s Ultima OnLine gaming community designed by Richard Garriott and Kveta Pacovska's MitterNachtSpiel are the three other objects of study that will help me to engage the issues of stories in different mediums. Unlike Myst and Riven, Ultima OnLine is a constructive hypermedia story experience. Myst and Riven are exploratory hypermedia with definite endings, Ultima OnLine is a never-ending hypermedia story developed by Garriott and the software company Origin and furthered by each and every participant who joins in the experience. Pacovska's CD-ROM, MitterNachtSpiel is a lovely rhizomatic experience of interwoven sights and sounds.

Gaiman's Sandman series (which won numerous awards and is stretched across 75 1/2 single issues and is also collected in 10 graphic novels) also incorporates myths from various cultures and epochs in the medium of sequential art (comic books). To name a few; there are Greek, Egyptian, Nordic, Shakespearean, Fairie, and contemporary urban myths included within the storyline. Words, images and stories are put into play together within the overarching story about the concept of dreaming and storytelling itself. Unlike the Myst comic, the Sandman series is a graceful and complex blending of words and images.

Richard Garriott’s Ultima OnLine, is a story and game that takes place entirely on the internet (hence, ‘on-line’). In fact, it is the largest on-line game to date. The story grand of Ultima was originally developed over nine versions of a CD-ROM role-playing adventure game. Ultima OnLine takes place in the fictional world of Britannia where multiple players can log on and interact with each other within the two-dimensional graphic realms. It is an epic fantasy story with good and evil, magicians and monsters. The twist is that it is a socially developed and persistent hypermedia environment; there is the foundational story developed by Garriott at Origin, but the activities of the myriad of players (around 150,000 and growing) are what motivates and creates the stories that literally never end. What I mean by constructive and persistent is that the participants not only add through their actions, but their actions have lasting consequences. If you build a house, it will be there the next time you play. Origin maintains a community paper titled the ‘Town Cryer’ that allows participants to see the various stories that are developing in the world.

Kveta Pacovska's MitterNachtSpiel ("MidNightPlay") is an elegant piece of interactive artistic storytelling, the only words involved are actually on the packaging, which basically set up the context that on nights when the moon is not in the sky, it is actually down on earth at a play, and the moon and cast of characters interweave in a dreamlike fluidity from place to place and activity to activity as sights and sounds echo and entwine in a midnight play.

The various media and genres employed are also incorporated by choice and I have picked the ones that I believe could best serve together in a complementary combination. There are two reasons for analyzing the three particular mediums of traditional text, sequential art and hypermedia. First, the narrative phenomenon of Myst is my main object of study and it occurs in these three mediums. So, I am using the mediums that are a part of Myst.

Secondly, I am interested in how the developing technology of hypermedia has created a new medium that has, and has not, changed what narrative is and can be in relation to what it was and used to be in older mediums. To do this, I will compare the narrative structure and process of written texts and sequential art with that of hypermedia.

The discursive text is an old and pure medium that simply does not go away because it works so well. Academe has relied heavily on words and for good reason: books are easily documented and disseminated so the ideas can travel far and wide. It is mainly through and with discursive symbolism that we created and shared our philosophies and logics. Books give us a permanent record and allow us to communicate, through words, our ideas and arguments. Also, I am not interested in throwing out the old as we ring in the new. The technological advances of hypermedia do not necessarily forecast the death of the written word. Books are being repositioned in regard to this new medium and are constantly being used to analyze it.

Sequential art, or comics, is another older medium, but like hypermedia, comics are a hybrid medium, incorporating images and words along with their graphic layout to convey a story. This is a prime example of how different mediums can be blended together to give us a new medium. And like film, another older medium that borrows from drama and photography, the medium of sequential art serves as a historical illustration of what a hybrid medium has done and can do to tell a story.

Hypermedia is an interesting theoretical can of worms because it makes undeniably obvious a post-structuralist notion of reading (in which the reader plays a large and active role in the creation of meaning). This problematizes issues of authorship and citation which some find laudable while others find deplorable. Hypermedia allows for a fluid document full of images, QuickTime movies, text, sound effects and potentially endless links and paths for the user to follow. It is a prime example of the benefits and problems of technology for storytelling. and this dissertation would be negligent if it were not addressed and illustrated. It is the most contemporary and advanced hybrid medium, incorporating aspects from older media: texts, graphic design, film, music, drama, photography, sequential art, theatre, architecture, landscape, puzzles and games.

speculative fiction

All of the objects of study, while occurring in different mediums, share the genre of speculative fiction (and Myst and Riven also have a mystery element to them as well). Speculative fiction as a genre category contains several other genres: science fiction, fantasy, utopic and dystopic. Each of these genres speculates on potential worlds and our lives in them. Anthony Wolk discusses how speculative fiction pushes the envelope of our knowledge, focusing our attention on our boundaries (28). It is a genre of fiction concerned with imagining worlds beyond our present reality that just may be possible. A great example is Star Trek. We see Scotty beam up Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock which is, as of today, quite impossible. But the computers aboard the Enterprise presage the computers that have since been invented and are now being used around the world. Speculative fiction is about the potential of seeing imagination become reality, whether it is a scientific invention or a social change. Granted, fiction in general is full of imagination and possibility, but speculative fiction posits an alternative worldview that can reflect or refract with our reality. And it seems like a genre readymade for hypermedia, a medium that allows you into immersive simulated worlds. These worlds can be magical or mechanical, but they give us a "reality" just on the edge of our own. Myst has the labyrinths of D’Ni where writing is an art of world creation or connection. Sandman takes us into our dreams, and introduces us to the Endless, meta-mythological figures touching our world across eras and cultures. Ultima OnLine places the participant in the magical world of Britannia, filled with rogues, sorcerers and monsters galore. MitterNachtSpiel takes us to a midnight theatre to play with the moon and company. Speculative fiction opens up to the imagination, and allows us to see what may be possible in our world.

interactivity

The advent of the computer and digital media is most definitely not the beginning of interactive stories. In fact, I believe that there is always a level of interactivity with every medium, it just differs in terms of intensity required from the audience. A reader interacts with a book, and a "reader" interacts with a hypertextual story online, and we all interact with mediums in between. But prior to the computer, there have been a variety of overt attempts in various mediums to get the audience to interact with a story.

In fact, books have had some overt interactivity. Dickens published his works serially and constantly responded to audience desires in between chapters. And there have been many post-modern books that encourage readers to do as they will with the text. Then there are the "choose-your-own-adventure" books. These are books with branching narratives that allow the reader to choose which branch(es) they would like to follow as they read their way through the story.

Traditional oral storytelling often encourages the audience's participation. We have the classic call-and-response of gospel and blues music. And performance art is full of interactive stories, ranging from performances like Yoko Ono's piece, in which audience members came up and cut off her clothing, to plays, like The Mystery of Edwin Drood, where the audience votes on the endings. Comedic improv is another venue that gets immediate audience input and puts it into play. And we had the Happenings of the Sixties where the performance required interactive audience participation.

Films and television have also garnered audience interactions. Some small experimental films have had the audience vote its way through the story. There is the present day practice of focus group testing on films before they are released. So, these small audiences often effect how a film is re-edited before it is released to the public at large. And TV is always responding to ratings, so the most watched shows continue to tell their stories. The TV show, Mystery Science Theater 3000 (where 3 characters sat in front of a B-movie and threw out entertaining commentary on the films) has spawned live versions, like the Mr. Sinus Theater 3000, where 3 people with mikes get up and comment on movies in the theatre itself and encourage the audience to chime in as well. And then there is the Rocky Horror Picture Show phenomenon. Here, audiences show up in costumes fitting in with the movie's characters and often get up on stage and perform along with the movie as a group. And with digital technology, people are actually re-editing, and distributing, new adaptations of movies. Case in point, there is a "Phantom Edit" of the Star Wars movie, The Phantom Menace, that cuts out several scenes, and some say, improves on the original.

And games have always built on the premise that the user is interactively doing something with the story. This goes back to classic games like go and chess, where you are enacting an abstraction of war. It then begins to get more overt with role-playing games, like Dungeons and Dragons, in which the players become characters and go on adventures together. There are even some games where the point is to tell a story. Once Upon a Time is a card game in which you win by telling a coherent and entertaining story. Arcade games moved even further and began to give players computational interactivity within a story. And new, cutting edge, virtual reality theme rides are immersing us in wildly interactive environments and experiences.

The preceding examples show some of the attempts at interactive narratives. The computer, and the internet of interconnected computers, lean more heavily on the past interactive explorations of games and film, as opposed to performance. Even so, computational mediums have opened up new levels of digital interactivity. Levels in which the "reader" is always already the interactive protagonist and participatory co-author of the unfolding story. In the digital world, where a copy is exactly the same as the original and there is no there, there, we are truly only limited by the author's and reader's technical and conceptual imaginations. The stories come out of the interactive collaboration between authors and readers. The authors set up the dynamic and interactive foundations and the readers then take these stories to where no narratives have gone before.

methodologies

This study works on two levels.

Attention to the methods employed is required for both the analysis and illustration of the mediums.

A part of my methodologies will be the development of two forms together. There will be a primary fluid, dynamic and rhizomatic online hypermedia version, and then a secondary indexical and chaptered version. The second version is a discursive and linear artifact, an imprecise map of the primary rhizome of the web.

why the web

Or, in other words, why have I written the primary dissertation hypertextually? And why do I consider the textual version to be a secondary artifact of the first? The answer to these questions can be found, implicitly, through the experience of this hypertextual document. It is in between all the pages. It is the hypertextual, rhizomatic linkings that weave these pages together in a diversity of layers and simultaneously open it up to the almost infinite world wide web, where there is no there there. It is in the dynamic reading/writing experience, where readers have more overt control to "read" as they choose. And the writer can continually, and performatively, update the document. It is a living document in which the process allows the content to grow and change as long as it is attended to. It never has to be completed as long as I (and very possibly others) continue to add to it.

So, I could have attempted to write this as a standard dissertation, in textual format and due process as it were. But it would most certainly not be the same dissertation, and it may even be lesser for the difference. A dissertation is an epitome of academic logics and process; it is the scholarly creation of new knowledge, adding to an extant area of study. As such, the content of a dissertation needs to be new. Normally, this would be a unique look at a subject with possibly some new theories put into play. All this efficiently documented in a discursive, academic text.

This is a fine standard and I am not arguing for its end, but for the expansion of academic discourse into new processes. We already see this in academe, with Performance Studies opening up new modes of academic exploration and knowledge. Performance Studies has amply shown limits to textual discourse: it's static nature and distance between the world observed and the pages preserved. And Performance Studies exists within its own ephemeral limits, always already gone, and then we may have a video, but we always have a written document of the performance.

Hypertext combines some of the characteristics of text and peformance into a new and unique experience. Like text, hypertext is a document that can be referenced and reviewed time and again. Like performance, it is dynamic and ephemeral, allowing the user to literally experience something anew each and every time. And it also exists within its own limits. You are currently confined to experience a hypertextual web page while sitting in front of your computer. Granted, there are wireless applications and other exceptions, but for the time being, if you are reading this in it's primary form, you are sitting at your computer.

That said, I have chosen to create my primary dissertation hypertextually. I also attempted to map the hypertext to a secondary, textual version (old standards cast long shadows). It is my belief that the text is merely a static artifact of the dynamic hypertext. The secondary version lacks the active links; therefore, ideas and web pages that are hypertextually linked and just a click away from each other become distanced from each other in the linear form of a chaptered text. Like text and performance, I believe that hypertext is enabling new and unique modes of exploration and knowledge for academe to struggle within and benefit from. So, while the content of my dissertation is important, I truly believe that the form of it is important as well. I am interested in my objects of study and my exploration of narratives and mediums and the computer's emerging role in our storytelling. And in the end, hypertext is here, and we are just beginning to explore its capabilities and constraints.This dissertation is a descriptive analysis of my topic, and just as importantly, it is an illustration of what hypertext may be able to add to our knowledge.

analytical method

scholar

In discussing the narratives of Myst, Sandman,Ultima OnLine and MitterNachtSpiel I will utilize a schema of narrative composed of four characteristics: setting, character, theme and plot. These four characteristics are the building blocks of narrative. Together they combine to give us a story. To define narrative:

And to define the four building blocks:

My contention is that these four building blocks of narrative differ in degree in relation to each other across mediums. So, setting may be more prominent in one medium, while character is much more prevalent in another. What I propose to do is take the four and measure them in relation to each other within the three mediums used to relate my objects of study. While there will be a visible difference between how these four blocks fit together in the different mediums, it may have more to do with the authors and less to do with the mediums themselves.

Along with these foundational narrative blocks, I will use the ideas of Wayne Booth and Nelson Goodman to help me discuss the process of storytelling in different mediums. Booth sets out in The Rhetoric of Fiction to look at how literary stories apply certain rhetorical devices to help the reader through the story. These devices pull readers into and through the story by giving them clues and directions as to what is going on in the story. For Booth, these devices are "elements that are recognizable and separable, 'friends of the reader'" that exist within literature (106). So, he tries to make a distinction between the rhetoric of fiction and the fiction itself. And yet, he goes and blurs this distinction. For Booth, the trick is that when these elements, or rhetorical devices, are done well, it is extremely hard to tell whether they are rhetoric or content (105). The best rhetoric comes across as content, and vice-versa. Booth is focusing on the written word, but his ideas are quite useful when examining storytelling in other mediums as well. I will examine these mediums looking for the rhetorical devices employed in them to help the story along. Looking for the rhetoric in the fiction of a medium has helped me better see how a medium tells a story.

In Languages of Art, Goodman specifically looks at how symbolism differs across mediums. He discusses how each medium has its own systems of symbolism. These systems of symbols allow examination of each medium in its own right and also illustrate how it compares and converses with others. Goodman helps distinguish the discursive and non-discursive symbolism of texts and images and hypermedia. He also aids in the analysis of the blending of these symbol systems as seen in sequential art and hypermedia. Goodman has been a great help because of his interest in how various mediums have different systems of symbols. Goodman allows me to look at the various ways symbolism functions in the mediums addressed and employed in this study; texts, sequential art and hypermedia

In novels, the rhetoric of the fiction comes through a discursive system of symbols. Description, point of view and literary allusion are some of the many ways that language is rhetorically used to help construct literature. This may sound obvious, but words are the symbols used to tell the story. With sequential art, the system of symbols expands beyond words to include colors, shapes and layout. The rhetoric of the fiction now includes images. The words matter in comics, but so does the shading, the lines of sight, the color schemes and the actual layout of the page. Hypermedia combines even more mediums than sequential art and includes hypertextual interactivity as well. The system of symbols is an elegant web of sights, sounds and actions. Interface plays an important rhetorical function, for if one is to interact with the world and story, one needs to know how. Sounds and videos become a part of the rhetoric of the story, and the hypermedia world itself is a place and space to explore the story and become immersed in it.

Finally, during this analysis of the structure and process, I will be standing on the shoulders of the theorists discussed in the related literature section. They have struggled before me with various issues involved in regard to technology’s impact on the narratives in our lives. The stories they have explored and shared will help to illustrate this study.

illustrative method

performer

I will borrow the process and structure of the objects of study for this discussion. Myst, Sandman, Ultima OnLine, and MitterNachtSpiel, are hypermedia that incorporate different mediums and stories beautifully. I also want to incorporate these mediums so that the dissertation shows what it is extolling. Through this representation, I will not only be analyzing, but using the various mediums, theories and stories together I believe the best way to do this is to create a hypertextual dissertation.

For this illustrative performance, I have leaned heavily on those who have written and performed within multiple mediums. Like Kathleen Stewart in, A Space on the Side of the Road, I will incorporate multiple styles of textual discourse in order to better illustrate this study. Stewart uses multiple voices and points of view as well as academic writing, conversational transcripts, and almost theatrical scripting of scenes in order to better represent her ideas and descriptions. I plan to play with different styles of writing to tell a story about narrative.

While Stewart was playing within one medium, playing with the mixing of two mediums is an interesting way to see how each medium conveys meaning in a slightly different manner than another medium. In his article, "Realism of Low Resolution," Richard Shiff notes how a medium best gains a sense of its communicative possibilities in relation to, and interaction with, other mediums. So when I show multiple mediums in this study, we will be able to get a better sense of the communicative strengths and weaknesses of those mediums.

In the case of comics, or sequential art, we will see the dance between words and images. This dance is gleefully explored and utilized by Scott McCloud, Will Eisner and George Herriman. All three of these authors/artists are great guides and inspirations for my interests into sequential art. McCloud uses a medium to talk about itself. In Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics, he uses comics to explain comics. And Eisner’s two seminal books, Comics & Sequential Art and Graphic Storytelling, literally and figuratively illustrate how images and words combined in the format of a comic to tell a story like no other.

The comic and comical experiments of George Herriman are well documented in an edition edited by Patrick McDonnell. As McDonnell notes, "Herriman’s history is the history of the comic strip" (25). He helped define the medium from its infancy (25). The comic medium was "perfect for Herriman because he was equally adept at manipulating verbal and pictorial elements" (26). We get to see how Herriman used words, images, space and time to represent the wild world of Krazy Kat.

Displaying several mediums to tell my story brings up issues of graphic design and page layout. Envisioning Information, Visual Display Of Quantitative Information and Visual Explanations by Edward Tufte serve as a guide for page design. Tufte has been analyzing and performing how visual representations of information can help an audience to better understand the information being shared. With words and images playfully and thoughtfully placed together on the page, I hope to relate and illustrate this study.

The use of the word play is not casual. As Johan Huizinga notes in Homo Ludens, playing is one of our most significant functions (1). We communicate a range of our wants and needs, thoughts and feelings through playing with each other. And in terms of hypermedia storytelling, the play is the thing and the game is afoot. Hypermedia stories like Myst, Ultima OnLine and MitternachtSpiel have an obvious game element. They are stories that use play to entice the reader to engage. As Andrew Colman notes in, Game Theory and Experimental Games, games deal with the logic of making decisions in situations in which the outcomes rely on the decisions made (3). In hypermedia, the story needs a context in which the reader then has impetus to act, otherwise the story does not progress. By incorporating a game component into the experience, creators of hypermedia encourage people to play and get involved with the story as they try to solve the puzzle or win the game. In Myst, the context is one of a mystery story that will not be revealed unless you puzzle through it. In Ultima OnLine, you are a participant in a world where you can kill the bad guys, be a bad guy, win some treasure, and/or become a leader, etc. The story develops as you build up experiences and gain more abilities in its world. In MitterNachtSpiel, the play is not engaged until you join the moon and company. It's through your interactions that the midnight play begins, continues and ends. The game is a part of the story.

Games on computer have always had some form of narrative involved. Pong, one of the first electronic games was a simple version of ping pong; the rules were similar, and you kept the "ball" in the "court" (Bennahum, 15). Space Invaders had the aliens coming to destroy the planet, Pac-Man had a round icon with a mouth that constantly ran around in mazes eating up dots while being chased by ghosts, and Mario Bros. had Mario saving the Princess from the dragon. Then came Zork, if any game can be seen to have an influence on the story of Myst it is Zork. Like Myst, Zork puts players into a fantasy world where they must explore and play in order to puzzle through the story (Murray, 74). Unlike Myst, Zork is purely hypertextual, there are no images or sounds, only text. You typed in your actions, such as "pick up box," "go west," etc, and more text would describe the results of your actions. Both games have a strong story within which the reader plays.

Along with an integrated story and game, Myst, Ultima OnLine and MitternachtSpiel incorporate several mediums (text, graphics, music and aural ambiance, video and hypertext). Each has a context that gives the reader a reason to want to play with the story, and because of the computer, each author had to design an interface that enables the reader to engage the story with a minimum of mental effort. In The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman, discusses some fundamental principles of good design that is pertinent to the issues involved with interface design.

David Miles points out that a current aspect of hypermedia is that it leans on other mediums. In his article, "The CD-ROM Novel Myst and McLuhan's Fourth Law of Media: Myst and Its 'Retrievals,'" Miles looks at how Myst borrows heavily from older mediums, illustrating how these retrievals show the strengths and weaknesses of the mediums involved (4). By illustrating all of these mediums, I will be able to analyze them differently.

[repeat] This is an academic study and a narrative about stories and their mediums [1]. [4] If you choose, you can decipher the puzzle and connect the links; if not, you can read straight through [5]. [3] Links in and between the digital and analog are keyed through repeated symbols (colors, words, numbers, images, etc.) creating a rhizomatic web [4]. [2] Images, colors, words, numbers and links are used to code and layer this chapter [3]. [5] Either way, stories are related and experienced [end]. [1] You can experience the story and play with the ideas as you puzzle through the words and images [2].

Within this representation will be a threefold blending, a critical choreography and cartography of stories, theories and media. The multiple mediums will be complementarily combined, blending together text, sequential art and hypermedia. Also, various narratives will be incorporated within larger narratives allowing a juxtapositioning that opens up new perspectives on the stories. And a myriad of theories revolving around narrative will be put into play together to shed as much light as possible on the process and structure of narratives across media. This tripartite collage of media, stories and theories will allow us to better comprehend and represent the ways and means in which we try to understand the worlds in which we live through the stories we share with each other.

looking back (related literature)

There has been an ever-increasing scholarly interest in digital literature and it’s effects on the way stories are related and experienced. In reviewing related literature for this study, I have limited myself to texts that deal with how developing technologies are changing conceptions of storytelling. The following studies all deal with how we communicate and act within technological advances that change our narrative capabilities, often for the better, but sometimes for the worse. They are arranged in loose analog groupings from issues of digital narrative (%), to digital writing (*), to digital performing ($), to digital media (ß), to digital identity (°), and digital research ( ¬).

(%) Like this study, Janet H. Murray explores the future of narrative as it is developed and used in cyberspace. In her book Hamlet on the Holodeck, she looks at the digital medium of the computer and what it does for storytelling. The new aesthetics that develop with this medium and the new questions it raises for issues of authorship also interest her. In the end, she believes that this new medium is going to offer us the chance to experience new meanings through stories told and read in ways as never before.

Espen Aarseth looks at the history of ergodic literature in Cybertexts. For Aarseth, a cybertext is an ergodic, or open, dynamic, text that is mechanically organized (1). To better understand how the advent of the computer has shaped the developed of ergodic texts, he looks back at older dynamic texts, such as the I Ching (9). While this study looks at how the computer can be used with older mediums, Aarseth hopes to use our experiences of past open texts in older mediums to help us better shape cybertexts on the computer.

Richard Lanham writes about the place of literary studies in this digital revolution. In his book, The Electronic Book, he looks at the digital revolution and how it has spawned a host of digital art forms and artists working within this new medium. He is interested in the changing position of the ordinary book in our electronic lives. For the most part, Lanham sees a great potential in digital media, but both Lanham and I also see a lasting place for print media as well.

In The Noise of Culture, William Paulson also looks at the place of literary texts in the information age. Like Lanham, he is interested in the positive effects of this digital revolution, but he also worries about some potential problems. He fears that we may substitute understanding and knowledge with possession of information. Or in other words, we may begin to suffer from information overload, unable to process the overwhelming amounts of information we are bombarded with daily. Similarly to Lanham and to me, Paulson thinks that literary texts will continue to flourish. He believes that textual books will help bring organization to the surplus of information so that we can understand and learn from it.

J. Hillis Miller looks at narrative in this day and age in his book, Ariadne’s Thread. He is quite interested in how we interpret stories as they occur in different mediums, specifically the discursive manuscript and the electronic book. He looks at the similarities and differences of narrative in these two mediums. By focusing on issues of repetition, line, order and chaos, he shows how hypertext is developing its own way of telling stories. Unlike the above theorists and myself, Miller believes that the electronic book is going to replace the textual book.

(*) In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari entertain the idea of words that can be disseminated across a matrix, whether it be electronic or not. They write about the rhizome of language and they write rhizomatically. Words are roots stretching and gnarling, connected together by their meanings (5). The rhizome is this diverse root structure full of "bulbs and tubers" in which "any point . . . can be connected to anything other" (7). Hypertext makes obvious the rhizome of language. It is an organic structure of roots and branches curving and connecting together. Words are roots, links that send us off into the branches each time we click on them. The form of this study is rhizomatic as well; words, colors, fonts and images are links, recontextualizing different sections of the document to be together, just a click away, even if they are separated when printed out linearly on pages.

In Terminal Identity, Scott Bukatman directly explores the virtual subject that has arisen from the rhizome of the web and from science fiction pieces that speculate on the developments of cyberspace. In his discussion, he analyzes such contemporary science fiction works as William Gibson’s novel, Neuromancer, and the film Alien directed by Ridley Scott. Throughout he examines how our images of ourselves, of space, and our bodies have all been strongly influenced by the ability of computers to give them an identity in a virtual world. Bukatman believes this "terminal" influence has both separated and reconnected our minds and bodies. Both he and I are interested in how virtual personas help shape our narratives on the computer.

($) Brenda Laurel looks at how computers allow us to act in her book, Computers as Theatre. She sees the screen as a stage in which both writers and readers enact narratives through the medium of computers. The drama enacted within the computer screen is related to the dramas that have been enacted on the stage for years. The difference for Laurel is that the screen demands that writers script for the audience’s actions as well as those written in the piece. So, the actions that take place when a reader interacts with the hypermedia portion of this study will have to be scripted in order for the narrative to unfold.

(ß) A study of the process and structure of various mediums would be incomplete without mentioning the work of Marshall McLuhan. He is seen by many as the forerunner for the field of media studies, and in his many books and articles, including, Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man and The Medium is The Message, he fully explores what the medium itself means. Whether is be hot or cold media, McLuhan investigates how mediums shape the messages we try to send to each other. The message of this study is being shaped by each of the mediums employed, creating a different message than if only one medium was used.

(°) Donna J. Haraway looks at how we have constructed more than discovered our ideas of nature in her book Simians, Cyborgs and Women. With a strong feminist focus, she looks at how science has studied and fictionalized the reproductive nature of primates. Most famously, she declares that we are already cyborgs, beings that have both organic and technological aspects. Our hiking boots, our contact lenses, our down-filled coat and many other objects are all technological prosthetics that expand our capabilities. Hypermedia is a part of our cybridity. It changes our conception of narrative by allowing us to construct computer personas with which we act within stories. We can dream of how technology will improve our lives, but by looking at ourselves presently, we can see how technology has already helped construct our experiences.

In her book, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age Allucquère Rosanne Stone examines the ways in which developing technology is challenging our culture’s notion of identity, particularly along the lines of gender. The tension between the old and the new interests her. She looks at how new technology allows us to manipulate our gender identity more than ever before. Stone believes the combination of old techniques along with new technologies allows for amazingly positive, but also potentially regressive, realizations of what it means when we say who we are. While we gain the ability to create (or not) virtual personas of various genders who act within stories, we also lose some of the distinctions of meaning found within a story with an author and a reader.

( ¬) Bruno Latour focuses on the dreams and attempted realizations of technological development in Aramis, or the Love of Technology. In a book written from multiple points of view, he examines the story of Aramis, a guided transportation system that almost became a functioning part of Paris but in the end failed for a variety of reasons. Latour is interested in these various reasons and why technology and its development needs political and monetary support in order to become realities beyond the drawing board. In the end, he illustrates the complicated and intimate relationship between humans and their technologies. While Latour illustrates the narrative of technological development, this study will illustrate the technological development of narrative.

My proposed study has a slightly different focus than the theorists discussed above. Like Murray, Aarseth, Lanham, Paulson and Miller, I am interested in the effect hypermedia is having on narrative. The difference between them and me is that they all focus on how narrative is developing in this new medium as compared to other, older mediums (text, film, etc.). I am also interested in this, but with the goal of using hypermedia along with other mediums to tell a story. Unlike the other works, this study is not solely a textual discourse on the subject of hypermedia and narrative. It is a scholarly document that examines and illustrates in various mediums in order for narrative to be related and experienced in a different way.

Deleuze and Guattari, Bukatman, Laurel and McLuhan explore different aspects of digital narrative that help to sharpen the focus of this study. Like Deleuze and Guattari I am trying to write rhizomatically. They do so to explore the rhizome of language, while I am looking at connecting a narrative across mediums. Bukatman looks at both what we have done with personas on the computer and what speculative fiction authors have posited we could do. I believe the formation of a persona helps to give readers a place within a hypermedia narrative where they can begin to act and explore the story. Like Laurel, I believe that a digital narrative gives readers a space within which they can act from the place of their personae. And since this study is not only expressed digitally, but textually and visually as well, McLuhan’s explanations on the way mediums are related to each other and how they shape messages help me connect and use the various mediums involved in this study.

Haraway, Stone and Latour all narrate how technological advances change our activities and abilities and give me examples of how to illustrate these changes. Haraway and Stone both look at how changes in technology can have positive and negative effects on how we see ourselves. Hypermedia does open up new and different ways to tell stories, but it is not the end-all be-all of narrative. There are many older mediums through which we relate and experience stories and that have had hypertextual characteristics long before the computer. This study is going to be a hypertextual connection between old and new mediums. Latour illustrates the process of how technologies develop and become ubiquitous parts of our lives. For better and worse, the nature of narrative is changing on the computer. By analyzing and performing within old and new mediums, I will show how narrative is changing even if the story remains the same.

This study is looking at the tension between the old and the new as seen in the narrative structure and process of different mediums. I am analyzing and illustrating how we tell each other stories through new and old mediums, and the combinations of them. I believe a choreography of old narrative techniques along with new technologies allows for amazingly positive, but also potentially regressive, realizations in the nature of what a story is and can be.

organization(s)

illustrating

analyzing

chapter 1: introduction

chapter 2: the written word: the Myst novels

chapter 3: sequential art: the Myst Comic and the Sandman series

chapter 4: hyper media: Myst and Riven CD-ROMs, Ultima OnLine and MitterNachtSpiel

chapter 5: conclusion

chapter 2 ->