Now, one thing I need to bring up again is the different possibilities between a CD-ROM and an internet-based experience. With a CD-ROM you have an experience that is delivered on a disc. This disc is a read-only copy, so once you get the game, that is the game you have. While the experience is dynamic and interactive, the assets (graphics, programming, etc) are not. They stay the same. The internet is a completely different world. The game is something in which you log on to another server (computers that stay online constantly) to experience the game simultaneously with thousands of others. The assets exist in a forum where they can be seamlessly (or not so seamlessly) updated as often as you want. So, the game could chance radically; it could look different, have new features, new stories, new everything and the people can come and go as well. And people do sell their characters and online possessions. These people are making money on their work. There can be a financial reward for the reader/author in this interactive internet world. The stories are truly shaped and experienced by the players themselves.

Looking back over the story grand of Myst, it seems that the idea of a story being developed from the outset to take place in multiple mediums is theoretically more interesting than practically feasible. Myst happened across time as the success of the original game fueled a multimedia barrage to tie into the initial success. This story grand shows some of the potential problems for spreading a story across mediums. Just like it is different for the reader across each medium, it is different for the author in, and of, each medium. Each medium makes its unique demands on the creator, and you need good form and content specific to that medium in order to tell a good story.

The specialization required of one medium is hard enough to come by, and in trying to combine, you lose the specialization as you spread across mediums. The Miller brothers made two amazing CD-ROM narrative games. They were groundbreaking in their time. Their novels, on the other hand, were just standard fantasy fare and the comic book was B-rate. So, their specialization shows in the area of expertise and the quality of the story grand ebbs and flows around their expertise. Currently, companies and individuals are set up to focus around one medium, so when there is a stab into a new medium, it is a secondary enterprise and the quality shows.

That said, I can see how large corporations, like AOL Time Warner or Disney, could put together a story grand across mediums through the licensing of characters and situations within their own holdings (movies, publishing books, internet, etc.). This would allow them to get talented artists within each medium to create that part of the story grand. But the creative genesis of the story usually comes in one medium with an original author, and the subsequent mediums end up lesser in quality as the creative vision is splintered, or the licensing could go to a lesser talent in another medium.

One possibility comes from the creative design and development world in which you have a creative producer who works along with the experts of various mediums. This producer would be in charge of the overall creative connectivity between mediums, helping stitch between the mediums. But to even make this worthwhile, the story grand would have to be good enough to make it worth the while, and this seems quite rare.

Mostly you see adaptations. For instance, Disney's movie the Lion King, which was adapted and directed by Julie Taymor into an award-winning Broadway show, and had a couple of video games released as tie ins. But all of these versions are telling the same essential story, just in a different medium. And often in these adaptations, you see the quality drop (How many times have you heard that the movie isn't as good as the book?). With this multimedia barrag,e where it is basically impossible for someone to have expertise in every medium, we may actually see a strengthening in the individual mediums as authors and artists focus on their expertise and return to specializing and mastering their medium of choice.

In turning this lens on myself, I have to wonder: readers can simply and solely read the secondary textual version of the dissertation and completely skip the primary hypertextual multimedia version. So, they will miss out on the associative linkings and logics as well as the dynamic and fluid connectivity of the internet and the ability to see images and movies playing together with the text. But would they miss out on the kernel of my dissertation? In this instance, I believe they will. Even though academe is still so focused on textual discourse, and an argument can be so well made with words, the medium of hypertext does allow for a new and different type of knowledge production and reception. The pervasive simulated worlds that computer enhanced narratives allow us to partake of are opening up a world where readers can be as interactive or as passive as they would like, exploring the worlds and stories as they wish. And the ability to argue, teach and learn within these stories is ours to choose.