chapter 4

hyper media

The immersive environment of Myst came out in 1994 and was a smashing success in the computer game world. It currently is the all-time best-selling CD-ROM game. In addition, many people have noted that it opened up a new type of storytelling. As Jon Carroll notes, Myst was the "first interactive artifact to suggest that a new art form may well be plausible, a kind of puzzle box inside a novel inside a painting -- only with music. Or something" ("Guerillas," 1). A fun and frustrating aspect of Myst is that it is the intertwining of a story and a game. To experience the story you have to play the game - the two go hand in hand. For those who want to treat Myst solely as a multimedia novel of sorts, the puzzle traits of the piece may get in the way and keep the reader from reading. And if you want to treat it as a game and only a game, the story can distract the player from the puzzles, keeping the player from zipping through and winning the game.

The narrative continues beyond the first CD-ROM into three novels, released in 1995, 1996 and 1997 and a comic book released in 1997. Interestingly, the novels have sold fairly well and have had both hardcover and paperback printings. The comic book, on the other hand, was to be a four part mini-series, although presently only the first one was published and there seems to be little possibility of seeing the other three anytime soon, if ever (more on this later). The biggest impetus for reading the novels and comic book would be if the reader found the story that started in the CD-ROM appealing enough. The novels and comic book flesh out, and give you a bigger context of, the storyline from the Myst CD-ROM. After reading them, you can then turn to Riven, which was released late in fall of 1997, and engage the story grand yet again.

The story grand, which arcs through these mediums, was originally inspired by Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island. Like the protagonists in Verne’s novel, the reader/player of Myst is stranded on an island that is full of haunting enchantments just waiting to be discovered. Myst does something in a very different and interesting way though. Ideally, while reading Mysterious Island, the reader is swept into this fantastic world of adventure, piggybacking on the shoulders of the protagonists as they discover the wonders of the island. Myst pays homage to the power of books to suck you into their worlds by framing the worlds you explore within books themselves. In fact, the storyline reveals that the worlds you are walking around in have been created by someone through a special form of writing. The act of writing is treated as an act of creation in this story. You place your hand on the book page and you are literally in the world of the book, fully experiencing it.

This homage to another medium also shows a weakness of Myst. It borrows heavily on the mediums of literature, graphic design and film. The creators have yet to discover how to use the medium to its best advantage. As David Miles notes, Myst is in accordance with Marshall McLuhan's fourth law of media: the initial development of a new medium will retrieve forms from prior mediums (4). So, the creators of Myst are retrieving conventions and forms from literature, film and graphic design, and combining them together within this new hypermedia CD-ROM. Eventually, the medium’s unique nature will be developed, but for now we are going to see retrievals resonating through the CD-ROMs. Myst emerges form this awkward and exciting stage of the development of hypermedia.

This new medium of hypermedia does create new possibilities for storytelling. As George Landow notes, hypertext is composed of words, images and sounds linked by multiple paths in an open-ended perpetually unfinished form (3). The "reader" is allowed to explore the range of possibilities within the narrative of Myst (there are several endings to both Myst and Riven). I believe this overt multiplicity brings a new aura to a piece of art. The "reader's" experience has a presence in time and space. It is your reading that opens the meaning of the story. You puzzle it out as quickly or as carefully as you can or wish. While there may be millions of copies of Myst out there, your reading has a unique sense of time and space to it. You have to puzzle it out your way, which may be by buying a book that gives you clues to the puzzles, or talking to friends about how they are "playing" through the story, or going on-line for hints and cheats, or working it out solely by yourself. Granted this aura is not a fixed one as Benjamin meant. Instead, it is a performative one that occurs and resonates with the "reader's" experience and exploration of the story.

The term, "immersive environment," is how some people are presently describing the worlds of the CD-ROM medium of Myst and Riven (Carroll, "(D)Riven," 3). These immersive environments are being talked about as being beyond a game and a novel. They are worlds in which a reader can, and is supposed to, get lost. To enter into these worlds, you need a computer with the capabilities to run the color graphics, video and sound of the immersive environment. It is recommended that you enter these immersive environments in a darkened room (so the graphics are at their best clarity) and to have a set of stereo speakers to take full advantage of the surround sound effects of the piece. So, if you hear a sound from your left speaker, that means that there is something over to the left of the screen shot at which you are currently looking.

The experience of exploring these immersive environments can be described in a variety of ways. First, there are the two levels of experience. In meat space, you are more than likely sitting at your desk (in the dark remember) with your computer on. You are looking at the various "places" the three dimensional graphics are representing for you while music and ambient noises are playing from your speakers. You are pointing and clicking with your mouse (which guides a little hand about the "scene" you are viewing) to go to adjoining "places", or to manipulate an object, or to look more closely at something else within the scene. One strategy is to point and click as much as possible all over the screen to see what does and/or does not happen (this is a trick of one who is starting to become frustrated by the lack of progress in the story, or just simply wants to solve the puzzles and win the game).

The above is a fairly accurate description of how you look while you're "in" this world. To be fair, I need to describe the other level of the experience; succinctly put, you actually feel like you are in the world. Oh sure, you can self-reflexively realize that you are just sitting at your desk, but you definitely respond to what you see and hear in this world. You dissolve from the level of pointing and clicking, looking at your screen and listening to your speakers. You begin to walk through the woods, listening to a gentle breeze rustle through the forest, and the distant sound of water lapping on a not too far off shore. You hear a noise off to your left. Startled, you quickly turn and see a slightly creepy brick building with stairs leading down into the dark. Bravely, you start down the stairs. There are a few stark lights above, but you walk from shadow to shadow. The pipes creak and groan around you. Water drips. Just the kind of place that a person might run into something you would rather not. You hastily beat a retreat back up and out into the woods. Freed from the claustrophobic dungeon you bask in the wind and sunshine.

That is what it can feel like in these immersive environments, even though you've just been sitting at your desk in the dark. Granted, books whisk you away to the worlds they describe, but in these immersive environments, you are not only the reader, but the protagonist as well. The actions of the story are not just having an effect on the characters, they have an effect on you. You don’t die in Myst, but you can get trapped forever (in a lot of games, you can die in a lot of ways). If you're a gamer, this just means you've lost; you start over from your last saving point (in these environments, there are no pages to place a bookmark, so you save your progress as you go). If you're into the story, you’re stuck, so the story has had a rather unfortunate ending. You can try again for a more satisfying ending though. And you can get stumped by the puzzles, so that the story/game is no longer progressing. You have to figure the mysterious story out within the world itself (like Sherlock Holmes) or you get a little outside help (from a clue or hint book, or web pages with clues or cheats, or a friend who has already experienced the story of this environment). As in the old game of tag, in this immersive environment, you are it.

This mysterious story of Myst illustrates the characteristics of Deleuze's paradox of pure becoming. The meaning is fixed, but it is open. You get a sense of the potentially "infinite identity of both directions and sense at the same time" (2). The audience gets "two much and not enough"(2). The medium allows for a multitude of possibilities, but it makes it hard to construct a narrative that can evoke responses. Instead, the "readers" develops the story as they go. But the various possibilities can leave some gaps in the narrative since it is hard for a creator to second-guess every possible action that audience may want to take.

So, you fill in the storyline as you figure out the mystery. Hayden White notes that a general characteristic of narrative is to fill in the gaps and discontinuities of events (9). This is a weakness of hypertext - gaps abound, disrupting the story. Even the creators of Myst admit that its story does not make sense at times (Carroll, "(D)Riven," 2). Another characteristic of narrative is the desire for a conclusion. Myst and Riven have several endings, but as Landow points out, hypertext can be "perpetually unfinished" (3). Even so, for readers to follow the story, they are expecting an end point of some sort (110). There are several ways to deal with this. One, hypertext as on the web, can be left infinitely, rhizomatically open. Two, there can be several endings. Three, the narrative can be multilinear in that your actions from the beginning of interaction with the narrative to the end all have consequences on how the story will end.

The second option is the easy way out. The creators simply have a losing and winning ending to the game. The first option is the most pure realization of a post-structural theory of reading that grows (and regresses) infinitely. The third is the most interesting, and is the one used partially in Myst and more fully in Riven. With this option, the creator constructs a variety of narrative paths that are braided together, crossing, diverging and influencing all the other paths. Thus, the "reader's" choices are prescribed, but each choice helps to build the narrative towards a conclusion(s). In this way, the "player" is not hurt by missing a clue. The story still progresses, just in a different path. Through your choices, you can travel on a variety of the paths and puzzle out the story. So, in reality, one reading can be different than another, and you can get to an end without having "read" all of the story.

The potential for many varied "readings" of this hypertextual medium can be seen as performative in that each reading is different from any other. Peggy Phelan notes that a performance cannot be reproduced; it can be repeated, but then it is a different production (Unmarked 146). So, each reading of Myst is not a reproduction of another reading. Instead, it is a re-experiencing of the storyline. The performative nature of this computer-bound medium 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). The "readers" are performers within the hypertextual narrative, shaping the actions and outcomes by the choices they make. You perform the story by participating in the narrative, puzzling and playing through the process. As Johan Huizinga notes in Homo Ludens, playing is one of our most significant functions (1). And it is playful in the Derridean sense that you are performing within a "'coded' or iterable" context (that of the creator's constraints on your choices) (Margins …, 326). So, while you are playing and may do something different from one time to the next within the story, it is also within an iterable context.

So, the immersive environment of Myst is a hypertextual one in which you point and click at various spots on the screen that may, or may not, take you to another screen shot in which you can point and click your way through onto the next one. What is interesting about the hypertextuality of Myst is the context helps to hide the links and smooth out your experience much more than in a web page. For the most part, when you are on the web you see a page of highlighted words and images and you click, and then you see another page with words and images. It has the feel of sifting through a card catalog; you are seeing a lot of information that is connected by the links.

In Myst, the graphics, music and ambient sound are there to help you suspend your disbelief and go into the world. You don’t "see" the links. Instead, you see a stairway, you point and click on the stairway and you start climbing up the stairway. The world of Myst holds together on a literal level, because the creators are trying to offer you the best opportunity to immerse yourself in this world. With hypertext, they could have made each link a visual and aural non sequitur, each click taking you somewhere that has no direct visual or aural relation to the preceding screen shot. This would be quite jarring and confusing, making it much harder to immerse yourself. So, the world of Myst behaves in a physical way: gravity works, you walk around, you do not jump off and fly away, you do not walk through walls, etc.

This illusion is sometimes broken apart by the urge to go somewhere on the screen and have your clicks garner no response. The creators have made a finite world, even with all of their attention to detail and trying to give you the best immersive environment, there are invisible walls. You may want to jump into the water, but since the storyline does not progress that way, you aren’t able to do so. Nothing happens. You may want to be able to explore everywhere and everything you see, but there are borders and edges to this world. Obversely, the minute details can sometimes disable the illusion they are meant to uphold. You can look up and see a chandelier hanging from the ceiling, and you want to go up there and you can’t. It really has nothing to do with the story, but it is a detail meant to flesh out the environment. Instead, it can lead you to think of your immersion abstractly. Why does the world have to be so literal? Why can’t you walk through walls, or climb up the hill instead of the stairs? Why can’t you go in any direction and have there be no visible end? Why can’t you click anywhere on the screen and have something happen? The borders and details are what allow you to immerse yourself in this world and also get frustrated by it.

As a "reader" of Myst, you are constantly made aware of the hypertext medium on another level as well. The story does not progress unless you can puzzle through it. Parts of the story do not make sense, and the only way to make full sense of them is to read the books. As Richard Shiff has written, "The meanings of the mediums evolve as a result of their interactions" with other mediums(8). Myst may not be a good example of the "realism of low resolution," but the meaning of the story does come out of the association and interaction of the three mediums. To experience the story grand of Myst, the audience needs to engage each medium.

The juxtaposition of the mediums (hypertext, novel and comic) through the story grand helps to show the strengths and weaknesses of a hypertext, multimedia CD-ROM. In Myst and Riven, the creators tried to use narrative to create the illusion of free will for the "reader" (Carroll, "(D)Riven," 2). But then it was hard to mix the story of the reader and the story of the narrative. In hypertext, it's hard to tell a story. The non-linearity of the CD-ROM makes it difficult for the creators to actually build a narrative that can evoke emotional responses (Carroll, "(D)Riven," 4). Too much of a structuring narrative would limit the possibilities. Instead, the novels serve as a way to structure the narrative that the interactive, hypertext CD-ROMs do not allow. The strength of the CD-ROM is also its weakness. Having readers be such an integral part of the story makes it hard to dictate their interactions with the piece. So, the story has to be left open and fluid, instead of fixed and directed. It is a new way of "writing" and "reading" to be sure.

Indeed, the hypertextual form of the Myst and Riven CD-ROMs makes manifest a post-structural theory of reading in which the reader is just as active a creator in the meaning of the text as the author. As a reader of hypertext, you get to choose which way you want to go in the narrative, but those choices are constrained and determined by the author. So, it is not limitless interactivity with no structure whatsoever. But it does reposition the point of view of the narration to the reader/player. If not the narrator, the reader/player is the driving force behind the story's progression.

A fair question to ask of this manifestation of a theory is this: Is it better or worse that we can now do and experience the reading process as described by post-structural theories? Or in other words, what's the point of realizing a theory? The point is less about whether it is better or worse, and more about how to better utilize the medium of hypertext. It becomes an issue of the quality of the content. So, while Myst is no great masterpiece of literature or art, it is one of the best representatives of this new medium. The goal should be to keep exploring how to improve the content of this new medium so that one day we will have a masterpiece of hypertext comparable to those in literature and art.

It should be noted that this realization of a post-structural theory of reading is not the final nail in the coffin of the author. Instead, the role of the author has been repositioned. The author is now a director, writer, painter, choreographer, curator, artist, programmer and designer all at once. On top of the mixing of multiple mediums, the creator has to script for multiple and open possibilities that hypertext allows so that the reader will have more choices and become more implicated in the narrative and more immersed in the environment.

So, to begin the game and start experiencing the story and environment, you boot up your CD-ROM and click on the Myst icon. You see the logos of the various companies who helped put this CD-ROM together (quite like the credits of a movie). You then see an animation of a man falling down towards you from the lip of a crevasse. The figure disappears, but a book continues falling down into the darkness. As it falls, credits continue to roll and a disembodied voice intones:

As the voice-over ends the book lands and you can pick it up. You are at the beginning of this new chapter; the Myst book has fallen into your hands. You open the book and see a picture of an island. If you point and click with your mouse/hand on the picture in the book, the screen fades out with a zooming noise. The screen fades back in and you are standing in the picture. You are on the island. Standing on a dock by the waters' edge, the narrative has begun anew.

From this meager introduction the reader/player is left to puzzle through the story. Essentially, it is a mystery. You are trying to figure out what has happened to Atrus and Catherine and their two sons, Sirrus and Achenar. As the reader, you are the sleuth in and of the tale. You are an active participant, navigating the hypertextual links, or better yet, walking around the island, exploring. The story does not progress until you have figured out the next puzzle as you puzzle together the story. The story only comes from your pointing and clicking your way through the haunting worlds into which you have fallen.

The tense of this narrative is twofold. There is the immediate story of you, the reader/player, trying to solve the game, and there is Atrus' story that occurred in the recent past and that you are presently working your way through. You spend the vast majority of your time walking around empty, haunting rooms and landscapes. You see and hear atmospheric phenomena, but you spend most of your time alone, trying to "solve" the story. The point of view is quite interesting because, in a sense, narrator and audience collapse into one. Or to be more specific, you are the main character of the current discovery of the past story narrated by Atrus and sons. The storyline does not advance unless you figure things out. Unlike a book, where to get to the end you just keep reading, the "game" of Myst can only progress if you start solving the puzzle. You, the reader, are the impetus behind the narration.

After working your way through the story and "winning" the game (there are three or four possible endings depending on the player's decisions), the narrative experience shifts from the hypertextual interactivity of Myst to the linear experience of the three Myst novels and then the Myst comic book.

The story grand does return to hypertextuality again in Riven. Readers are now a players again, participants in the narrative, puzzling through the story as they point and click around the new worlds. A new twist to the medium is added though. In Myst, you basically spent your whole time alone, searching for what has happened. In Riven, there are characters who you can talk to and ask questions, and they will answer you, some truthfully, some not. The puzzle aspect is even more integrated into the story. You decide whether to believe a character based on your knowledge of the story so far. So, puzzling through the story is even more a part of the immersive experience. Once again, you are an active part in the development of the story. The narrative is waiting for you to figure it out.

The experience of the story grand of Myst is a hypertextual one in itself. It consists of the immersive environments of the CD-ROMs and the linear story in the novels and comic book. As a reader of these mediums, you make the links between each of these storylines and narratives. Reading the novels and comic book and engaging with the CD-ROMs is how you experience the story grand of Myst. The narrative is associated between the mediums. What hypertext lacks is made up for in the novels. A fair critique of this phenomenon is that a quality story should be able to exist on its own in whatever medium. Presently, no one working in hypertext and multimedia has developed a masterpiece comparable to those in literature and art. But, the medium is still in its infancy and is still retrieving from older mediums. Given time, a masterpiece may be developed that fully utilizes the unique capabilities of hypertext and multimedia and does not have to rely on supplementary novels and comics. The question is whether or not people will keep trying in this new medium, which realizes the audience's role in creating a story, or will they find that to realize a theory of reading is too self-recursive to be of much use or interest. Time and experience will tell that story.

I still find it useful to look at how a narrative can develop across mediums. The story grand that is related in Myst could not have occurred in one medium. You would lose the unique qualities of the combination of the mediums if you used only one. The novels gave you linear structure for storytelling. The comic book illustrated a world for you. The CD-ROMs put you in the story itself, puzzling through the narrative. Combining the narrative across these mediums gives you a story in which you are not only a reader, but a "co-author, theater goer, movie goer, museum visitor and player, all at the same time" (Miles 4).

Ultima Online (UO) is a role-playing game that takes place in the fictional world of Britannia, an immersive online environment. This narrative takes place not on a CD-ROM, but over the internet and it illustrates some dynamic facets of hypermedia not seen in CD-ROM. It is an immense fantasy world with monsters, animals, people and more. Nightly, thousands of players log on to inhabit this world and go on adventrues and quests as mages, healers, fighters and rogues. There are multiple parallel UO servers offering up identical copies of Britannia. Each server can hold up to 2,500 simultaneous players and there can be as many as 15,000 people logged on at once.

In terms of size, UO is one of the largest on-line gaming world (the closest is Everquest by Sony). Britannia is a massive environment with more than 32,000 different screens. Within these screens there are cities, dungeons, shrines, and lots and lots of wilderness. Unlike Myst and Riven, which are static CD-ROM worlds, Britannia is a persistent, evolving world. You develop your character over time and you can make yourself a home that stays within the world

.

Britannia is not as graphically lush as Myst or Riven, but the 2-D isometric images are of high quality. As Amy Jo Kim notes:

And on top of all of this, Britannia is a very interactive place. You can build yourself a house, talk with other people, sell goods, train animals, steal, eat food, etc. "There are 27 different types of animals, and 30 types of monsters - and each of these automated creatures has an appropriate set of (beautifully animated) behaviors for reacting to events" (Kim, "Ultima Online"). But as Kim points out, "it’s the power of 'interactivity in context' that makes UO feel so alive" ("Ultima Online"). When you do something in Britannia, the environment responds within its conceptual framework. For instance, if you train a bear but you don't feed him, he might start ignoring you and go looking for food; but he may not be able to find food if the woods have been over hunted by other players (Kim, "Ultima Online").

Another interesting aspect of the interactivity within Britannia has to do with the persistence of the world itself. So, repeated visits are rewarded because as you play and progress, your character gains more abilities and skills and new parts of the word open up for you with these new abilities. And you get to mark your progress through your clothes and accessories. You start off without any clothes, but as you go, you get to be more and more visually impressive and the variations are staggering - you really get to personally tailor your look. So, your progress is displayed for all to see and gives a graphic representation of seniority. Along with skills and clothing, you also gain cash. So, as you play, you learn how to make (or steal) money within Britannia, which allows you to buy things (supplies, houses, clothing). And as you play and get better and richer, you develop a reputation for all to see in where you live and what you wear.

And this environment has inspired community behaviors. Many player care about the social and political climate of Britannia and they take action to try to improve the climate. "A nascent civil government is emerging, and some citizens are organizing themselves into groups that have goals, values and a clearly articulated moral stance" (Kim, "Ultima Online"). But not everybody gets involved on a virtual civic level. There are many players who just want an RPG (role playing game). Others just want to go on hunts, killing other players. Others just want to form online friendships within this environment. It is a testament to UO’s flexible and open-ended environment that all of these perspectives can find a home within Britannia.

This diverse nature makes Britannia an addictive and frustrating place. Kim notes that, "on the one hand, it’s a game -- with rules to learn, roles to play and status to track. On the other hand, it’s a virtual world -- with complex social, economic and ecological systems that affect the gaming experience of each and every player" (Kim, "Ultima Online"). So, when lots of different people enter this world, "they’ll inevitably find the stress fractures in the complex, interlocking systems -- which will force the game designers to patch the systems and rewrite the rules" ("Ultima Online").

This is part and parcel of an ever-evolving online environment, but Garriot and the UO team made some mistakes. For example, in the interest of "realism," the in-game communication facilities in UO are badly crippled" (Kim, "Ultima Online"). So, most of the players use ICQ (an application that enables instant messaging) to communicate with each other outside of the game environment (but this allows them to talk while logged onto Britannia). But a particularly social issue that the Britannia community has had to address is player-killing (and violence in general).

Interestingly, the community has dealt with player-killing by grouping together into Guilds. And Kim believes that the Guilds are what "Britannian culture, and perhaps on-line culture in general, is really all about" (Kim, "Ultima Online"). "Ultima Online offers many features that facilitate Guilds and Clans, such as being able to dress alike, develop synergistic team-oriented skills and pool resources to purchase and furnish a shared Guild House" ("Ultima Online"). In fact, players liked the Guilds so much, that UO added more features to the game to encourage and facilitate Guilds and their activities. And Kim notes that, "what’s fascinating and important about these bottom-up, self-organizing, member-created groups is what people are learning about how to build and manage an effective distributed team. To form a Guild in UO, people who are geographically scattered must come together, organize themselves, define their shared values and goals and decide how to best move forward to achieve those goals" ("Ultima Online").

Kim illustrates how, "Ultima Online gives us a tantalizing glimpse of how cyberspace could be. It’s the largest, most complex and most ambitious virtual world yet" ("Ultima Online"). She states that:

this highly responsive, ever evolving game is triggering that age-old impulse to bond together into groups. You could look at UO, and similar game worlds, as on-line training environments for team-building, places where small, synergistic, geographically-distant teams are learning how to work together effectively and develop the leadership and role-playing skills that are necessary for surviving in an increasingly networked world. As more and more people inhabit cyberspace, multiplayer game worlds like Ultima Online will proliferate -- because they offer experiences that people are hungry for, and because their responsive and open-ended nature leverages the basic power and potential of the Internet as a real-time interactive medium ("Ultima Online").

 

 

 

 

MitterNachtSpiel is another CD-ROM based multimedia experience, but unlike Myst, Riven and Ultima Online, it is a sensuous, free-associative work of multimedic art. It is a wondrous adventure that beckons you to explore the sights and sounds and play at midnight with the moon and a cast of bizarre characters created by Kveta Pacovksa in a children's book of the same name. But she takes from the book and makes an interactive work of art. The story is given a framework on the packaging (there are no words spoken or written throughout the multimedia experience): "The theater at night is dark and quiet. The actors are all sound asleep until midnight, when the moon rises above the theater. As if to say, 'Is anyone down there?' the moon looks down at the theater. As moonlight beams upon the stage, one by one, the actors awake to perform all kinds of fun music, movements and tricks." As J.C. Herz notes, "As in a ballet, namely "The Nutcracker," the story [of MitterNachtSpiel] is merely a premise for the visual and musical delight that follow" (Herz, "Making Art...").Essentially, MitterNachtSpiel is a performative interactive piece. Nothing happens without your playing with the piece. Once you do you dance through sights and sounds and romp with characters through and in a variety of interconnected and recursive scenes. Herz believes it illustrates the qualities of drawing and painting. She notes one scene where you pull colors across the screen and:

because of the split-second delay, and the way the color overlays itself with a subtle shadow, it's more like drawing with oil pastels than with a computer paint program. The color doesn't feel as though it's made of pure light. It feels as though it's made of something soft, unctuous, thick and blendable. On this digital canvas, there is a pleasure in the gesture of painting, in the illusion of texture, that makes the experience into an abstract expressionist exercise whose fluid quality is enhanced by a trance-inducing drum-and-woodwind soundtrack ("Making Art...").

The tactile experience builds as you click into other scenes. There is one where you shuffle through torn pieces of paper and hear the ruffle of paper as you slowly uncover a bell-ringing clown. Often you can change scenes from within a scene itself, as you expand or contract into the images and into another scene. And "as you move among these images, their relationships deepen" (Herz, "Making Art..."). You find out that you've just had a playful moment on the leg of a clown, who there in turn turns into a world full of round colorful balls that melt into the body of a dragon. Throughout, thematic music connects with each character, so you come to recognize where (or who) you are by the music playing. In fact, there is one squiggly scene that plays all the music for you and you find yourself recalling all the connected images in the lines. There are several connecting scenes that take you to several places. One with six colored squares gives us more texture again. Each square has the "sound of a different art medium (charcoal, chalk or squeaky markers, paper being crumpled) and leads to another full-screen composition" ("Making Art...").

The recursive imagery and sounds are stitched together by the subtle transitions between scenes. You get to see the scenes become the leg of a clown. "By illustrating the links between paintings, they knit the work together into a visual riddle -- a fractal jigsaw where the pieces fit together in multiple ways, adjacent to one another but also inside one another. One painting suggests a path through several others" (Herz, "Making Art..."). So, once you've begun to see the connections, the next time you return to a familiar scene, it's virtually impossible not to view it anew because of the connections made. And as you begin to understand the connections, you get to play more knowledgeable within the scenes, taking paths you've been down before or looking for something anew. "And the links are so multidimensional and nonlinear that understanding them becomes a delight in itself. Taken as a whole, the work is an exercise in nonsense logic worthy of Lewis Carroll" ("Making Art...").As Herz notes, MitterNachtSpiel, "speaks to the possibilities of digital media" ("Making Art..."). These interwoven sounds and images unwind into diverse links and connections, rendering us an interactive universe in which to play and make a story as we go. And the sounds and images are connected in ways words cannot easily be. "Verbal stories dissipate as they branch because they are progressive - the only way to learn more is to go forward. Visual stories deepen as they branch because they are recursive - you can understand something new by going back" and looking anew ("Making Art..."). The world created is one that spins around with you as you return through it and spin your own midnight play.

In looking at the narrative aspects of the four different computer examples we shall see how diverse computer-mediated narratives can be. Let me note that the narrative elements of all of these hypermedia experiences have more to do with the authors' choices within this medium and less to do with the medium itself. In Myst and Riven, we are in richly detailed worlds, alone for the most part, exploring and looking for clues and hints that reveal more of the story and allow us further into the game. Myst and Riven thrive in setting. The worlds and the atmosphere created within these worlds is paramount. Next comes theme, an implicit need to carefully explore these worlds. And finally character and plot come into play on very low levels. You are the main character (an electronic Sherlock Holmes) and there are some other characters involved - Atrus, Catherine, Sirus and Achenar, and Gehn. But mostly you are alone, wandering through these worlds trying to piece together the story. The plot suffers the most here. Outside of a magnificently persistent atmosphere and sense of exploration, there are very few ups and downs and points beyond just exploring more and unraveling more story as you solve more puzzles. The authors themselves complained that it was extremely hard for them to develop any variety of narrative tensions. They felt stuck with relying on the user to propel the story, and struggled to find ways to add more spice while still allowing as full a range of interactivity as possible (Carroll, "(D)Riven"). And so the story is truly one where you are the driver. It does not proceed without you there unraveling it. You learn more about Myst and Riven as you make your way deeper into the worlds.

This reliance on the user being able to figure out the story, has led to an interesting boon in guidebook and fan websites that offer you clues for completing the game successfully, and also in revealing all the little secrets tucked away in the worlds. So, while it is possible to play your way through the story and finish without having seen everything, these guides tell all there is to know and see. They completely break down the puzzles and nooks and crannies and lay bare the entire story. Once upon a time this would have been looked on as cheating, but now it has developed into part of the experience. For example, often the creators will put in secret little features that you can intentionally or accidentally stumble upon. They are called Easter eggs, because you have to look for them. People often share with each other the various eggs they have found and it becomes a part of the narrative experience (and opens the experience up to a community of people who have played the games). The stories related in Myst and Riven are immensely rich in atmosphere and the spirit of exploration.

Whereas Myst and Riven have a community that has formed around the games to help each other play them fully, Ultima Online has a community within it. Myst and Riven are solo pursuits. You can play with several people sitting around one computer, but the perspective is solo. There is one "player" within the game with agency to propel the story forward. So you play alone with your CD in your computer and then you can talk about it with friends. Ultima Online is an internet-based game that allows thousands of people to play together, each from their own unique perspective, interacting with each other within the world of Brittania. Ultima Online is strong on character. You assume one and it is your character that you grow with as you play. The world comes next. You develop yourself in the dungeons & dragons fantasy word. Then plots and themes come into play. There are storylines to pursue, mostly quests and whatnot, and the themes are all over the map, all dependent on the community of players and their interests.

Now, one thing I need to note is the technical difference 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. If you want another version of the game, the game company may release a patch, or you just have to buy another disc. While the experience is dynamic and interactive, the assets (graphics, programming, etc) are not; they stay the same. The internet is a completely different beast. The game is something in which you log on to another server (a computer that stays online constantly) to experience the game. 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 change radically; it could look different, have new features, new stories, new everything. Ultima Online exists in this fluid medium of the internet. You log on and interact with thousands of others, and Origin often places storylines within these worlds. There are quests to go on and things to do, but often the players themselves form communities that interact with each other and the stories are completely developed within the framework of this world. You assume a role (a character) and then you grow your character in this world by doing things with others. The stories all fit in this framework, but they are as varied as the people who are playing. There have been tales of the 100 troll naked streak (each troll being a different player) and of the drunken bash thrown to complain to Lord Briton (Garriott) about the state of affairs.

And like Myst and Riven, a community has developed outside the game world. There are tons of fan websites and chat rooms where people get together and talk about Ultima Online. And in a bizarre development, people have begun selling their characters and online possessions in the real world. So someone who has taken a character and developed the character to expert levels and has a huge castle and lots of gold has sold all of the above on ebay for $5,000. So, these people are making money on their work, there can be a financial reward for the reader/author of this Ultima Online world. So, the stories of Ultima Online while framed by Origin and Britannia and truly shaped and experienced by the players themselves.

MitterNachtSpiel is unlike the others in that it is a much more abstract and artistic experience. Like Myst and Riven, it is a CD-ROM, but that is where any similarity ends. It is heavy on theme and setting. You are playfully performing a theatrical piece with a moonlit cast of characters. These characters are iconic to the point of abstraction. You see them in a scene and then you see a scene in them. And the plot is fairly nonexistent. You play with them. You see them play. It is a magical movement of sights and sounds. It leaves you with a sense of wonder and joy. It is a story so simple (playing with the moon and friends) yet so surreal, seeing how recursive iterations of images and sounds associate and interweave as you perform a multimedia art piece with the moon.

chapter 5 ->