An interview with Janet Murray
a cura di Massimiliano Colletti

We met Janet Murray in Torino, during the "International Book Fair" where, with G. Longo, C. Infante, J.R. Balpe and F. Antinucci, she gave a talk on the theme of Scrittura Mutante. We met her again in October on the Internet for an interview.

Thinking about "Scrittura mutante" I'm reminded of the growing relationship between writing and game playing. Many say the best adventure story of recent times is Tomb Raider. Could you explain to us the way in which these two things are connected and how literature is changed by this relationship?

There is a continuum in storytelling that stretched backward to the earliest oral traditions and forward to emerging technologies. The purposes and pleasures of storytelling remain the same: to make sense of the many intersecting patterns of experience, to share our individual responses with one another, to savor the richness of human desires and perceptions. Every new medium expands our ability to tell stories, to make sense of life, to share our subjectivity across the boundaries of consciousness, culture, time. The print medium has let us capture consciousness itself with increasing precision and detail, and at the same time to capture the patterns of interconnectedness in complex urban cultures. Film and television have allowed us to tell stories that could not be captured in print, including the "long form" stories of television series that allow for hundreds of hours of dramatic situations involving the same characters.
At the same time print culture has brought us to an understanding of the world, a knowledge system, that models everything from our bodies to the solar system to our family dynamics as a system of interconnected agents. A linear book or film is not the best way to portray a world that we see as a system. Books and films have become more and more like games over the past several decades, even before the advent of the electronic game. Borges' stories are good examples of this trend. So are popular films in which the hero gets to go back in time and change the outcome of events.
Games belong to the same moment in culture. They grow from the same story-telling impulse. The let us enact the experience of the second chance, the same thing repeated with different choices.

What is "storytelling" and where can we place it in the world of literature?

Storytelling precedes literature. It includes oral culture, and literature, strictly speaking, refers to stories that have been written down. Storytelling is the more inclusive term.
Storytelling is also a cognitive ability that forms a crucial part of our humanity. We organize the world in to past, present, and future; we see events as exhibiting cause and effect. A story is not just a sequence, but a sequence with causality. Telling stories is a way of predicting the world and patterning behavior. This was true for early human beings and must have helped them avoid becoming dinner for predatory animals, and helped them to find their own dinners. This is also true in our more complex social world in which we immediately respond to good and bad experiences, to anything striking and new, by weaving a story about it, linking it to some genre of storytelling, some shared pattern of sense-making.
Literature provides master stories, stories that focus the attention of larger circles than the anecdotes we share with our family and friends every day. Literary stories have been more worked over by retelling, honed by transmission. They live within their own specialized semantic systems (comedy, tragedy, melodrama, love stories, etc.) that link up to the everyday and age old, incessant storytelling that is part of the human experience.

My idea is that, right now at the current state of research, there isn't anything in a digital environment that we can actually read and consider to be a good story. I've seen a lot of advances in the technical side of writing, changes that effect the way we read, (I'm thinking for example about Balpe's experiments), but nothing that really adds quality to our literature.

That may well be true, but it is not fair to compare a tradition that is in its infancy to one that has been formed by 500+ years of practice (to take only the Western print tradition). The interesting thing to look at is the elaboration of expressive conventions. In interactive television and in games I see many conventions that could lead to expressive storytelling that will eventually have the same power as literature.
For example, games have been mostly dominated by shooting and combat patterns. But lately a different type of game is becoming popular. The most popular game in the world is Will Wright's The Sims produced by Maxis. This game is not about combat or weapons but about setting up a bourgeois home. It is like a translation of the 19th century novel into interactive format. One of my favorite gestures in that game is the backrub or massage. If one character gives another character a backrub their relationship improves and they both become happier. That is a small thing but I think it is a good example of game designers thinking in terms of domestic plots and inventing a different palate with which to describe the world.
In the world of interactive television I am struck by the possibilities of making documentaries that can be followed through many different paths. This is an ideal way of telling stories about societies in conflict and allowing many different points of view to be presented so that they can be more fully understood. This is a kind of thinking that we need more of in the world, and this is a good medium for teaching us how to expand the circle of empathy in that way.

I recently visited "Palazzo Té" in Mantova, and one of the rooms that shocked my imagination most was the Giants Room. I thought about the impression that entirely painted room could have on a man of the 16th Century. More recently, at the end of the 19th Century a small group of people who were so lucky as to see Arrival of a Train at la Ciotat Station of the Lumiére brothers, ran away, screaming and fearful, tricked by the extreme reality of that visual experience. Something like that seems to be happening right now, is it true?

Yes, these are very appropriate reference points for the immersive power of the emerging environments. Colleagues of mine at Georgia Tech are experimenting with virtual reality and with augmented reality, with artificial environments that you can enter and be surrounded by, and with ghost-like figures (not unlike the mannerist giants in the Palazzo Te) that are superimposed on the actual world.
Any new medium of representation has the power to frighten us since it reminds us of how easily we can be duped, how we can be made to mistake an illusion for reality. It also confuses us with the unexpected force of our own powers: how is it that human beings can make something that so thrillingly imitates the actual world? So it is a paradoxical experience. As spectators we are humbled, but as human beings we are exalted by our common creative powers.
Some of the disapproval and distrust of new media comes out of this deep-rooted distrust of our own senses and of our own creative powers.

In your book you said: "three dimensional photography has put me in a virtual space and has thereby awakened my desire to move through it autonomously, to walk away from the camera and discover the world on my own"; this sentence, like an epiphany, focuses the problem on the borderline between playing and watching fiction, at the moment in which the audience becomes an active part of the fiction. How does the audience's (reader) role change?

A key question! As designers this is one of the most important challenges we face. The digital medium is a participatory environment, and we cannot think of an "audience" (listeners in the original Greek sense) or of "viewers." Instead we must think of "interactors"-- of active participants in the imaginary world. The more immersive we make it the more the interactor wants to test its boundaries. A well-designed world invites this participation. The designer who has understood the medium scripts both the computer and the interactor.
Online role playing games are good examples of this new relationship. The game I mentioned earlier, The Sims, has just moved into an online format, where you can bring the characters you make into a common space. This is a very complicated world, and the participants have to improvise their interactions with one another. What allows them to do this? The stage set and props do this to a large extent. If you bring a character into an online living room with music playing, they will be able to dance. Not only will the character's menu include dancing, but the player operating the character will think about dancing, and look for the appropriate menu item. You don't have to tell the player in advance that they might get to dance. The immersive environment scripts the behavior.
If you allow interactors to buy flowers and engagement rings in this environment they will begin to act out courtship plots. If you allow them to buy guns they will act out robberies and murders.
The interactor is always looking at the environment for clues about what story possibilities are present in the world.

Literary Hypertexts are one of the possibilities offered to new (and old) writers by computers, even if Hypertextuality as a concept is not something new. I'd like to know what its own characteristics are and if in the last years they have substantially changed.

The first wave of hypertexts were focused on subverting the expectations of the interactor, of unraveling the logic of the linear book. The problem with many of them was that they did not create a higher coherence, and so people grew tired of the form. In some ways the first wave of practitioners were more poets than storytellers, more interested in the resonance of language than in the creation of cause and effect sequences.
One thing that I think would help to move toward more coherent storytelling in digital formats is to come up with clearer models of structure than the mere subversion of linearity. The Deleuze and Guattari model of the rhizome was one such model, but a potato field is not particularly expressive as organization. Its major qualities were negative: the lack of a beginning or end for example.
I have found it helpful to think in terms of the multisequential and the multiform. The multisequential story is one which is composed of many coherent sequences and is only grasped through tracing multiple sequences. It is not a matter of making something non-sequential as distinguished from the sequential book; instead we can think of traditional books and movies as being uni-sequential, and of storytelling as moving toward a multi-sequential norm.
A multiform story is one like Run Lola Run which the same story is retold with a different arrangement of its elements. (It can be multi-sequential as well.)
In the multi-sequential story the world stays fixed and there are many ways through it. In the multi-form story there are many ways in the world may be put together. Both of these formats reflect the ways in which we see our own lives and the unfolding common experience in the 21st century. We see how the same event can be viewed differently by different participants in the event -- the criminal, the victim, the police; the husband and the wife; the doctor and the patient. We also see the many ways in which a sequence of events can unfold, the many futures implicit in every present moment.

Do you know last Marie-Laure Ryan's book, Narrative as Virtual Reality? Do you think that a balance between immersion and interactivity could really be found? In other words, is it possible to write electronic narrative and give rise to that mixture of emotion, experience and reflection that was particular to the modern literature?

I think Marie-Laure Ryan is one of the most perceptive writers on this tension. I agree with much of her analysis.
I think that the way to reconcile the immersive and the interactive is to think of them as reinforcing one another in what I like to call the active creation of belief. In interactive environments we do not merely "suspend disbelief" as Coleridge aptly described the literary experience. We test out our beliefs, and if the dynamic world acts in a consistent manner then our beliefs are reinforced. If I can navigate through a virtual space it is more real to me. If I can interact with an electronic character then the character is more present.

Which relationship do you imagine between traditional literature and digital narrative in the future? Do you think they will make a pact of friendship, as film and literature already have, or will they constitute separate domains?

I think that the computer is a medium of representation like print or film and that it is drawing on the older media just as they did. At the same time the contemporaneous forms are drawing on one another. Films and novels are become more like simulations, just as interactive environments are assimilating more complex story structures.

Where is your research going and what kind of experiments are you conducting in your school?

At Georgia Tech, in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture we are expecting to be able to announce in the near future a new Ph.D. in Digital Media which will be a new kind of degree, meant to produce scholars who practice and theorize for the emerging digital genres. So one thing I am very interested in is the formulation of this new discipline. I am writing a textbook called Inventing the Medium which will stress the connections between older media and the new practices and will articulate the particular affordances of the computer for extending human expression and human understanding.
My work, Hamlet on the Holodeck, has been interesting criticized by the Scandinavian game theorists for imposing the rhetoric of narrative on games. I think they misunderstand narrative, but they are right that games deserve their own critical vocabulary. Since I did not see much of this vocabulary emerging from those who were critiquing narrative analysis, I have set out to try to come up with a formalism of games. A group of my students and I have surveyed some important game designers and scholars and asked them for the most important games and why they find them important. Game designers are as eager as scholars for a vocabulary in which to talk about what they do. We have been working with this list to identify the features of games that are the same across game genres, features that have nothing to do with narrative per se.
Another focus of my research is interactive television. I am particularly interested in the promise of digital technology to extend the scope and depth of storytelling, both fictional and documentary.

Bollettino '900 - Electronic Newsletter of '900 Italian Literature - © 2002-2003

Giugno-dicembre 2002, n. 1-2