The Aesthetics of the Medium

1. The Aesthetics of the Medium From Hamlet on the Holodeck byJanet Murray Aaron LevisohnPHD CandidateSchool of Interactive Arts and TechnologySimon Fraser University

2. The Three Aesthetics Immersion Agency Transformation

3. Immersion “Immersion is a metaphorical term derived from the physical experience of being submerged in water.” P.98 “Being transported to an elaborately simulated place is pleasurable.” P.98 “Immersion can mean a mere flooding of the mind with sensation…but, in a participatory medium, immersion implies learning to swim, to do the things the new environment makes possible.” P.99

4. Immersion Entering the Enchanted Place “The computer itself, even without any fantasy content, is an enchanted object.” P.99 “It can also seem like an extension of our own consciousness.” P.99 “Computers can give us uninhibited access to emotions, thoughts, and behaviors, that are closed to us in real life.” P.99

5. Immersion: Liminal Objects Liminal Objects In psychological terms, computers are liminal objects, located on the threshold between external reality and our own minds.” P.99 “Narrative is also a threshold experience.” p.99

6. Liminal Trance Problem for digital media: “Because the liminal trance is so inherently fragile, all narrative art forms have developed conventions to sustain it. One of the most important ways they have done this is to limit participation.” p.100 “When we enter the enchanted world as our actual selves, we risk draining it of it’s delicious otherness.” p.101 Solution “The answer to all these questions lies in the discovery of the digital equivalent of the theater’s fourth wall. We need to define the boundary conventions that will allow us to surrender to the enticements of the virtual environment.” P.103

7. Immersion: Finding the Border Mingling of fiction and non-fiction Cervantes: Don Quixote (p.103) Internet bulletin boards p.104) Seinfeld (p.105) Remind audience of media’s representational qualities Laurence Sterne:Tristram Shandy (p.104) Chuck Jones: Duck Amuck (p.104) Dramatize Border Winsor McCay: Gertie the Dinosaur (p.105)

8. Immersion: Structuring Participation • The Visit • “The visit metaphor is particularly appropriate for establishing a border between the virtual world and ordinary life because the visit involves specific limits on both time and space.” (P.106) • Amusement park rides: • Jurassic Park: Like visiting a real place • “But Jurassic Park is not a place, any more than a theatrical stage is, since the visitor cannot step off the boat without destroying the experience. Jurassic park is essentially a giant computer driven machine for telling an immersive story, and the boat is the fourth wall.: (p.107)

9. Immersion: Structuring Participation The Visit in Digital Media “Here the screen itself is a reassuring fourth wall, and the controller (mouse or joystick or dataglove) is the threshold object that takes you in and leads you out of the experience.” Myst: Good story, limited movement Enterprise: Movement without Story

10. Immersion: Active Creation of Belief The reader creates belief “When we enter a fictional world, we do not merely “suspend” a critical faculty; we also exercise a creative faculty…We actively create belief.” (p.110) Exploit Encyclopedic nature of media “…Immersive stories invite our participation by offering us many things to keep track of and by rewarding our attention with a consistency of imagination.” (p.111) Make objects real through use [The telephone] behaved as a functional virtual object, and because it became part of the accomplishment of a specific goal.” (p.111)

11. Immersion: Masks Masks are Threshold Objects “The mask is a threshold marker, like Harold’s moon or the Jurassic park boat. It gives is our entry into the artificial world, and also keeps some part of ourselves outside it.” (P.113) Smart Costumes Placeholder: Brenda Laurel and Rachel Strickland Social Avatars: Woggles: Oz Group at Carnegie Mellon

12. Immersion: Collective Participation The audience shares role of sustaining the theatrical illusion. (p.115) MUDs“The power of the MUD is that the computer filters out the distraction of the actual appearance of the other players who are present.” (p.115) “One key to functioning in a mud is the ability to flip back and forth between player and character…”(p.115) “Sharing an unscripted fantasy environment with other people entails a constant negotioation of the story lineand also of the boundary between the consensual hallucination and the actual world” (p.115)

13. Immersion: Collective Participation Goals and Plots “In order to participate with focus in the immersive world, a character is usually given some goals to try to accomplish.” (p.118)

14. Immersion: Regulating Arousal “’the pleasuraable element in playing carries with it the implication that the instinctual arousal is not excessive’; that is, the objects of the imaginary world should not be too enticing, scary or real lest the immersive trance be broken.” (p.119) “The trance should be made deeper and deeper without the emotions becoming hotter and hotter.” (p.119) Maintain Distance: Over the shoulder shot in film Focus on Exhibitionism rather than on sex “We are gradually learning to do what actors do, to enact emotionally authentic experiences that we know are not ‘real’.” (p.125)

15. Agency “Agency is the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices.” (p.126) “…agency in electronic environments is often confused with the mere ability to move a joystick or click on a mouse. Activity alone is not agency.” (p.128)

16. Agency: Pleasure of Navigation Spatial Navigation “The ability to move through virtual landscapes can be pleasurable in itself, independent of the content of the spaces.” (p.129)

17. Agency: Story in the Maze The Adventure Maze “The maze is a more interactive version of the immersive visit. “(p.130) The maze turns visitor into active protagonist. (p.130) The adventure maze embodies a classic fairy-tale narrative of danger and salvation. It’s lasting appeal as both a story and a game pattern derives from the melding of a cognitive problem (finding the path) with an emotionally symbolic pattern (facing what is frightening and unknown.” (p.130) “[The adventure maze] is particularly suited to the digital environment because the story is tied to the navigation of space.” (p.132)

18. Agency: Rhizome Maze Derived from poststructuralist literary theory Unheroic and solutionless (p.132) “In trying to create texts that do not “privilege” any one order of reading or interpretive framework, the postmodernists are privileging confusion itself.” (p.133) “But the unsolvable maze does hold promise as an expressive structure.” (p.133) No resolution means no irreparable loss is suffered. (p.133) Q: This seems like a quagmire for the digital narrative author. What are your thoughts on the subject?

19. Agency: Harnessing Anxiety “Both the overdetermined form of the single-path maze adventure and the underdetermined form of the rhizome fiction work against the interactor’s pleasure in navigation. The potential of the labyrinth as a participatory narrative form would seem to lie somewhere between the two…” (p.134) Regulate the anxiety by harnessing it to the act of navigation. (p.135) Example: The violence hubA web of narratives exploring a violent incident from multiple points of view.

20. Agency: Problem Solving “One of the consistent pleasures of the journey story in every time and every medium is the unfolding of solutions to seemingly impossible situations.” (p.138) “Capture and escape can be simulated by keeping the player within a confined space until the solution to a puzzle is found.” (p.139) Uh oh, What would Chris Crawford say?

21. Agency: Games in Stories There appears to be an inherent opposition Games players want happy endings Games are win/lose Authors of narrative want complex story satisfactions (p.142)

22. Agency: Games as Symbolic Dramas • “A game is a kind of abstract storytelling that resembles the world of common experience but compresses it in order to heighten interest.” (p.142) • Games as enactment • We have a chance to enact our most basic relationship with the world – our desire to prevail over adversity, to survive our inevitable defeats…” (p.143) • Games as Interpretation • Games can also be read as texts that offer interpretation of the experience. (p.143) • Games as Rehearsals for Life • “Games traditionally offer safe practice in areas that do have practical value; they are rehearsals for life. (p.144)

23. Agency: The Contest story The Reunification “The most common for of game – the agon, or contest between opponents – is also the earliest for of narrative.” (p.145) “The Greek word agon refers to both athletic contests and to dramatic conflicts, reflecting the common origin of games and theater.” (p.145) “We need to take advantage of the symbolic drama of the contest form to create suspense and dramatic tension without focusing the interactor on skill mastery.” (p.147) How do we do this? Is this already being done?

24. Agency: Constructivism “In children’s play, there is no sharp distinction between ‘authoring’ and ‘experiencing’” (p.149) The constructivist pleasure is the highest form of narrative agency the medium allows, the ability to build things that display autonomous behavior.” (p.149) Changing emphasis of MUDs from game areas to social areas. “As computer access spreads, it is likely that more and more people will turn from win/lose game playing to the collective construction of elaborate alternate worlds.” (p.149) Q: We now have sites like Second life and MMPORGs like World of Warcraft. Which is more compelling?

25. Agency: Interactor as Author The interactor is not the author “The interactor is not the author of the digital narrative, although the interactor can experience one of the most exciting aspects of artistic creation – the thrill of exerting power over enticing and plastic materials.” (p.153)

26. Transformation We delight in variety “Because digital objects can have multiple instantiations, they call forth our delight in variety itself.” (p.154)

27. Transformation: Kaleidoscopic Narrative “The computer presents us with the spatial mosaic of the newspaper page, the temporal mosaic of film, and the participatory mosaic of TV remote control.” (p.156) We need to develop conventions “Just as we need to define new narrative conventions for entering the immersive world and for exercising agency within it, so too do we need a new set of formal conventions for handling mutability.” (p.155) “There will not be a single answer, but every narrative will have to signal the reader very carefully about what is allowed in order to not raise inappropriate expectations.” (p.159) Authors must ground the reader somehow Examples: Map metaphor, Bus, Waiter (159-160)

28. Transformation: Morphing Environments “Interactors are invited to construct their own stories out of a set of formulaic elements.” (p.162) Example: The Bronte’s “The exercise of constructive agency on external, formulaic materials invests the character or toy with the power of a threshold object, the power to create the immersive trance.” (p.165) “In order for electronic narrative to reach a higher level of expressiveness, the medium as a whole must make the shift that Charlotte made, that is, away from adolescent rehearsal fantasies and towards the expression of more realistic desires.” (p.167) Q: Is this Murray expressing her particular interest or is there a more universal lesson here?

29. Transformation: Enactment Enactment as a Transformational Experience “Enacted events have a transformative power that exceeds both narrative and dramatized events because we assimilate them as personal experience.” (p.170) Virtual Reality Therapy Must establish the (VR) world as a fictional space.

30. Transformation: Refused Closure • Electronic closure occurs when a work’s structure, not its plot, is understood.” (p.174) • Lack of closure can still be emotionally riveting: • Dramatic Contest • Sustained Arousal • Closure through exhaustion (p.174) • When the story no longer progresses, when it cycles, or when you tire of the paths, the experience of reading it ends.” (p.174) • Closure can even be feared • The interactor does not want to leave the enchanted place

31. Transformation: Tragedy • Murray believes that interactive narrative must encompass tragedy in order for it to mature. (p.175) • Three examples: • The Mind as Tragic Labyrinth • The Web of Mourning • Simulation and Destiny

32. Transformation: Tragedy The Mind as Tragic Labyrinth Puts the reader in the position of both enacting and witnessing the tragic. “A labyrinthine hypertext might be the ideal medium for capturing the interior monologue as a sort of snapshot of the mind itself.” (p.177)

33. Transformation: Tragedy The Web of Mourning A kaleidoscopic story in which the interactor is able to see the unfolding events from any character’s perspective. “We would experience the loss in all of its resonance and have a sense of all the worlds of caring and trust that are torn apart by a violent death.” (p.177)

34. Transformation: Tragedy Simulation as Destiny The interactor is given the power of decision making. She has limited control over the events in the story. “In the simulation treatment of Rob’s suicide, the interactor would be put in the position of a god over Rob’s social world but a god with a limited power of intervention.” (p.178) Digital narrative could capture something we have not been able to fix as clearly in linear formats: not just a tragic hero or a tragic choice, but a tragic process.” (p.180)

35. Transformation: The Multipositional View • We cannot bring to a transformative, shape-shifting medium the same expectations of static shapliness and finality that belong to linear media. But that does not mean that we will forgo a sense of completeness and emotional release. Instead, we will learn to appreciate the different kinds of closure a kaleidoscopic medium can offer” (p.180) • Ability to explore dense narratives over and over again • We are able to explore process • The pleasures of digital media are “in some ways continuous with the pleasures of traditional media and in some ways unique.” (p.181)