Hamlet on the Holodeck by Janet H. Murray, Free Press, $25, ISBN
0684827239
IT鈥橲 ABOUT time the humanities got involved in artificial intelligence. There
are, however, some cultural chasms to be bridged. In Hamlet on the
Holodeck Janet Murray is ostensibly discussing the nature of narrative. How
can a drama with the power and the depth of meaning of Shakespeare鈥檚 play be
constructed within a medium like the Star Trek 鈥渉olodeck鈥�?
There are no middles and no ends there鈥攐r on today鈥檚 Web鈥攋ust
tangles of rhizome-like nodes. A bit like life, really. Can a story reach
鈥渃losure鈥�, or is it all an unholy mesh?
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Murray proposes improvised role-playing with participants and actors guided
by an auteur. She raises the culturally crucial question of how much such stuff
will be built by the media corporations in their own image, and how much by
citizen cooperation. Unfortunately she then ignores the economics.
Apparently unwittingly, she thus sketches a Tinseltown postmodern parody of
the East German state in which half the human population serve, not as spies,
but as personal soap-opera actors to the other half. If those interactive dramas
are going to happen, most of the characters have to be artificial
intelligences.
A lover of books, Murray is clearly coming to terms with her teenage son鈥檚
absorption in today鈥檚 computer games, whose narratives make the Iliad
look modern. She discusses the text-only collaborative hallucinations that are
the Net-based 鈥淢uds鈥� and 鈥淢oos鈥� as one might travellers鈥� tales from exotic
lands: you won鈥檛 understand unless you鈥檝e been there.
Murray teaches interactive fiction at MIT. There, across a campus chasm, she
might usefully discuss the 鈥渕any histories鈥� interpretation of quantum reality,
and connectionism as an alternative to her faith in symbols, and much else.
Perhaps the answers to her important questions will be worked out not by lone
authors of books, but by collaborative constructors of webs of texts which
reference each other? A bit like science, really.