IT’S THE final act and the Prince of Verona takes the spotlight to utter:
“A glooming peace this morning with it brings;
The sun for sorrow will not show his head.
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Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things;
Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished;
For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.”
And so the curtain falls on the end of Shakespeare’s tragic love story. At
least, that’s how it has always ended in countless performances over the past
400 years. But not any more. Naoko Tosa and Ryohei Nakatsu, two researchers from
the ATR Media Integration and Communications Research Laboratories in Kyoto,
Japan, have followed the lovers to Hades where they can begin working their way
back into the world of light.
Nakatsu and Tosa’s cybersequel is performed with the help of the latest in
interactive systems, using gesture, voice and emotion recognition software. It’s
more like a computer game than a staged performance. Two people “play” the
protagonists, each taking control of an avatar which is projected onto a screen
where the action takes place. The cybercharacters they meet as they try to
return to the living world respond in different ways depending on the
performers’ words and actions.
Entertainment explosion
Play Cinema, as the two researchers call their project, is part of an
entertainment explosion spawned by the increasing power of modern computers.
This and other such experimental forms will have to fight for a place in a
leisure world overflowing with everything from multi-user domains (MUDs), in
which people take part in role play over the Net, to gory games, cerebral
adventures stuffed with demanding puzzles and texts designed to exploit the
Internet’s singular powers.
Already, some of these forms have become incredibly popular, but will any of
them ever be celebrated in the same way as a great novel or film? Will Romeo
and Juliet in Hades ever be as highly regarded as the original?
One of the curious effects of the new digital forms is that they confound our
traditional ideas about entertainment and art. Many of the works emerging from
projects such as Play Cinema blur the edges between plays, novels, films and
computer games. Of course, some degree of blurring has happened even without the
computer. Novelists such as James Joyce and Thomas Pynchon have tried to escape
the confines of linear narrative, for example. And readers of fantasy fiction
books, such as Star Striker by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, need
a pair of dice to know which page to go to next. But the interactivity possible
with a computer has confused matters even further. Strangest of all, it is even
making the distinction between author and audience disappear.
Not surprisingly, new artistic forms need new words to describe them. At the
University of Bergen in Norway, Espen Aarseth is one of a handful of people
trying to create a new lexicon. His main concern is the host of online
text-based media that have appeared— including MUDs, text-based games and
electronic books. All these texts he calls ergodic, borrowed from the Greek for
“work” and “path”. The term emphasises that the effort the reader must invest in
these works is very different from that needed when reading a traditional book.
Ergodic texts require the reader to make choices to reach an endpoint.
Take “hypertexts”, for example. One of the innovations that gives the Web its
unique power is the hyperlink, which allows you to follow a single theme from
one website to another by clicking on highlighted words. A number of authors
have produced hypertexts that exploit this type of link. One example is
Forward Anywhere by artist Judy Malloy and Cathy Marshall of Xerox’s Palo
Alto Research Center in California.
In 1993, Marshall and Malloy decided to get to know each other by sending
e-mails that described snippets of their lives. The result is an entertaining,
three-year dialogue that discusses feelings and events from their lives (which
they changed slightly to protect friends). These e-mails were then linked to
create a hypertext. At the end of each e-mail, the reader is given the choice of
going “forward”, “anywhere” or “lines”. Forward brings up the next e-mail, so
the reader can follow the dialogue sequentially. Anywhere takes the reader to
another e-mail chosen at random—much like opening pages at random.
Lines is something else again. It displays a search box: type in a word and
it brings up lines from their other e-mails that contain that word. The result
is to connect the text in a way that no writer of a traditional book could
easily duplicate. The choices that the reader must make to navigate through
Forward Anywhere is the extra work that Aarseth says is characteristic of
ergodic texts.
This type of hypertext highlights one of the big differences between old and
new forms of entertainment. You can travel through Forward Anywhere any
way you choose without fear of losing the grand plot—because there isn’t
one. “We didn’t plan a narrative,” says Marshall. “We just decided a starting
point.” A text without a strong storyline that you can start and finish anywhere
is very different from all but the most experimental novels. Aarseth argues that
with this type of work, the notion of narrative makes no sense at all. “It’s
just a different type of literature,” he says.
There is another, more intriguing distinction between ergodic texts and
traditional literature. The novelist is virtually all-powerful when it comes to
dictating the course of a story. While every reader may see a different meaning
in the words, he or she has no ability to change the plot. In his book
Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, Aarseth likens someone
reading a novel to a spectator at a soccer match: “He may speculate, conjecture,
extrapolate, even shout abuse, but he is not a player . . . The reader’s
pleasure is the pleasure of the voyeur. Safe, but impotent.”
By contrast, some ergodic texts allow the choices made by readers to
completely change a story. This radically changes the relationship between
writer and reader. Suddenly, says Aarseth, the reader becomes “a player, a
˛µ˛ąłľ˛ú±ô±đ°ů”.
Take the case of Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse by John McDaid, a
software consultant and postgraduate student at New York University. Readers of
Funhouse become the literary executor of a vanished science fiction
writer, Arthur “Buddy” Newkirk. They receive the contents of what was on Uncle
Buddy’s hard disc at the time he disappeared. These include such items as a
digital notebook, music lyrics, a dictionary, a deck of tarot cards and a proof
copy of a short story Uncle Buddy was editing.
The readers work their way through the objects rather like detectives, trying
to develop hypotheses and connections that may explain why Buddy disappeared.
“There is no one `right’ path through the fiction,” says McDaid, “nor is there
any one right answer to the question of what happened to Buddy.”
This form of adventure is somewhere between a game and a story. While the
writer creates a world, the readers are free to explore that world any way they
want. Two readers may read about totally different objects and events. “The
writer sets the rules, but the explorer may experience something that is
completely new,” says Aarseth, “something the designer hadn’t thought of.”
If cybertext is converging with game playing, are computer games being given
stronger narratives? Dominic Cahalin, a games designer for Sony Entertainment
Europe, is doubtful. “I don’t know anyone who bought a game for the story,” he
says. The narrative of a game, he argues, is seen as something onto which the
creators can hang the game-play mechanics. The most attractive elements are
competition (whether it’s against the computer or a friend), the feeling of
accomplishment when a task is completed, and the power element—the ability
to control the system and the destinies of the “characters”.
Robyn Miller, one of the creators of the incredibly popular computer game
Myst, seems to agree with Cahalin. Myst is a graphical game
set on an island in which the player is left totally alone to wander around,
discover clues about the island and solve puzzles. Last year, Miller decided to
stop making such interactive games. “Interactive is an incredible medium, but I
don’t necessarily believe it’s a storytelling medium. It focuses on
environment,” he said at the time. “People are not what it portrays best, and
character is what drives story.”
But this may be an overly bleak view. According to Janet Murray, director of
the Program in Advanced Interactive Narrative Technology at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, the stories underlying games are improving. One of her
favourites is The Last Express, a graphical adventure game that takes
place on the final outing of the Orient Express before the First World War.
As the train travels inexorably towards Constantinople, you—the
hero—are forced to uncover the strands of an elaborate, melodramatic plot.
Whatever you do, certain events happen to a preset timetable—just as they
would in a conventional story—which introduces a real sense of tension and
release. “It’s more like a movie,” says Murray. “You can talk to the other
characters, take things from them, give them things, hide from them and overhear
them. It’s a very rich world.”
And it’s not just storylines that have improved. Though Myst’s
storyline and characterisation may be questioned, it set new standards for
graphics and music. Ever since its debut in 1993, says Murray, people have
realised that “the medium can be discussed in the same sort of aesthetic terms
you would use for films”.
Graphical computer games, ergodic texts and Play Cinema are just a few of the
myriad forms that the computer now makes possible. “The computer generates an
endless number of different genres,” says Aarseth (see “Once more with
feeling”). What we’re seeing now is the wild thrashings of an infant industry.
In her book Hamlet on the Holodeck, Murray likens the situation today
to the early, sometimes wildly experimental days of the film industry at the
turn of the century. Yet, “In the first three decades of the twentieth century,
filmmakers collectively invented the medium by inventing all the major elements
of filmic storytelling, including the close-up, the chase scene, and the
standard feature length.”
Digital entertainment needs to go through a similar process. “Now, we’re at
the stage of pounding on clay,” Murray says. “We’re still exploring the medium.”
The people who are really helping to create new media are those who are trying
to give people what they want by harnessing the unique power of the computer,
rather than merely copying traditional forms.
And what is this mysterious digital power? Aarseth and Murray agree on the
chief aspect, though they call it different things. “Simulation” is Aarseth’s
term. “Books are great for telling stories,” he says, “but computers can create
a dynamic model in which you can experience things in different ways.” Murray
calls it “immersion”—the sense of being in a complete world and being able
to move around. No longer are people left to read a representation of a world,
they can actually enter it.
Is anything likely to grow out of this experimental period that will ever
become art? Aarseth reckons so, and that there will be many different genres to
choose from. Murray agrees: “It’s reasonable to have that expectation.” After
all, new media have a habit of spawing great art. Could the pioneers of film in
the last century, for example, ever have predicted a film like The Godfather?
EVEN poetry may benefit from the computer’s interactive powers. If your verse
is lacking feeling, Naoko Tosa and Ryohei Nakatsu of ATR in Kyoto, Japan, may
have just what you need. Their experimental Interactive Poem System helps people
to write poetry in the mood of their choice.
At the centre of the system is a software agent called Muse, which appears on
the computer screen as an animated face that expresses emotions. Muse utters a
short poetic phrase to a human, who may respond with one of the phrases given to
them on screen or by creating their own poetic phrase. These words are
identified by a speech recognition system while a neural network, trained with
the utterances of many speakers, identifies the emotion in the speaker’s voice.
It can spot eight emotions: joy, happiness, anger, fear, teasing, disgust,
disappointment and surprise.
Once Muse has analysed the human’s words and the emotion in their voice, it
adds an appropriate emotional phrase and changes its expression. Human and Muse
then take turns, a line each, until they have created a new poem.
Once more with feeling
-
Further reading:
Star Striker
by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone (Puffin Books) -
Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature
by Espen Aarseth (Johns Hopkins University Press).
The first chapter is at: www.hf.uib.no/hi/espen/default.html -
Hamlet on the Holodeck
by Janet Murray (MIT Press)
Links referred to in the book are at:
http://web.mit.edu/jhmurray/www/HOH.html -
Excerpts from Forward Anywhere can be found at
www.csdl.tamu.edu/~malloy/html/
and is published by Eastgate Systems
(www.Eastgate.com lists a range of cybertexts and links). -
Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse
by John McDaid (Eastgate Systems) -
Details of The Last Express are at
www.lastexpress.com -
For details of Play Cinema and the Interactive Poem System,
see: www.mic.atr.co.jp/~tosa/