Is there a fourth wall in cyberspace?

As the technologies of hypermedia, virtual reality, and the World Wide Web continue to converge, creating a total communication medium, writers may be excused for feeling paranoid. On every side, the cyber-prophets are predicting our inevitable disappearance, along with the print-based works we create. Like the canary in the mine, we’re told, we will go first. Authors will give place to content-providers, texts to navigable multimedia environments. And it will happen, the digital visionaries promise, sooner than we think.

To a member of this endangered species, Janet Murray’s widely praised Hamlet on the Holodeck comes as a much-needed reprieve. To a playwright, it is doubly welcome, since Murray makes her case largely by means of a theatrical model. A professor of interactive narrative at MIT, Murray believes emphatically in the future not just of narrative, but of writers too. In many ways, Hamlet on the Holodeck is an extended paean to the “cyberbard” or “cyberdramatist” (she uses the terms interchangeably) whose coming she eagerly awaits, the Homer or Shakespeare of the post-print age.

This is an important book for anyone interested in the literary implications of the new digital media. Its greatest strength is Murray’s understanding that essential questions remain to be answered: How do we develop narrative forms intrinsic to cyberspace itself? What will they look like? How will they be experienced? And how will they be made? For the most part, Murray’s answers avoid the usual utopian generalizations familiar from too many recycled futurist visions—unfettered imaginations, undreamed of formal innovations, every reader an author in her own right. Instead, Hamlet on the Holodeck focuses on concrete issues of writing practice: what future electronic authors actually will do, and how they’ll do it. It concerns itself with matters most discussions of the subject never bother to address, engaging equally with hardware (bandwidth, feedback devices), software (authoring tools, user interfaces) and “wetware” (the conceptual frameworks, the narrative structures, the formal models).

No less important is Murray’s commitment to the use of all this for the creation of transformative artistic experiences. Unlike many “digerati,” she is never so dazzled by the technology that she forgets to question the value of what it will be used to make. She adds to this an informed skepticism towards much of what currently passes for “interactivity,” and the inflated claims made on its behalf, that is equally rare. “Activity alone,” she notes trenchantly, “is not agency.” It’s an aphorism that stands as warning to content-providers everywhere, a reminder that point and click in itself constitutes neither meaningful interaction nor imaginative liberation.

All of which makes it still more disquieting to notice how frequently phrases like “the enchantment of immersion” and “our immersive trance” feature in Hamlet on the Holodeck as terms of approval. Yet the farther one reads, the clearer it becomes that Murray is measuring the artistic maturity of any future electronic narrative form by the completeness of the illusion it provides. If interactivity is the hallmark of electronic story-telling, then true interactivity for Murray is inseparable from the ability to lose oneself in a technologically enabled fiction, to “become” a character in an all-encompassing electronic drama. This is the unquestioned goal towards which hardware, software, and practitioners are all assumed to strive.

The corollary, not surprisingly, is an equally unquestioned preoccupation with transparency. Murray writes with barely concealed longing of a time when “we will find ourselves looking through the medium instead of at it,” when we will be “lost in the make-believe and care only about the story” in which we are immersed. The narrative future Hamlet on the Holodeck heralds is a state of undisturbed immersion, total identification, invisible interface. Murray presents her vision with an enthusiasm and intelligence that are highly persuasive. For that very reason it seems necessary to ask if we will, in fact, “find ourselves” in the form she describes so compellingly. We seem much more likely to lose...