''Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace'' is a 1997 book by Janet H. Murray about digital technology's influence on the development of narrative. Murray analyzes

interactive cinema Interactive cinema tries to give an audience an active role in the showing of movies. Another newer definition of interactive cinema is a video game which is a hybrid between participation and viewing, giving the player – or viewer, as it were ...

hypertext fiction Hypertext fiction is a genre of electronic literature, characterized by the use of hypertext links that provide a new context for non-linearity in literature and reader interaction. The reader typically chooses links to move from one node of text ...

, and the future of storytelling. In this book, Murray explores how narratives may change in stories based on new interactive mediums. Murray discusses her fears of storytelling as well as boundaries that we must set, the four essential properties of digital environments, and accurately predicts new media genres such as MUDs, 3-D films, etc.

Background

After Janet Murray earned her bachelor's degree, she became employed at IBM, where she would be surrounded by a virtual environment that was more technologically advanced than what most people experienced in their daily lives. Murray saved up money from the position to go and attend graduate school at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

as she would later go on to graduate with her Ph.D. in English. After her newfound perspective in English she taught at

Georgia Tech The Georgia Institute of Technology, commonly referred to as Georgia Tech or, in the state of Georgia, as Tech or The Institute, is a public research university and institute of technology in Atlanta, Georgia. Established in 1885, it is part of ...

where she discovered games like

Zork ''Zork'' is a text-based adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company Infocom, expanded a ...

and

Eliza ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program created from 1964 to 1966 at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Joseph Weizenbaum. Created to demonstrate the superficiality of communication between humans and machines, ...

, which were presented to her by her students in the 1980s. This got her interested in games studies where she pondered how new interactive interfaces could mesh with narrative formats. She began to combine her expertise in technology and English as she contemplated ways in which a new form of storytelling could arise. This was the inspiration that led to her writing ''Hamlet on the Holodeck''.

Synopsis

Hamlet on the Holodeck is made of an introduction and four parts, in which Murray examines storytelling media. In part one, "A New Medium for Storytelling", Murray examines the use of the

holodeck The Holodeck is a fictional device from the television franchise ''Star Trek'' which uses "holograms" (projected light and electromagnetic energy which create the illusion of solid objects) to create a realistic 3D simulation of a real or imag ...

as it first appeared in '' Star Trek: The Next Generation'' and the holonovel ''Janeway Lambda One'', which was used by Starfleet Captain

Kathryn Janeway Kathryn Janeway is a fictional character in the ''Star Trek'' franchise. She was the Captain of the Starfleet starship USS ''Voyager'' (on '' Star Trek: Voyager'') while it was lost in the Delta Quadrant on the other side of the galaxy. After re ...

from '' Star Trek: Voyager'' as an escape from her responsibilities. Murray states that this illustrates the future of storytelling and that the holodeck is "an optimistic technology for exploring inner life." She also examines works that have multiple stories within a single story described as a multiform story and identifies four essential properties of digital media: procedural, participatory, spatial, and encyclopedic. In part 2, "The Aesthetics of the Medium", Murray examines immersive experiences, which she describes as fragile and easily disrupted. She also explores agency, which she defines as "the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices" and the ability of technology to transform anything digital. In the following parts, "Procedural Authorship" and "New Beauty, New Truth", Murray discusses the impact of users being able to interact with a multiform plot, which she feels are more appealing and satisfying in the new digital environment. She also examines technology via

chatbot A chatbot or chatterbot is a software application used to conduct an on-line chat conversation via text or text-to-speech, in lieu of providing direct contact with a live human agent. Designed to convincingly simulate the way a human would behav ...

s such as

Julia Julia is usually a feminine given name. It is a Latinate feminine form of the name Julio and Julius. (For further details on etymology, see the Wiktionary entry "Julius".) The given name ''Julia'' had been in use throughout Late Antiquity (e.g ...

and the possible future of the cyberdrama and its many formats.

Analysis

In ''Hamlet on the Holodeck'', Murray provides a detailed accurate prediction of what she sees as the future of narratives in cyberspace. She focuses on the delicate boundary between the viewer and the narrative, imagining a future with participatory involvement with different cyberdramas. She encourages us to not be afraid of the ever changing future of technology and to welcome the world of

virtual reality Virtual reality (VR) is a simulated experience that employs pose tracking and 3D near-eye displays to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment (particularly video games), e ...

as we did with past technologies that have come and gone. Throughout the reading, she reassures us that we are in complete control of how we perceive this new type technology that is best exemplified as the holodeck.

Publication

''Hamlet on the Holodeck'' was originally published in 1997 by MIT Press. Its second edition, published in 2017, includes a new introduction and chapter commentaries. Murray's 2016 edition of this book consists of the same core content in each of the chapters in the original edition and does not add or take away from the content within the publication however, the second edition of the book consists of updates to include brief updates after each chapter, along with more recent twenty-first century examples, and a revised bibliography. The updates in Murray's 2016 edition serve the purpose of summarizing her original thesis.

Reception

The first publication of ''Hamlet on the Holodeck'' was published in 1997 and was both praised and condemned by literary critics. Many felt that the book consisted of extremely controversial claims. Upon its initial release, popular critic

Michiko Kakutani Michiko Kakutani (born January 9, 1955) is an American writer and retired literary critic, best known for reviewing books for ''The New York Times'' from 1983 to 2017. In that role, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1998. Early life ...

expressed that Murray's work ignored the possible downsides of technology while embracing "utopian" ideals. Many agreed that the book seemed daunting or even "unsettling" when first introduced to the public in the late 1990s, while more recent critics have come to recognize the accuracy of Murray's predictions regarding the new medium for storytelling.

References

Bibliography

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