User:Andre Castro/2/annot/murray cyberbard

From XPUB & Lens-Based wiki

Janet Murray - The Cyberbard and the Multiform Plot

From Hamlet on the Holodeck. (pp.185 - 213)

Murray, Jannet. 1998. 'Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace'. MIT Press. Cambridge / London.

Yugoslavian bards

Murray begins the chapter titled The Cyberbard and the Multiform Plot by asking what do writers need to write narratives in a digital environment that take advantage of the possibilities opened by this medium? She argues for the necessity to find strategies to enable multiform, fluid, and collaborative plots to be written. Although such endeavor might look like a break with writing tradition, Murray argues that traditional and historical explore techniques of pattern and variation that resemble computer based narrative (p.186). Murray bases her argument on the work of classicist Alfred Lord. Lord's researched the tradition of Yugoslavian oral bards. His study revealed that this tradition of oral story composition relied heavily on repetition, redundancy and cliché. Those elements allowed the bards to memorize the stories and retell in front of an audience. In every performance the story would be composed on the spot, reacting to audience's reaction and following the bards own interpretation.

Murray describes three levels of patterns, or a 'set of formulas within formulas' used in the bardic tradition. At the lowest level one can find the stock phrase, a system of substitution, that focused on rhymes and rhythm rather than on the plot. At intermediate level theme can be found, self-contained and generic unit, resembling a film scene, which be inserted into several types of narratives. And at a higher level the plot, the overall story (-193. Murray to Lord's realization that bardic stories that focus of "rescue and release intertwined with marriage and battle were 'basically one song' with many different plot possibilities" (pp. 188-193).

The bardic system of patterns and variations does not only make possible the creation of a myriad of stories, but also the transmission of the stories between generations, as what is transmitted is not the performance, but the mechanism and the ingredients that allow for the multiplicity of stories to emerge at every performance. Murray argues that such model is a provocation to cyber-narrative, and an example from what could be aimed in the digital environment (p.195).

Propp's morphology

Murray follows her discussion by describing Vladímir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale, "a recipe for Russian folktale...[which] makes clear that the formulaic underpinning makes folktales more intricate; it allows storytellers to weave together multiple different story sequences without becoming confused" (p.196). In Murray's opinion the formula Propp is describing is far more complex than the ones employed in the construction of computer games. "Games that do offer choice-points leading to variant plot events are usually constructed with only shallow detours off the main spine of the plot...Games that do provide narrative variety often do so through a simple substitution system...But games do not allow substitution of thematic plot elements ... the way fairy tales do. Games are limited to very rigid plotlines because they do not have an abstract representation of the story structure that would allow them to distinguish between a particular instantiation and a generic morpheme" (p.198). Murray


"By generating multiple stories that look very different on the surface but that derive from the same underlying moral physics, an author-directed cyberdrama could offer and encyclopedic fictional world whose possibilities would only be exhausted at the point of the interactor's saturation with the core conflict" (p.209).



Commedia dell'arte

Jannet Murray makes reference to Commedia dell'arte strategies as possible inspiration for modeling the digital characters interaction behavior. (pp.235-236) Commedia dell'arte had its peak in the Europe during Renaissance. The staged plots were populated by a few stock characters, with very accentuated, almost caricature characteristic and behaviors. And the same characters kept reappearing from one play to another, yet the repertoire of plays was quite diverse. The plays weren't based on a written script, but on scenarios, with specific stage entrance and exists for each character. The text from each scene would be improvised, based on a collection of memorized written fragments, and the characters' stereotypical behavior. Character's interaction also revolved around known rituals that would adapt to the content, and formal patter of dialogue.

"The insides of a digital character should perhaps resemble the improvisational materials of an actor - including set of speeches, stage business, and plot patterns - more than the insides of a ordinary person, with emotions, beliefs, superego."(p.237) [Is it the same with spam characters? Don't each of the spam character has a stock of speeches, behaviors, and patterns? ]