The holodeck, like any literary experience, is potentially valuable in exactly this way. It provides a safe space in which to confront disturbing feelings we would otherwise suppress; it allows us to recognise our most threatening fantasies without being paralysed by them. [...] such an exploration brings the benefit of self-knowledge. It is not paralysing. It sends her back to the real works all the stronger.

Narrative films were originally called photoplays and were at first thought of as a merely additive art form (photography plus theatre) created by pointing a static camera at a stagelike set. Photoplays gave way to movies when filmmakers learned, for example, to create suspense by cutting between two separate actions [...] to create character and mood by visual means [...] to use a "montage" of discontinuous shots to establish a larger action [...] After thirty years of energetic invention, films captured the world with such persuasive power and told such coherent and compelling stories that some critics passionately opposed the addition of sound and color as superfluous distractions. [...] One of the lessons we can learn fromt he history of film is that additive formulations like "photo-play" or the contemporary catchall "multimedia" are a sign that the medium is in an early stage of development and is still depending on formats derived from earlier technologies instead of exploiting its own expressive power. [...] Today the derivative mind-set is apparent in the conception of cyberspace as a place to view "pages" of print or "clips" of moving video and of CD-ROM as offering "extended books". The equivalent of the filmed play of the early 1900s is the multimedia scrapbook, which takes advantage of the novelty of computer delivery without utilizing its intrinsic properties. [...] Therefore, if we want to see beyond the current horizon of scrapbook multimedia, it is important first to identify the essential properties of digital environments, that is the qualities comparable to the variability of the lens, the movability of the camera, and the editability of film, that will determine the distinctive power and form of a mature electronic narrative art.

While linear formats like novels, plays, and stories are becoming more multiform and participatory, the new electronic environments have been developing narrative formats of their own. The largest commercial success and the greatest creative effort in digital narrative have so far been in the area of computer games. Much of this effort has gone into the development of more detailed visual environments and faster response time, improvements allowing players to enjoy more finger-twitching challenges against more persuasively rendered opponents. The narrative content of these games is thin, and is often imported by from other media or supplied by sketchy and stereotypical characters. The lack of story depth makes even wildly popular figures such like the Mario brothers or the Mortal Kombat fighters impossible to translate into successful movie heroes.

In 1455, Gutemberg invented the printing press - but not the book as we know it. Books printed before 1501 are called incunabula; the word is derived from the Latin for swaddling clothes and is used to indicate that these books are the work of a technology still in its infancy. It took fifty years of experimentation and more to establish such conventions as legible typefaces and proof sheet corrections; page numbering and paragraphing; and title pages, prefaces and chapter divisions, which together made the published book a coherent means of communication. [...] Similarly, the narrative traditions do not arise out of the blue.

The networked computer acts like a telephone in offering one-to-one real-time communication, like a television in broadcasting moving pictures, like an auditorium in bringing groups together for lectures and discussions, like a library in offering vast amounts of textual information for reference, like a museum in its ordered presentation of visual information, like a billboard, a radio, a game board, and even like a manuscript in its revival of scrolling text. All the major representational formats of the previous five thousand years of human history have now been translated into digital form.

The feely [with reference to what described by Huxley in Brave New World] offers an opposing image of a sensation-based storytelling medium that is intrinsically degrading, fragmenting, and destructive of meaning, a medium whose success implies the death of the great traditions of humanism, or even a fundamental shift in human nature itself.

In addition to creating vivid virtual worlds we can enter and fictional characters we can interact with, researchers are also developing complex computer models of plot. For instance, at Carnegie Mellon university, the Oz group, led by Joseph Bates, applies artificial intelligence techniques to storytelling. [...] The Oz group analysed all of the possible paths a player may take through the story and identified the ones that are the most satisfying. Then they fed this information to a complex mathematical procedure called "adversary search", which is similar to the algorithms used in chess-playing systems, and which can calculate the optimal response to any action of the player toward the most interesting narrative paths.

Some of the games focus on jousts and ambushes, others on elaborate political negotiations, and still others on skilful improvisations of dramatic scenes. In all of them, the players share a sense of exploring a common fictional landscape and inventing their stories as they go along. Role-playing games are theatrical in a nontraditional but thrilling way. Players are both actors and audience for one another, and the events they portray often have the immediacy of personal experience.

For my experience in humanities computing has convinced me that some kinds of knowledge can be better represented in digital formats than they have been in print. The knowledge of a foreign language, for instance, can be better conveyed with examples from multiple speakers in authentic environments than with lists of words on a page. The dramatic power of Hamlet's soliloquies is better illustrated by multiple performance examples in juxtaposition with the text than by the printed version alone. [...] Although the computer is often accused of fragmenting information and overwhelming us, I believe this view is a function of its current undomesticated state. The more we cultivate it as a tool for serious enquiry, the more it will offer itself as both an analytical and a synthetic medium. [p.7]

First introduced on 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' in 1987, the holodeck consists of an empty black cube covered in white gridlines upon which a computer can project elaborate simulations by combining holography with magnetic "force fields" and energy-to-matter conversions. The result is an illusory world that can be stopped, started, or turned off at will but that looks and behaves like the actual world and includes parlor fires, drinkable tea, and characters, like Lord Burleigh and his household , who can be touched, conversed with, and even kissed. The Star Trek holodeck is a universal fantasy machine, open to individual programming: a vision of the computer as a kind of storytelling genie in the lamp.

Critics have condemned the too-easy stimulation of electronic games as a threat to the more reflective delights of print culture. A prominent fil critic, for instance, recently lamented the fact that his sons have deserted Dickens for shoot'-em-up computer games, which offer a kind of narrative, but one that yields without resistance to the child's desire for instant gratification.

[talking about a scholar who wouldn't accept the new technologies] To my mind it was because she could not separate the activities of research from the particular form they had historically assumed. Her love of books (which I share) momentarily blinded her to the true object of reverence: the creating of a superb reference work. Her reaction is a sign that the new technologies are extending our powers faster than we can assimilate the change.

The literary publisher Eastgate Systems distinguishes its products from both pornographics "web soaps" and games by calling them "serious hypertext". The pioneering work in this genre is Michael Joyce's Afternoon (1987), written in the Storyspace hypertext system, which he code signed with Jay David Bolter and John Smith specifically for the purpose of writing narrative as a set of linked text blocks. Afternoon contains 539 carefully crafted lexias and begins with one (although it does not necessarily come first) entitled "I want to say". [...] There is no overview of the work's structure, and the 'hot word' links do not offer much of a clue to the content to which they lead. To complicate things further, Joyce has programmed some of the links to force the reader to return to the same lexia again and again in order to be permitted to go to new places in the story. [...] to the postmodernist writer , confusion is not a bug but a feature. In the jargon of the postmodern critics, Joyce is intentionally "problematizing" our expectations of storytelling, challenging us to construct our own text from the fragments he has provided. [...] The architectural playfulness of Afternoon, its construction as a series of discrete lexia linked by overlapping paths, and the poetic shaping of its individual lexia mark it as the first narrative to lay claim to the digital environment as a home for serious literature in new formats.

I find myself longing for a computer-based literary form even more passionately than I have longed for computer-based educational environments, in part because my heart belongs to the hackers. I am hooked on the charm of making the dumb machines sing. [...] I find myself anticipating a new kind of storyteller, one who is half hacker, half bard.

Seymour Papert had developed the LOGO programming language that allowed children to develop mathematical concepts by choreographing the actions of magic sprites that raced across the screen. A follower of Piaget, Papert believed that computers are tools for thinking and should be used to create "micro worlds" where inquisitive students can learn through a process of exploration and discovery. (p.6)

The hypertext formats of the 1990s support many kinds of narrative writing, from voyeuristic soap operas aimed at advertising revenues to postmodernist experimental fiction for university students. The first widely successful hypertext narrative is "The Spot", a sexually titillating soap opera about a group of West Coast yuppies living in a beach house who post their diary entries regularly on the Web. Readers can hop through the various diaries to compare different versions of the same event; can search through past events to catch up on the plot; and can even participate in the story by posting opinions, advice, or their own stories to a bulletin board in which the simulated characters participate along with fans. [...] The dramatic action is not in the canned story created by the writers alone but in the spontaneously improvised exchanges between the simulated characters and the participating fans.

[...] so too does it [the computer] promise to reshape the spectrum of narrative expression, not by replacing the novel or the movie but by continuing their timeless bardic work within another framework. This book is an effort to imagine what kinds of pleasures such a cyberliterature will bring us and what sort of stories it might tell.

When the writer expands the story to include multiple possibilities, the reader assumes a more active role. Contemporary stories, in high and low culture, keep reminding us of the storyteller and inviting us to second-guess the choices he or she has made. This can be unsettling to the reader, but it can also be experienced as an invitation to join in the creative process.

Digital environments are procedural, participatory, spatial, and encyclopedic. The first two properties make up most of what we mean by the vaguely used word 'interactive'; the remaining two properties help to make digital creations seem as explorable and extensive as the actual world, making up much of what we mean when we say that cyberspace is 'immersive'.

Hypertext formats are not new as intellectual structures. The Talmud, for instance, is a giant hypertext consisting of biblical text surrounded by commentaries by multiple rabbis. Literary works are hyper textual in their allusion to one another. In the twentieth century the allusiveness has grown so dense that a work such as James Joyce's Ulysses is almost impossible to understand without accompanying pointers to other works, including a map of Dublin.

In 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor of computer science at MIT, create, as an experiment in natural language processing, a computer program called ELIZA that carried on a conversation by replying to typed-in statements with printed words. [...] The resulting persona, Eliza, was that of a Rogerian therapist, the kind of cliniciam who echoes back the concerns of the patient without interpretation. [...] To Weizenbaum's dismay, a wide range of people, including his own secretary, would "demand to be permitted to converse with the system in private, and would, after conversing with it for a time, insist, in spite of [Weizenbaum's] explanations, that the machine really understood them." [...] Weizenbaum had set out to make a clever computer program and had unwittingly created a believable character. He was so disconcerted by his achievement that he wrote a book warning of the dangers of attributing human thought to machines.

The accessibility of the World Wide Web has introduced a growing audience to hypertext fiction. Hypertext is a set of documents of any kind (images, texts, charts, tables, video clips) connected to one another by links. Stories written in hypertext can be divided into scrolling "pages" (as they are on the World Wide Web) or screen-size "cards" (as they are on a Hypercard stack), but they are best thought of as segmented into generic chunks of information called "lexias" (or reading units). [...] But screen-based pages and cards become lexias: they occupy a virtual space in which they can be preceded by, followed by, and placed next to an infinite number of other lexias. Lexias are often connected to one another with "hyperlinks" (or "hot words"), that is, words that are displayed in color to alert the reader/viewer that they lead somewhere else. [...] Stories written in hypertext generally have more than one entry point, many internal branches, and no clear ending. Like the multiform life stories imagined by Borges and Lightman, hypertext narratives are intricate, many-threaded webs.

I am using the term multiform story to describe a written or dramatic narrative that presents a single situation or plot line in multiple versions, versions that would be mutually exclusive in our ordinary experience. [...] Multiform stories often reflect different points of view of the same event. The classic example of this genre is Rashomon (1950), the Kurosawa film in which the same crime is narrated by four different people: a rape victim; her husband, who is murdered; the bandit who attacks them; and a bystander.