Research from 'Hamlet on the Holodeck' by Janet H. Murray

Basic Details:
MURRAY, J. H. (1997), Hamlet on the Holodeck, NY: The Free Press.

21-22.

• Starting in the 1970s and 1980s, the same fears provoked by the... advent of film and television began to be expressed against videogames, which added interactivity to the sensory allures of sight, sound and motion.
• Critics have condemned the too-easy stimulation of electronic games as a threat to the more reflective delights of print culture.
• A prominent film 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."

53.

• On the other hand, some game designers are making good use of film techniques in enhancing the dramatic power of their games.
• Myst (1993) achieves much of its immersive power through its sophisticated sound design. Each of the different areas of the game is characterised by distinctive ambient sounds, like the whistling of wind through the trees of the lapping of waves on the shore, that reinforce the reality of fantasy worlds, which are really just a succession of still images.
• ... a musical motif that gets darker and more foreboding with each step and reaches an emotional peak when I uncover a severed head. 

140.

• Stories do not require us to do anything except to pay attention as they are told.
• Games always involve some kind of activity and are often focused on the mastery of skills, whether the skill involves chess strategy or joystick twitching. Games generally use language only instrumentally ("checkmate", "ball four") rather than to convey subtleties of description or to communicate complex emotions.
• ... games are goal directed and structured around turn taking and keeping score. All of this would seem to have nothing to do with stories.
• ... narrative satisfaction can be directly opposed to game satisfaction, as the endings of Myst, widely hailed as the most artistically successful story puzzle of the early 1990s, make clear.

142.

• A game is a kind of abstract storytelling that resembles the world of common experience but compresses it in order to heighten interest.
• Whatever the content of the game itself, whatever out role within it, we are always the protagonists of the symbolic action.
• Even in games in which we are at the mercy of the dice, we are still enacting a meaningful drama.

145.

• Most of the stories currently told on the computer are based on the structure of a contest of skill.
• The interactor is given the role of a fighter or detective of some sort and is pitted against an opponent in a win/lose situation.
• ... computer games have developed multiple representations of the opponent, who may be another human player (as in the first videogame, Pong), a character embedded in the story (as in Pacman), and the programmer or game designer implicit in the game (as in Zork). 
• Contest games have also developed at least three different ways of situating the player: we can watch from a spectator perspective while operating out own avatar character or spaceship (as in Mortal Kombat); watch from a situated perspective while operating a character (as in Rebel Assault, where we see the vehicle we are operating as if we are following just behind it with a movie camera); or, most immersively, watch and act form a situated first-person viewpoint, as in Doom...

146.

• ... where we see the landscape of the game and our opponents coming toward us as if we are really present in space. These gaming conventions orient the interactor and make the action coherent. They are equivalent to a novelist's care with point of view or a director's attention to staging.
• Fighting games have also developed a sure-fire way of combining agency with immersion.
• It requires very little imaginative effort to enter such a world because the sense of agency is so direct.
• ... every object in a digital narrative, no matter how sophisticated the story, should offer the interactor as clear a sense of agency and as direct a connection to the immersive world as I felt in the arcade holding a six-shooter-shaped laser gun and blasting away at the outlaws in Mad Dog McCree.

147.

• ... the moral impact of enacting an opposing role is a promising sign of the serious dramatic potential of the fighting game.
• We need to find substitutes for shooting off a gun that will offer the same immediacy of effect but allow for more complex and engaging story content.
• We need to find ways of drawing a player so deeply into the situated point of view of a character that a change of position will raise important moral questions.
• We need to take advantage of the symbolic drama of the contest format to create suspense and dramatic tension without focusing the interactor on skill mastery.