The narrative is the primary focus of Janet Murray’s book, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, while the database takes center stage in the chapters we read from Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media. This difference appears to be a consequence of Murray’s background in literature in contrast to Manovich’s in cinema and new media art.
Murray is constantly comparing computer games and artificial characters with novels. She looks to digital technology as allowing non-linear, individualized multiple narrative lines. She sees increased agency and even authorship by what we once called the audience, but now becomes the participant. While recognizing the media is young and as yet undeveloped, Murray views the future of narrative in new media as a rosy one. With computer generated characters of increasing reality and interest, “. . . the narrative imagination is beginning to awaken to this task.” (Hamlet on the Holodeck, p. 247) Murray looks forward to a future when a character “as true to the human condition” as Hamlet will someday appear in a digital narrative, on the Holodeck, as it were. (p. 274)
In contrast, Manovich is surprised that the narrative has survived at all in the new media. (p. Language and New Media, p. 228) He sees the information age as having changed the very relationship between narration and description or data. He downplays computer games in comparison to Murray. He sees them more as algorithms, with the player figuring out the logic of the game rather than emphasizing the narrative elements. , “Thus narrative becomes just one method of accessing data among many.” (p. 220) He appears to belittle the very “interactive narratives” in which Murray sees so much potential and instead he looks to new interactions between database and narrative. “Modern media is the new battlefield for the competition between database and narrative.” (p. 234) Rather than look to computers for moving literary narrative to a new stage, Manovich sees it in a larger sense, even altering the way we think: “What before had been a mental process, a uniquely individual state, now became part of the public sphere,” with Habermasian implications for public opinion and thus policy. (p. 61)
The strength of the later, I believe, is the breadth of vision and the willingness to back up farther, carefully define new media, and look more widely at the directions it might lead us. Murray’s work, on the other hand, does celebrate potential, where many see simply the wasteland of videogames. While her ideas do have strength and potential, her viewpoint is less critical and more narrowly focused, not allowing for a larger vision.
Roger Mellen