Since 1992 I have been teaching a course on how to write electronics section. My students include freshman, writing majors, and media lab graduate students.

As I watch the yearly growth in ingenuity among my students, I find myself anticipating a new kind of storyteller, one who is half hacker, half bard. The spirit of the hacker is one of the great creative wellspring Safari time, causing the in animate circuits to sync with ever more individualized and quirky voices; the spirit of the bard is eternal and irreplaceable, telling us what we are doing here in about we mean to one another.

p. 12 A New Medium of Storytelling

p. 18 Aldous Huxley Brave New World
(more on it here https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=huxley)

Set 600 years from now, describes a society that science has dehumanized by eliminating love, parenthood, and the family in favor of generating engineering, test tube delivery, and state indoctrination. Books are banned, and science has come up with a substitute form of storytelling to delete the masses.

p. 20 Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451

p. 22 this accounts of a digital dystopia but eroticize and demonize the computer. Cyberpunks surfers are like Cowboys on the new frontier motorcycle hoodlums with a joystick in their hand instead of a motorcycle between their legs. They are outlaw pirates on an endless voyage of exploration throughout the virtual world riding and plundering among the invisible data hoards of the world in many states by the stronger pirate parents who reach in and reprogram their minds.

p. 22 William Gibson Neurmancer

p. 28 The Harbinger on the the Holodeck

The technical in economic cultivation of this freestyle new medium of communication has led to several new varieties of narrative entertainment. This new storytelling formats very from the shoot them up video game in the virtual dungeons of Internet role-playing games to the post modern literary hypertext. This wide range of narrative art holds the promise of a new medium of expression that is S varied SD printed book or the movie picture.

Books printed before 1501 or cold incunabula; the word is derived from the Latin for swaddling clothes and is used to indicate that this books are the work of a technology still in its infancy.
The garish video games in tangled websites of the current digital environment or part of a similar period of technical evolution, part of a similar struggle for the conventions of coherent communication.

p. 29 now, in the incunabular days of the narrative computer. We can see how 20th century novels, films, and please have been steadily pushing against the boundaries of linear storytelling. We therefore have to start our survey of the harbingers of the holiday back with a look at multiform stories, that is, linear narrative straining against the boundary of pre-digital media like a two dimensional picture trying to burst of its frame.

p. 30 The multiform story
Frank Capra’s It’s a wonderful life

p. 34 Robert Zemeskis Back to the Future

p. 35 Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day
Multi forms stories often reflect different points of view of the same event.  p. 37 Kurosawa Rashomon, the same crime is narrated by four different people: a rape victim; her husband, who is murdered; the bandit who attacked them; and a bystander.

p. 37 Milorad Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars

p. 37 Multi form narrative attempts to give a simultaneous form to this possibilities, to allow us to hold in our minds at the same time multiple contradictory alternatives.

p. 38  active audience

When the writer expands the story to include multiple possibilities, the reader assumes a more active role.

p. 40 although television viewers have long been accused of being less active engaged in readers or theatergoers, research on thin culture provides considerable evidence that viewers actively appropriate the stories of their favorite series. In addition to sharing critical commentary and gossip, fans create their own stories by taking characters and situations from the series and developing them in ways closer to their own concerns.

p. 42 role playing games or theatrical in a non-traditional but thrilling way. Players are both actors and audience for one another, and events the purple tree often have the media seat of personal experience.

p. 43 Live theater has been incorporating the same qualities of spontaneity and audience involvement for some time.

p. 43 MUDs have allowed distant players on the Internet to share a common virtual space in which they can chat with one another in real time. A the social psychologist Sherry Turkle has persuasively demonstrated, mods are intensely “evocative” environments for fantasy play that allow people to create and sustain elaborate fictional personas.

p. 44 movies three dimensions

p. 51 dramatic storytelling in electronic games

p. 55 story webs

p. 59 computer scientist as storytellers

p. 65 Chapter 3 From Additive to Expressive Form

beyond multimedia
Sept 28, 1895 Arrival of the Train at La Ciotat Station

p. 66 photoplays

p. 67 one of the lessons we can learn from the history of film is that additive formulations like photo play or the contemporary catshall ‘multimedia” or a sign that the medium is in an early stage of development and it is still depending on the format derived from earlier technologies instead of exploiting its own expressive power. Today the derivative mindset is apparent in the conception of cyber space is the place to view “pages” of print or “clips” of moving video end of cedar rooms is offering “extended books.”

p. 60 ELIZA, 1966 Joseph Weizenbaum

p. 71 the four essential properties of digital environments

Digital environments are procedural

Digital environments are participatory

Digital environments are spacial

Digital environments are encyclopedic

p. 90 Digital structures of complexity

p. 95 part to the aesthetics of the medium

chapter 4 immersion

The experience of being transported to an elaborate please simulator please it’s pleasurable in itself regarding of the fantasy contact. we Refer to this experience as immersion. Immersion is a metaphorical term derived from the physical experience of being submerged in water. We seek the same feeling from a psychologically immersive experience that we do from a plunge in the ocean or swimming pool: the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality, as different is water is from air, that takes over all of our attention, our whole perceptual apparatus.

p/ 99 entering the enchanted place

my note: ghost in the machine
The computer itself, even without any fantasy content, is an enchanted object. Sometimes it can act like an autonomous, animate being, sensing it’s environment in carrying out internally generated processes, yet it can also seem like an extension of our own consciousness, capturing our words through the keyboard in displaying them on the screen as fast as we can thank them.

p. 110 the active creation of belief

In digital environments we have new opportunities to practice this active creation of belief. For instance, in an interactive video program set in Paris that may research group designed in the 1980s for language learners, we included a working telephone, represented by a photograph of a phone who’s keypad could be clicked on .

p. 112 structuring participation with a mask .

p. 119 regulating arousal According to Winnicott, “the pleasurable element in playing Carris whit eight employee Kasian that the instructional a razzle is not excessive”; that is, the object of the imaginary world should not be too enticing, scary, or real let the immersive trance be broken. This is true in any medium. If a horror movie is too frightening, we cover our eyes or turn away from the screen.

p. 126 chapter Agency

Agency is the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices. We expect to feel agency on the computer when we double click on a file and seat open before us or when we enter numbers in a spreadsheet and see the totals readjust. However, we do not usually expect to experience agency within a narrative environment.

p. 129 the pleasures of navigation

One form of agency not dependent on the game structure yet characteristic of digital environment is spatial navigation. The ability to move through virtual landscapes can be pleasurable in itself, independent of the content of the spaces.

p. 130 the story of the maze

the adventure maze embodies a classic fair-tale narrative of danger and salvation. as a format for electronic narrative, the maze is a more active version of the immersive visit (chapter 4).

p. 134 Giving Shape to Anxiety

p. 137 The Journey Story and the Pleasure of Problem Solving

p. 140 Games into Stories

p. 142 Games as Symbolic Dramas