#medp299

     As a student, I’ve always struggled with writing powerful conclusions that don’t sound repetitive. Murray’s final chapter gives an excellent example of how to do it right. She lays out the key aspects of her argument once again, elaborating on how procedural authority, building on narrative traditions of virtuosity, and formulaic invention and originality all have a place in the digital stories of the future. She also suggests that individuals are still testing the waters of our new online media, establishing the formulas for a new Shakespeare or Brontë to epitomize in their work. 

Abstract: “The CUNY of Our Dreams” represents the possibility of a free public university, in every sense of the word. The piece is an exercise in imagination, care, archiving, and wish fulfillment, providing a digital campus grounds to explore and spur action in the virtual realm and beyond.

Project Description:

I first arrived at CUNY as a bright-eyed honors student, fresh off a weekend of inspiring orientation sessions. Throughout my first year, I lived like a stereotypical college student: I stayed in residence halls, met one-on-one with an advisor, and used the flexibility of fifteen credits to explore any and all subjects that interested me, without a single hitch in registration. I worked as a tour guide at Hunter College, spouting optimistic tall tales and obscure facts to high schoolers. I dutifully filled out my FAFSA every year, and I never had to visit the Office of Financial Aid to negotiate my scholarship. 

After a year at CUNY, I realized that my experience was closer to the depictions of college students often seen in mass-produced coming-of-age movies than that of my peers. For many CUNY students, academic and career advising are at best impersonal and at worst, unreachable. Accessing needed classes and financial aid can be a nightmare, as scholarships cover some of the cost of tuition, but never enough. Many undergraduate students juggle class full-time work, and many are food insecure. Additionally, departments that would uplift student experiences and local legacies (like Ethnic and Gender Studies) are notoriously underfunded, not to mention the fact that our buildings are falling apart. Instead of housing well-resourced counseling centers and student-run care spaces, CUNY spends millions on campus police and even permits the surveillance of students and their social groups. 

Drawing inspiration from the visioning work of CUNY student activist groups past and present, as well as my own experiences as a former Hunter College tour guide, I aim to construct an opposing view of CUNY, the public university of our dreams, in virtual reality. After clicking through the title screen, which welcomes students to CUNY in the style of an acceptance letter, the player would arrive at an entrance to a stereotypical college campus (I’m particularly drawn to the style of Georgian classical architecture at Brooklyn College). As players approach, a high gate and security booth at the campus entrance disintegrate, revealing an open campus with NPC students, professors, and community members socializing. The main scene resembles a classic quad, with grassy lawns, a few trees, and building exteriors. From the quad, players can visit four interior areas: an advising/student care office, an urban greenhouse, an Ethnic Studies classroom, and a library. Each of these rooms offer just one of many possibilities for manifesting a new type of university.

These rooms could use a shared classroom template with different texture maps and 3D models applied in the space. For instance, the Ethnic Studies classroom might hold posters or a mini library honoring the legacy of CUNY alumni like Audre Lorde and Toni Cade Bambara. The urban greenhouse could have a scattered assortment of potted plant prefabs. In each room, a specific object (such as a single plant or open book) would be marked as interactible, prompting players towards an article to read or a video to watch. In representing a university, this project will be educational in its own small way. (As an individual, my dreams for CUNY are inherently limited, and I don’t want to bite off more than I can chew with this project due in 2 weeks.) 

     In this chapter, Murray proposes several hypothetical media frameworks for presenting digital narratives which utilize the affordances she set out in earlier in the book. These frameworks include:

the “Hyperserial,” a TV show with its fictional settings extended online in greater interactive detail, allowing for more plot complexity and viewer interactivity with aspects of character’s lives typically hidden from view

the “Mobile Viewer” Cyberdrama, where the viewer literally remains mobile in the world of a television show, able to follow characters in branching paths and exploring different plotlines by physically traversing the cyberdrama’s world.

the “Authored-World” Role-Play, which marries a TV show with audience role-play, letting viewers create their own minor characters (akin to getting cast as extras) who can role-play and develop their own sub-plots alongside a show’s main plot.

     In the 2016 chapter update, Murray identifies some of the ways in which these frameworks manifested across media over the past 15 years. “Hyperserials” show up as “blogs run by fictional characters,” livetweeting recreates the “mobile viewer,” and informational overlays on a show’s cast and development provide a new layer of interactivity in streaming services. Murray leaves out several key examples, like alternate reality games (ARGs). Often used to promote standalone movies or series and taking techniques from geotagging and scavenger hunts, ARGs can let viewers interact with the world of the media, immersing themselves in it before ever coming face to face with the characters or a new season (notable examples include the ARGs developed for Mr. Robot and Gravity Falls).

     Sadly, no single piece of media truly captures the frameworks Murray dreamt of in the late 1990s. To do so, developers, directors, writers, and showrunners would have to abandon the comfortable frameworks of 2-hour movies and serial television/webseries to develop a completely new way of telling stories. Even in a digital era, these media are treated as time-honored institutions, while digital storytelling tools appear as mere add-ons or marketing stunts. Murray is asking a lot of storytellers in proposing these frameworks. For many writers and creators, visual/virtual worldbuilding is left to art directors and social media managers, treated as the unrendered environments just out of range in a video game. To ascend to these new art forms, these creators would need to rebuild their tools and stories from the ground up, planning far more in depth than the current media landscape requires. 

     This chapter explores the history of characters developed entirely within digital narratives since Eliza, the Rogerian therapist bot who often fooled people into thinking she was a real therapist. Murray delves into several examples, from computer-generated MUD participants to virtual pet applications. The main difficulty in developing complex, reactive characters lies in using programming to calculate the “incalculability of life.” In the 2016 chapter update, Murray argues that the “building blocks” for procedural character creation lie in the prescripted, conditional dialogue and dynamic interaction interfaces of games like The Sims and Blood and Laurels (the latter of which seems like an amazing game but remains weirdly inaccessible to the average online user). 

     This chapter targets a very specific but important aspect of storytelling: character building. While most of this book remains devoted to discussing digital narrative environments, this chapter betrays the author’s infatuation with the richly developed characters of Victorian-era novels. Murray seems to crave the complexity of a Jane Eyre or Victor Frankenstein over a Sim, but I’m not sure that the digital space will approach character creation through such an explicit historical lens. The people that arise purely out of virtual narratives will likely take more from the internet’s own history than that of narrative writing overall. This chapter reminded me most of the internet art piece Petscop, a fictionalized “let’s play” series centered around one family’s trauma and interpersonal relationships, both reflected in the narrator’s character and the game he plays. The work clearly draws from the proliferation of family Youtube channels and “let’s play” series over the past 15 years, part and parcel of the internet’s history. Although there’s no explicit viewer interactivity, the easter eggs within Petscop videos and their manner of distribution created a larger inner life for the characters beyond the bounds of the videos (the delineation between the narrator and the “family” who controlled the Petscop Youtube channel informed viewers’ understandings of the main characters motivations and seemingly unimportant pieces of dialogue, greatly widening the story’s world). 

     This chapter was even more complex than the last few, for here Murray begins to weave together the affordances and characteristics of digital storytelling into possible playable games. Learning the modular tools of narrative development (researched by Propp and others) felt very similar to learning the modular editing system in Unity, which could even be the Unity developers’ direct reference to this work. I was surprised by how many of Murray’s examples were familiar to me: I watched a youtuber play through Façade when I was a young teen, and I’ve played through a few hours of Papers, Please. Both surprised me in their emotional depth, especially considering the current landscape of so-called “casual” gaming today. Now that games with little or deemphasized plot garner huge emotional investment from their players (I’m thinking of Flappy Bird, some MMOs, Club Penguin, Farmville, etc), narrative games can have an even larger impact on a player’s internal state, and this is especially true of Papers, Please. Its gameworld-building is succinct and effective, and it speaks with a limited controller and visual vocabulary, magnifying the emotional and narrative impact of a player’s choices. Although it introduces players to its authoritarian setting and social order through a violent terrorist act, nothing prepared me for the grief I’d experience as I slowly lost the game. Plenty of video games involve some sort of life-on-the-line stakes (the prime example being Mario jumping through levels to rescue Princess Peach), but Papers, Please places the player as the main breadwinner of a family whose members slowly get sick and die without enough funds for food. Even in 8-bit, amidst the secret societies and hidden plots, the starkness of this fundamental social reality pierced through to then-15 year old me. After my youngest child died in-game, I couldn’t bring myself to finish my run.

     This chapter rounds out Murray’s section on the aesthetic principles of digital narratives, showing how the transformative aspect of digital media works alongside immersion and user agency to create new storytelling opportunities and experiences. Murray uses the term “kaleidoscopic media” to describe the depth and multivalence of digital stories, contrasting it with “mosaic”  or “linear” media (like editing in film). The transformation here can occur on both creator and audience ends, as Murray uncovers examples from popular TV and games that constantly change shape (like the cast of Game of Thrones) or allow the viewers to do so by hopping into different viewpoints or characters to reenact their experience over and over again.

     In this chapter, Murray reveals to many forms that agency takes within different digital narratives. While I could clearly see the through-line of multi-user roleplaying experiences in MUDs, Zork, and LARPing in the previous chapter on immersion, it was far more difficult to understand the connections between Myst, Tetris, and Mortal Kombat, since they all frame the player’s agency in different ways. Murray’s analogy of game designer/DM : player :: choreographer : dancer clarified this for me, having occupied each of those roles at various points in my life. Players can shape their individual story arcs and the environments around them, but game designers control the boundaries of the digital narratives they interact with.

(Prof. Miranda, sorry that this is late, and double sorry that I switched the reading weeks up- I’m all caught up now!)

     Reading this chapter, it’s easy to see why this is the most referenced section of Murray’s book. She lays out the affordances of procedural, participatory, spatial, and encyclopedic digital media in a way which immediately encourages the reader to imagine their intersections. While Murray cites specific historical examples within each category, her writing style spurs readers to look into their own internet history and reevaluate the sites and programs which mean the most to them in light of these affordances.

     In my case, I immediately thought of Discord, a popular group messaging app, and its relationship to these affordances. When trying to explain Discord to a non-user, I compared it to a house with many different rooms, with each room filled with a variety of tables at which to sit and have different conversations. Discord’s flexibility allows these rooms to range from small, intimate spaces with one main chat to sprawling study halls with 20+ conversation areas and thousands of members. This spatial aspect is reflected in the user interface based on servers with groups of channels and voice chats. Discord’s main function as a chat server is inherently participatory, but also procedural, since it lets users scroll back and read through conversations as they happened at any time in the past. Through the use of a search bar, it takes on an encyclopedic function: users can refer to snippets of past conversations by searching with keywords, and some servers even keep resource channels specifically as an encyclopedia of online references.