Avatars Of Story

Ryan begins by considering, among other texts, a 1989 Cubs-Giants baseball broadcast, the reality television show and the film In all these texts, she sees a narrative that organizes meaning without benefit of hindsight, anticipating the real-time dimension of computer games. She then expands her inquiry to new media. In a discussion covering text-based interactive fiction such as and hypertexts such as multimedia works such as Web-based short narratives, and a multimedia, AI-supported project in interactive drama, she focuses on how narrative meaning is affected by the authoring software, such as the Infocom parser, the Storyspace hypertext-producing system, and the programs Flash and Director. She also examines arguments that have been brought up against considering computer games such as as a form of narrative, and responds by outlining an approach to computer games that reconciles their imaginative  and strategic dimension. In doing so, Ryan distinguishes a wide spectrum of narrative modes, such as utilitarian, illustrative, indeterminate, metaphorical, participatory, emergent, and simulative. Ultimately, Ryan stresses the difficulty of reconciling narrativity with interactivity and anticipates the time when media will provide new ways to experience stories. Marie-Laure Ryan is an independent scholar and the author of, most recently,