Hamlet on the Holodeck

Most of all, the power to create objects procedurally (by specifying not just their appearance but their behavior) has led to an outpouring of whimsy and practical jokes: a plate of spaghetti “squirms uneasily” whenever someone says they are hungry; a bucket of water falls on people who try to enter a player’s room; magic spells turn fellow players into frogs or make them invisible to one another. MUDders relish one another’s ingenuity in stretching the representational powers of the environment. This constructivist pleasure is the highest form of narrative agency the medium allows, the ability to build things that display autonomous behavior

Of course, it is possible to play the game purely for the thrill of flying the Empire’s planes, but the moral impact of enacting an opposing role is a promising sign of the serious dramatic potential of the fighting game

Because guns and weaponlike interfaces offer such easy immersion and such a direct sense of agency and because violent aggression is so strong a part of human nature, shoot-’em-ups are here to stay. But that does not mean that simplistic violence is the limit of the form

In games, therefore, we have a chance to enact our most basic relationship to the world—our desire to prevail over adversity, to survive our inevitable defeats, to shape our environment, to master complexity, and to make our lives fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Each move in a game is like a plot event in one of these simple but compelling stories. Like the religious ceremonies of passage by which we mark birth, coming of age, marriage, and death, games are ritual actions allowing us to symbolically enact the patterns that give meaning to our lives.

Every game, electronic or otherwise, can be experienced as a symbolic drama.

Games seem on the face of it to be very different from stories and to offer opposing satisfactions. Stories do not require us to do anything except to pay attention as they are told.7 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. They offer a schematized and purposely reductive vision of the world. Most of all, games are goal directed and structured around turn taking and keeping score. All of this would seem to have nothing to do with stories

Odysseus’s description is constructed so that we can enjoy each individual step and gain increasing pleasure as the overall plan becomes clear. The story is as much a riddle as Oedipus’s, but the answer to the riddle is not in a single word; it is in a series of beautifully orchestrated steps, an elegant algorithm for defeating giants

Moving the journey story from the fairy tale to the novel meant moving it from a symbolic realm of universal actors (a king, a wicked stepmother) to a particularized social world and a particular time and place

The boundlessness of the rhizome experience is crucial to its comforting side. In this it is as much of a game as the adventure maze. In fact, it reminds me of a particular game my son William invented at about age five. At his own initiative he one day drew a large game board, assembled dice and playing pieces, and invited his father to join him in an inventively improvised game with ever-changing and ever more elaborate rules. After two hours of this surreal activity, my husband became restless and began asking every five minutes or so if the game was almost over. William responded by calmly walking into the kitchen, where I was sitting, and asking me to write his father the following note:

DEAR DAD—THIS GAME WILL NEVER END. WILLIAM

In trying to create texts that do not “privilege” any one order of reading or interpretive framework, the postmodernists are privileging confusion itself. The indeterminate structure of these hypertexts frustrates our desire for narrational agency, for using the act of navigation to unfold a story that flows from our own meaningful choices.