Hamlet on the Holodeck, updated edition: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace

by Janet H. Murray

An updated edition of the classic book on digital storytelling, with a new introduction and expansive chapter commentaries.

I want to say to all the hacker-bards from every field—gamers, researchers, journalists, artists, programmers, scriptwriters, creators of authoring systems... please know that I wrote this book for you.”—Hamlet on the Holodeck, from the author's introduction to the updated edition

Janet Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck was instantly influential and controversial when it was first published in 1997. Ahead of its time, it accurately predicted the rise of new genres of storytelling from the convergence of traditional media forms and computing. Taking the long view of artistic innovation over decades and even centuries, it remains forward-looking in its description of the development of new artistic traditions of practice, the growth of participatory audiences, and the realization of still-emerging technologies as consumer products. This updated edition of a book the New Yorker calls a “cult classic” offers a new introduction by Murray and chapter-by-chapter commentary relating Murray's predictions and enduring design insights to the most significant storytelling innovations of the past twenty years, from long-form television to artificial intelligence to virtual reality. Murray identifies the powerful new set of expressive affordances that computing offers for the ancient human activity of storytelling and considers what would be necessary for interactive narrative to become a mature and compelling art form. Her argument met with some resistance from print loyalists and postmodern hypertext enthusiasts, and it provoked a foundational debate in the emerging field of game studies on the relationship between narrative and videogames. But since Hamlet on the Holodeck's publication, a practice that was largely speculative has been validated by academia, artistic practice, and the marketplace. In this substantially updated edition, Murray provides fresh examples of expressive digital storytelling and identifies new directions for narrative innovation.

Genres: Nonfiction, Games, Writing, Technology, Philosophy, Game Design, Video Games

413 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Janet H. Murray is Ivan Allen College Dean's Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Institute of Technology. She is the author of Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice (MIT Press).

Reviews

[Ken Liu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Insightful and provocative -- changes the way you think about digital media. Recommended for anyone who's interested in thinking about what it means to tell a story through games, VR, IF, hypertext, or any other form of digital medium.

[Thom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Released in 1997 and updated in 2016, it feels like this is due for another update. Even without that it's a very interesting take on stories and interaction in electronic media. While today's "AI" is closer to ELIZA than intelligence, the effect of autocomplete is one topic this author didn't consider.

The core chapters cover immersion, agency and transformation, and Murray makes a convincing argument that these have brought us from books to the Bard and beyond. Between the main chapters and the updates to each, a LOT of computer storytelling history is covered. I really enjoyed this read, though it was at times a slightly dry. I found myself constantly thinking on what has happened in the eight years since the update was published.

I have a feeling that I might like her Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice even more than this one. Instead of getting it from the library (as I did Holodeck), I will probably keep an eye out for it at a technical bookstore.

[Jesse Keeter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting to read this in 2021. Because she was right about damn near everything. Let us hope that she will also be proven right in our ability to create more than violent video games, despite their graphical beauty and powerful immersion. Let us hope we can don the crow suit, flap our wings, and fly away into the digi-sphere.

What she did not anticipate, at least within these pages, was the smart phone epidemic. I am curious whether she still has faith in our species’ ability to grasp narrative at all with the fractured nature of our attention spans. But if her theories, nay, prophecies! within these pages hold true, I can only imagine she has a few more aces of disparate story threads left to unravel.

[D J Rout · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a superb, but highly academic, discussion on the changes in narrative caused—arguably necessitated—by the advent of computers. Murray is an expeert in this subject and that clearly shows in this book.

So, the contents should give an idea of what's going on here:

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A Book Lover Longs For Cyberdrama
Preface to the 2016 eBook: The Future of Narrative, Revisited

PART I. A NEW MEDIUM FOR STORYTELLING
1. Lord Burleigh’s Kiss—2016 Update
2. Harbingers of the Holodeck—2016 Update
3. From Additive to Expressive Form—2016 Update

PART II. THE AESTHETICS OF THE MEDIUM
4. Immersion—2016 Update
5. Agency—2016 Update
6. Transformation—2016 Update

PART III. PROCEDURAL AUTHORSHIP
7. The Cyberbard and the Multiform Plot—2016 Update
8. Eliza’s Daughters—2016 Update

PART IV. NEW BEAUTY, NEW TRUTH
9. Digital TV and the Emerging Formats of Cyberdrama—2016 Update
10. Hamlet on the Holodeck?—2016 Update

About Janet H. Murray
Notes
Bibliography
Index

The notes are clear and provide many other resources to look into, and the biblography is thorough and is as well-researched as Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing

[Alexandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Experimental literature is the greatest thing in the world!

[Ryan Berger · Rating 5 out of 5]

This fairly obscure pop-science novel from the 90's was shockingly brilliant and what I might call required reading for anyone with a vested interest in storytelling.

To lay my cards on the table, I went into this book as a somewhat skeptic of how VR technology is going to change storytelling and narratives and a massive skeptic for how close we are to engaging with these technologies in a meaningful way no matter how many overpriced, half baked and ugly goggles Apple shoves in your skull. After reading this book, I would say I'm no longer a skeptic about the potential these digital spaces could offer future narratives, and even more entrenched in my belief that the grifters who promise that the future is here right now in 2024 look even dumber and in fact don't even really understand the most baseline potentialities for what VR brings to the table. Their imaginations are as narrow as their gall is towering.

Applying that retroactive lens to this book did not reveal nearly as many cracks as I thought. Murray is primarily advocating for technology's role in a long history of storytelling and her earnestness and excitement for the role of stories in our lives is on the same wavelength as a Salman Rushdie or Robert McKee type. While her excitement and outline for procedurally generated content sidesteps (and perhaps could not really have predicted) the oncoming layoff apocalypse where corporate overlords attempt to replace the job of making art with machines, she *did* have the blueprint not only for how the next stage of video gaming would play out, including stages yet to play out.

My background is in writing, but this book was revelatory about key concepts in game design like feedback, player intuition, and immersion. This should be a foundational text for anyone looking to get into game design regardless of the book's contribution to virtual reality fantasies. That's also not to say that the book didn't teach me some interesting tricks and ways of thinking about narrative. Murray is a well-rounded thinker and easily communicates the nuances of both the written word and cyberspace which is enviable and a pleasure to read.

An underrated gem. I recommend that anyone skeptical about the future of VR in our lives check out the full video essay by Noah Caldwell Gervais on the Half Life series (the updated one with Half Life Alyx). That video is the single greatest argument for the potential of VR that's been made to date. Between that essay and this book-- even dug-in skeptics like myself can become believers.

That said: AI art is still a wild west of thievery, liars, and hollow commercialized art. We are, with regards to VR technology and procedurally generated content with actual literary worth, at a stage that is so far beyond an infancy. Valve proved that great art is possible with care. If we are not careful, an entire medium could be smothered in its crib.

[Terry · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm almost finished with this one, and really recommend it for anyone studying new media literature or attempting to write it. Murray traces the history and theory of interactive multimedia narrative and provides a great deal of source material for readers to turn to.

My only criticism is the focus on gaming and immersive narrative - that is not the direction of my own new media writing as I am working on novels and essays, and pretty thoroughly reject the immersive idea in favor of post-modern anti-immersive writing. But, to her credit, she does cover a lot of ground in all aspects of interactive writing possibilities.

[Kyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing investigation of virtuality in both classical and pop culture, hitting all the high notes for both (Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Woolf, Tolkien and Kurosawa plus Star Trek: TNG and Super Mario Brothers). Written at a time when developments in digital and virtual spaces was relatively new, it can almost be said Murray rides on the first VR wave while her thoughts tend towards the third wave, symbolized by the holodeck still centuries in the making. As the second wave of virtual reality now seems to be reaching its crest, computer scientists and especially literacy scholars will have to keep their surfing skills at the ready, using his excellent resource as a guide.

[Bethany Kirkbride · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating reading this in 2020; even in the four years since Murray last updated the text the digital landscape has changed even more and interactive storytelling is taking on new forms e.g. Black Mirror's 'Bandersnatch' which draws on the 'choose your own adventure' formula, as well as work by Charisma.ai that uses natural language processing to create a highly personal experience for 'readers' or 'players'.

[Alper Yılmaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very prescient and insightful book. The first few chapters, exploring the lead-up to "multiform" media throughout the 20th century and then the earliest forms of digital media, are valuable for everyone consuming any type of media today. The middle chapters where she takes on forms and modes of storytelling that she predicts will take precedence in the digital age are also worthwhile; the whole book is full of depth and useful knowledge. That's not to say it's flawless, however.

There are some issues related to the author's occasional imposition of outdated structuralist critique where it doesn't really belong (a minor and somewhat personal point), and her lack of engagement with the craft of game design, though she does dip occasionally into game studies, and there is very little in the academic world of her time that engages with the craft itself.

Where the book is most disappointing, tied to the lack of engagement with game design, is the author's seeming lack of a personal relationship with her subject matter; whether she speaks on videogames or folk tales, she almost always comes across as quoting someone else's curated and/or academic opinion, not forming a genuine opinion for herself. Lots of talk about text-based media such as Zork and MUDs, likely due to all the computer science people the author is in contact with who are interested in these environments, but where are mentions and analyses of Ultima, Might & Magic, Zelda, Final Fantasy, LucasArts works or the newly-emerging MMORPGs, perhaps the strongest pillars of interactive storytelling in their time and occasionally quite representative of some of her points? She clearly doesn't avoid such media—she voices her admiration for Myst several times—, but still leaves a lot to be desired. This shortcoming is why the author's depiction of her brief encounter with the Mad Dog McCree arcade cabinet is such a standout; imagine how many more such standout experiences would be on display given a more rigorous engagement with interactive narrative media. She also leverages this experience to reach a rather problematic and insufficient definition of immersion, which lies at the core of her biggest misprediction related to digital media evolving into a "holodeck" style environment provileging virtual reality and total sensual integration. I believe a lack of personal engagement with "multiform" media lies at the heart of this missing of the mark, as it leads her to synthesize these disparate ideas into a contrived and unnecessary end.

I want to end by reiterating, after all my criticisms, that this is a fantastic book, full of significant considerations and eye-opening insights. It is about as complete and cohesive as a book written all the way back in 1997 can reasonably be, and that's remarkable.

[Dominick · Rating 3 out of 5]

I guess you'd call this speculative scholarship. Though Murray roots her study in what was already happening in the digital world with narrative (whether for the purposes of fiction or otherwise e.g. as a therapeutic tool), mainly what she is doing is making a case for how the digital landscape will allow for a new Renaissance in narrative form. It's a nice idea. However, even for 1999, her position seems not merely optimistic but positively starry-eyed about the positives and potentials rather than the hazards. At one point she confidently asserts that no machine could ever become a substitute for the human narrative imagination. That seems to me to be pretty goddamn optimistic, even for 1999. And here we are in 2025, seeing big tech setting out to kill the human manufacture of all art (or at least, commercially viable art), so whether the human CAN be replaced is pretty much moot: if the mega-money-men have their way, It WILL be. So, this is rather a quaint historical curiosity, sometimes interesting, sometimes a fascinating snapshot of then-emergent uses of tech, but ultimately about as valuable today as any such prophecy could be. Admittedly, Murray admits that "The future of art and the future of software" are especially difficult to predict, so she evidently imagined her own failure. There was an updated edition in 2017, but I imagine it's almost as much a historical artefact at this point as is the first version, so I doubt I will seek it out.

[Crispin · Rating 4 out of 5]

fascinating take from 1997 (updated in 2016) on the evolution of media and narrative under the influence of computation, anticipating the rise of video gaming far above (in business terms) the film industry, and with an illuminating historical grounding, drawing on examples such as bardic tradition, Shakespeare, adaptation of language to the printing press etc. etc.
Curious to see how before the printing press, narrative was very fluid (or 'multiform'), due to the community/oral traditional forms, then became more crystalline as our media technologies favoured static, identically reproduced content (shades of Walter Benjamin's 'The Work of Art In the Age Of Mechanical Reproduction') – and now, computers are enabling a reincarnation of multiform narrative. Leaving the question… but what of the benefits of community (multi)forms? Murray seems aware of this issue, but perhaps is mesmerised by the technology, failing to realise how its allure will lead capital away from the community multiform she implicitly desires, and towards a more Black Mirror-esque future…

[Lucas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Que sepáis que Murray es un amor de persona. Yo a esta señora la veo como la fundación de la literatura cibernética seguida de Marie Laure Ryan y su narratologia virtual y culminada por Rosa Maria Rodriguez Magda y su transmodernidad. Murray es una ancianita super-maja que escribió este libro en pos de la popularización de la VR y decidió escribir en los 90 (creo) todo aquello que ella creia que iba a pasar con todo esto que en su época apenas había empezado a salir a la luz, videojuegos, VR, 3D... Y la mitad no se cumplen, pero está tan bien relatado que parece que estés leyendo un diario personal de una niña anciana que espera mucho del futuro que le apasiona

[Antón Táboas · Rating 3 out of 5]

En resolución, él se enfrascó tanto en su lectura, que se le pasaban las noches leyendo de claro en claro y los días de turbio en turbio; y así del poco dormir y del mucho leer se le secó el cerebro, de manera que vino a perder el juicio. Llenósele la fantasía de todo aquello que leía en los libros, así de encantamientos como de pendencias, batallas, desafíos, heridas, requiebros, amores, tormentos y disparates imposibles; y asentósele de tal modo en la imaginación que era verdad toda aquella máquina de aquellas soñadas invenciones que leía, que (...) le pareció convenible y necesario (...) hacerse caballero andante e irse por todo el mundo con sus armas y caballo, a buscar las aventuras.

[Uma Sarkar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very cool and insightful, especially if you have the version with her notes and additions from 2016 (she was right about most of it!). I will say I skimmed through most of the parts that were heavy on video games, but that's because I'm not personally too invested in those. I enjoyed how her literature and tech backgrounds combined perfectly to give such an informed perspective. This is what it means to be a scholar in my opinion- to be able to blend disciplines in the quest to deeply understand something.

[Genevieve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Janet Murray is an absolute hero of mine and the book was such a confirmation of what I have believed to be true for a long time: Narratives and storytelling are one of the most important things in life. After finishing the book I had the chance to attend a Masterclass of Murray and it made me adore the book even more.

A must read for anyone into narratives or digital design.

My copy is now signed and will never leave my possession again :)

[Casey Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredible subject matter with some amazing predictions about the future of storytelling. Many of the predictions she made in 1997 have came true or are on their way to coming true. Not 5 stars because it reads alot like a university textbook at times(it is one) and she gets super nerdy (MUDs and role playing games) and loses her practicality at times

[Josefine · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE book if you’re going to explore literature in a computer format. It covers hypertext to games to classic literature and it does it all with academic quality. Read it for my thesis and I cannot thank my counselor enough for recommending it. Murray has a way with words that reminds one of Felski. Never a dull moment, despite sitting with heavy textbook.

[Tubular Garf · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is an academic book of literary criticism. It has an abstract rambling style. Like most modern philosophy, I fail to see the point of most of it. If you are interested in writing stories or making games, there exist far better books.

[Yifat Shaik · Rating 5 out of 5]

While some parts of it aged, it is still one of the more relevant digital media book available

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant book. Makes hard concepts easy to understand.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was such a fun experience to read this book for a graduate class then take Dr. Murray's project studio simultaneously. (This was not Dr. Murray's assigned reading). Such a helpful reference!

[Gabe · Rating 3 out of 5]

The theory is sound but the specific predictions are dubious.

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I remember when this was radical. Ha! We were so young.

[James Mason]

DNF.
It felt insufferable to me right from the preface. Skimmed the first chapter and a half increasingly quickly looking for a hook but did not find it.

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

reading this in 2025, it's an elegy of an internet lost, with some knowledge of what's to come.

[Joe Nelis · Rating 3 out of 5]

An exploration of the evolution of narrative as it crosses into digital media. Murray's approach covers a wide range of media platforms through which narrative can be experienced, but, as many of her critics have pointed out, does so without much regard for the specific functionality of the media she addresses; for example, she claims that Tetris is an apt metaphor for the hectic rat-race of American life in the late 20th century, side-stepping an analysis of the gameplay and ignoring the fact that the game was created by a Russian programmer. Despite some of the shortcomings, this still works as a foundational text for anyone beginning their journey into new media studies or video game criticism, though Murray's own ideas have evolved as the fields have grown.

[Mark Poulsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary storytelling practices using digital technology. A great and easy-going introductory read to help you start thinking about some of the affordances digital technology provide for storytelling purposes. It arrived at a time where games and other multimedia art forms were just on the verge of becoming massively popular, but its relevance has not diminished today (especially not in its updated edition). In the long run, its academic usefulness has been questioned in fields such as game studies, but nevertheless I think practitioners will find great joy in reading it.

[Shane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Outstanding at parts, particularly in the meatier sections in the middle of the book that deal with emergence, agency and the possibilities of kaleidoscopic progression in digital narrative. This is certainly a must for anyone who wants to work with story-telling on digital formats. The only issue I would have would be in the slightly shallow handling of the first and last couple of chapters, which wind the book up and round it down a little poorly. Either way, I would still recommend this as a fascinating and in-depth study that draws many interesting conclusions.

[Timothy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is still cited often despite its age, and it is still a good introduction to the subject of narrative in new media. Murray's predictions are generally correct in their basic principles and way off the mark on specific details. It is a relatively well-written book that presents its ideas clearly, but I think it is rapidly nearing the end of its life span. I might suggest skipping to Ian Bogost, who covers most of the same points.