Marie-Laure Ryan,
Avatars of Story.
University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
ISBN: 978 081664686 9
US$20 (pb)
296pp
(Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press)
Marie Laure-Ryan has written and edited a number of books on the subject of narrative theory in new media and interactive media, and her body of work has had some degree of influence; within the fields of game studies and interactive media at least, Ryan’s name appears almost as often as Janet Murray, a pioneer of interactive narrative theory. Avatars of Story continues Ryan’s inquiry into this relatively new area.
The driving question for Avatars of Story deals with an exploration of the problems faced by narrative theory when applied to non-traditional media. The book is divided into two parts: the first part claims to look at ‘old media’, though given that topics here include baseball and reality TV, a better description might be ‘non-traditional, non-interactive’ media. The second part focuses on new (interactive) media, looking at interactive fiction, multimedia and web-based narrative and digital games.
Ryan begins by considering the different ways in which narrative and media have been defined. She finds that traditional definitions of narrative are text-specific and therefore do not lend themselves well to non-text media, and she proposes a more broadly defined approach to storytelling that she calls ‘transmedial narratology’. With regards to media, Ryan states that “what counts as a medium is a category that truly makes a difference as to what stories can be evoked or told, how they are presented, why they are communicated, and how they are experienced” (25).
Chapters three and four look at the process of turning a live continuous event into a story. In chapter three the fictional life of the fake reality TV star Truman (from the film The Truman Show [USA, 1998]) and the real experience of surviving on a tropical island (on the reality TV/game show Survivor) are turned into a story though the selection and arrangement of aspects of these continuous streams into a meaningful narrative. In chapter four, Ryan looks at how a game of baseball, broadcast live and unedited, becomes a story through the contextualization of the commentators.
The second part of Avatars of Story looks at digital media. Ryan begins by questioning some of the assumptions that she says have set the goals for interactive narrative. In particular, the author criticises Janet Murray’s suggestion that becoming the central character in a story on the Star Trek holodeck represents the ultimate narrative experience. Ryan argues that “the personal experience of many fictional characters is so unpleasant that users would be out of their mind – literally as well as figuratively – to want to live their lives in the first-person mode” (124). Ryan also questions whether a virtual world with unlimited player choice, but lacking authorial drive, is capable of producing meaningful narrative.
Over the next two chapters, Ryan looks at a variety of digital texts, running the gamut from interactive fiction text-adventure games (as popularised by Infocom in the early 80’s) to hypertexts created using Storyspace, to web-based narrative experiments, and a number of multimedia (including Flash and Director works) and interactive drama applications. There is an emphasis here on working within (and exploiting) the limitations of the medium, and particularly with the latter examples, Ryan emphasizes the difficulty in reconciling player agency with authorial control.
Computer games represent by far the largest portion of the interactive narrative sector, and it is therefore somewhat disappointing that the chapter on computer games in Avatars gets bogged down in an old debate rather than breaking new ground. The field of Game Studies has been consumed by a debate between narratologists interested in how games tell stories, and ‘ludologists’; scholars who would seek to expel narrative theorists from an area they feel has nothing to do with telling stories, and everything to do with playing games. Although what Ryan has to say makes for fascinating reading, and is highly relevant in the context of Avatars, it adds nothing new to the external debate.
Avatars attempts to straddle a rather wide range of subject areas, and the work does suffer from having a scope that is perhaps too broad for a single book to cover in enough detail. Although their common ground does justify the two parts of the book appearing in a single work, each part could have been fleshed-out further in separate works. Part one explores texts where the author constructs a story through a selection process not unlike that of the historical or observational documentary filmmaker, but a discussion of documentary is absent. And while part two limits itself to a discussion of interactivity in new media, such a discussion could benefit from considering aspects of interactivity in traditional media, as demonstrated by Espen Aarseth in his seminal work Cybertext.
Criticsms aside however, Avatars of Story does ultimately succeed in its goal to consider the problems faced by narrative theory when applied to non-traditional media. Though Ryan’s dense style of writing does not make for light reading, it does allow her to tackle the rather broad subject in greater detail than the criticisms here might suggest. Avatars of Story, though not Marie-Laure Ryan’s best, is nonetheless a significant and interesting work.
Martin Manning,
Flinders University, Australia.
Created on: Monday, 3 December 2007