Readers of this book are treated to an exploration of how story enlivens new computer-based representational technologies. Taking an incident from the Star Trek holodeck as an initial example, Murray demonstrates that the old method of representation does not simply migrate to the new platform. She studies “four essential properties of digital environments”: procedural, participatory, spatial, and encyclopedic. The first two characterize the interactive; the last two, the immersive. She extracts three pleasures from the digital world: immersion, agency, and transformation, with a chapter devoted to each.

Murray vividly reiterates several examples in her exposition: the film Casablanca, the plays of Shakespeare, and the folk products of the bards. While seeking literary projection in computer systems, she also places characters such as the Rogerian therapist Eliza in the context of storytelling.

Murray belittles the notion that “multimedia” captures any significant digital essence, but she champions “multiform” plots as fertile opportunity in the digital realm (Rashomon is a canonical cinematic example).

Besides citing her many research and classroom adventures in computer lit, she proves her own power of telling a good story through this readable and indeed entertaining account of computers and narratives.

The only descent into the morass of postwhateverism is the brief disclaimer that she is in fact not a narratologist (adverse to a ludologist) despite others’ claims of praise or wickedness. (She is safe now--no mention in the corresponding Wikipedia articles.) Thus, one is spared the miasma that makes Sokal’s parody both undetected (undetectable) and a crass joke.

Murray again flirted with the narratology/ludology chasm when she supported Tetris as a symbolic emotional drama, stirring rhetoric that missed the point of open discussion. That controversy, now settled down, is cited here. It is likely readers will find many points in the book that touch their sensibilities. For me, Tetris was one, since our students made the first Mac port, and I discovered repetitive stress injury through it.

Indeed, Murray’s book is incisive yet lighthearted, persuasive yet comradely. This update comes 20 years after the initial publication, in 1997. It speaks to her earlier insight and exposition that she can move two decades ahead at the end of each chapter to supply new examples and extended observations in codas, without recasting the original. Together, the well-spaced contributions broaden her arguments on the future nature and direction of cyberdrama and its creators, the cyberbards.

Note two typographical errors: “[c]lowns” on page 22 and “ice planet Hath [Hoth]” on page 328.

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