In both “From Additive to Expressive Form” and “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis”, Janet H. Murray and N. Katherine Hayles respectively touched on the same point regarding digital storytelling: it is not enough to simply analyze the content of the narrative being presented, we have to consider the capabilities of the medium and how they shape the experience of the story being told.

“From Additive to Expressive Form” focused on the interactive and expressive elements of digital media, both of which brought to mind for me the rise in plot elements of video games over the last thirty years (quite possibly because of the mention of Zork). When video games first came out, something as simple as Space Invaders was sufficient; the bad guys come down, you shoot at them until they finally get you. Now even fighting games like Tekken feel the need for plot lines, and deeper story driven games like Skyrim  are wildly successful. However implicit in each of these narratives is still a particular view of the world; even in games where any path is open to you, some are denoted as “good” and others as “bad”, and there is a defined sense of morality.

An example from “Print Is Flat” that I found particularly notable was the discussion of the historical consideration of what literature was: “Consistently in these discourses, material and economic considerations, although they had force in the real world, were elided or erased in favor of an emphasis on literary property as an intellectual construction that owed nothing to the medium in which it was embodied.” I immediately thought of my mother reading The Hunger Games  in paperback, some person listening to it as read by the author on CD, my wife reading it on her Kindle, and myself seeing the movie. Did we all really experience the same story? Did any of us? Taking it the step further and thinking about the interactive and expressive elements of digital media, what if we got to decide the order in which we experienced the story, or which elements of it? What about a game based in that world? Will it still be the same narrative? Obviously not, so how do we compare it to the original story, or others? What criteria do we use? Or does it become something completely different, like trying to compare a painting to a novel?