Steven Jones
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The Book of Myst in the Late Age of Print Steven Jones © 1997 PMC 7.2 only use Research © copyright: Cyan, Inc., Spokane, WA MYST is a registered trademark of Cyan, Inc. DISTRIBUTION: FOR The Myst Age – NOT 1. 2020 My point of departure is the fact that the 1993 Broderbund-Cyan CD-ROM game Myst has sold an estimated two million copies to date, making it among the most widely experienced hypernarratives (if not, Simionato, strictly speaking, hypertexts) in our time.1 Only the Andy Web as a whole has allowed more users to follow more forking paths to unexpected if not indeterminate ends. and Even if we grant the phenomenological differences between a literally textual and a graphical environment, theorists of hypertext would do well to pay attention to Donnachie Myst and what it reveals about the place of the Book at this late moment in the history of print culture. When ann the stand-alone CD-ROM game is situated in the context of cultural production (in this case, materially, Karen the publishing enterprise), the world-making impulse by figured in the very structure of the game, as successive or parallel "ages" or technological regimes, tellingly gives way to messier arrangements in the social nexus-- classes extraneous networks, intertexts, contradictory modes of production, overlapping markets of users, hybrid studio notions of genre, sparse or tangled, end-less webs of for provisional links. Myst and its production makes a text is worth reading, in part because of the way it reminds us of what we know but are continually tempted to forget: reading that no text--much less hypertext--is an island. This 2. Despite its graphical interface and its being marketed as a virtual reality game, Myst is fundamentally a hypertext product. It was developed in the early, quintessentially hypertextual software, HyperCard,2 and one navigates the spaces of the game by clicking through successive cards in a series of stacks; it's just that the cards contain images rather than verbal lexias. Besides, as others have noted, Myst has deep (sub)cultural roots in command-line games like only Adventure and Zork, with their virtual environments the use player manipulates by way of raw text.3 ASCII commands--turn left; open trapdoor; pick up torch--are replaced in Myst and its species of game Research with mouse clicks through a lushly rendered series of images (over 2500 in this case). In effect, such hypermedia games translate hypertext into pictures. Another way to put it is that they amount to nonverbal DISTRIBUTION: renderings of what Michael Joyce once articulated as the ideal hypertext experience, in which "movement" FOR takes place as a series of "yields" to the touch of the – NOT hand of the user. 4 In this case, the user's hand holds a mouse and the onscreen cursor is the familiar tiny-hand 2020 icon. Trial and error, experimental wandering, is the only way short of an "external" hint book to learn which objects or paths "yield" to a click. When Simionato, frustrated or trapped--in the dead-end tunnel of a maze, for example--one is at first tempted (as the Andy documentation warns us) to give in to unproductive "thrashing," clicking wildly on every possible feature of and the scene. 3. Donnachie Viewed more positively, this potential for frustration ann looks like freedom. The lack of directions and paucity of verbal clues in the game are precisely what most Karen 5 reviewers have praised. Like stumbling into someone by else's dreamscape or stepping into a quiet surrealist painting, the general opinion runs, this game encourages the suspension of disbelief in one's freedom classes to navigate. The paths fork and you must choose, but there is no default motion sweeping you along: you studio stand still until you click. And since, as the publicity for for the product repeatedly makes clear, no one dies in this is game--Myst is an antithesis to the maze game Doom--the user tends to relax into the rhythm of aimless wandering, a flâneur without the crowd, reading strolling, alert and yet dreaming, ready to respond with This a forefinger click of focussed attention to any phantasmagoric object or scene. By far the most promising objects, however, those that yield instant transportation to other "ages," turn out to be the enigmatic, backlit, fetishistic, leatherbound books that are everywhere you turn in this landscape. 4. only From Arthurian narratives to Romantic and Victorian poetry, of course, magic talismanic books use have been central devices in the romance-quest tradition, a tradition whose complicated history eventually sweeps up games like Myst. But we can be Research more precise than this. The books in Myst are clearly self-conscious products of our own Late Age of Print. Their magic is of a historically specific kind, connected to hypertext and what it portends for the aura of the DISTRIBUTION: Book and its culture. FOR 5. – NOT In fact, brothers Rand and Robyn Miller, the celebrated creators of Myst, explain their design in 2020 terms that will sound familiar (to say the least) to any theorist of hypertext.6 In one interview, for example, Rand reports that the "interactive story design" of the Simionato, game "went along two paths--the linear and the non-linear." Andy The linear was the back story and and the history, all those elements that followed a very strict time-line. The non-linear was the design of the worlds and was more like architectural work. Like Donnachie building a world without the time ann element at all--a snapshot of an age. Now the struggle was to try to merge the two by revealing some Karen parts of the linear story during by the exploration of the non-linear world, while maintaining the explorer's feeling that he/she can go anywhere and do anything they classes please.7 studio So described, the celebrated freedom of such for game-play, the "non-linear structure" of the user's is constrained choices, exists in a tension with the sense of an ending built in under the game's surface. On one level, the story flows right to a single site: the reading subterranean cave of "D'ni" below the island's central This Library. On another level (or played another way), it remains on the surface of the island, free to move in a determinate but unpredictable number of directions. But the alternative levels of narrative are not equal. As Rand Miller sees it, "the end had to pull things back together for one of the several different ending scenarios." The plot stream that leads inevitably to these endings breaks through the surface of game-play intermittently, like the famous underground river of Coleridge's Xanadu. The user is, however, always only aware of something portentous rumbling just below the use surface of the island (partly prompted by the suggestive ambient soundtrack). Like Friday's footprints in the sand, there are teasing clues and signs of an Research overarching, providential plot, the mystery in the Myst. Most of the game was designed without a cinematic-style linear storyboard, but the designers did use structural maps and what they refer to as "top-down" flow-charts. As they point out, the DISTRIBUTION: subterranean flow of the story was intentionally built FOR into the user's experience of the landscape; if the designers couldn't completely constrain the paths taken – NOT by users, they could, as Rand Miller says, "gently nudge them, using clues and other information, toward the 2020 end." 6. Simionato, Although no user ever has to reach it, of course, the "authorized" endgame of Myst is a conventional Andy narrative denouement with a couple of abbreviated and forking paths. The bedrock of Myst Island--as well as the other "ages" or parallel universes to which players can travel--turns out to be a highly overdetermined oedipal story, like that of any number of Fantasy-SF Donnachie novels. According to Rand Miller, the story developed, ann which is to say: its "details came to light," not before but in the midst of designing the game. However, Karen because of the huge commodity success of the by CD-ROM, the codex book version--like the novelization of a popular movie derived from a screenplay's back-story--was published after the game, classes not as a luridly illustrated paperback in a standard SF trilogy, but as a relatively expensive hardcover studio ($22.95), by Hyperion Books. As a linked-media for publishing event, Myst: The Book of Atrus, makes a is fascinating text. reading This only © copyright: Cyan, Inc., Spokane, WA use 7. Its glossy boards are covered in photo-faux leather, Research complete with "water stains," "scratches" and raised and textured "gilt" corners, and its main title is represented as "stamped" or "burned" into the cover, with its subtitle apparently scribbled beneath with a pen, just DISTRIBUTION: above a mandala or rose-window emblem. Inside, the pages are artificially yellowed, the illustrations FOR deliberately primitive pencil or charcoal sketches from – NOT the protagonist's notebook. Clearly, this is a book that means to be a Book--and in as many ways as 2020 graphically possible. It is also a book about (magic) books, the story of a patriarchal wizard who possesses a Prospero-like techne that allows him to make worlds by writing them (or perhaps only to open portals to Simionato, existing, parallel worlds--this is kept unresolved). The same magic allows him (and others) to travel to these Andy worlds (or "ages") via special "linking books." A and functional prequel, The Book of Atrus ends literally where the game of Myst begins, its first-person Epilogue repeating the Prologue voiceover one hears at the beginning of the game--an "ending...not an ending," Donnachie written in the protagonist's journal, explaining that a ann lost Myst book dropped into a volcanic fissure earlier in the novel is, in fact, the very same small book that plops Karen down into the darkened, starlit space of your computer by screen when you open the game.