Since I first heard them, I have had an instinctive liking to Janet Murray's Four Essential Properties of Digital Environments: Procedural, Participatory, Spatial, and Encyclopaedic. They are put forward in Hamlet on the Holodeck. Cambridge: MIT P, 1997.
Still, the "spatial" property puzzles me. I wonder if it is not a mix, or sliding, of metaphors. As a history, she mentions PARCs desktop, Pong and PacMan, and the Aspen Movie Map, all visual, before coming to ARPANET.
We recognize the fruit of all of these developments in our conceptualization of the digial domain as 'cyberspace,' an environment with its own geography in which we experience a change of documents on our screen as a visit to a distant site on a worldwide web (Hamlet, 80)
Murray is aware that this cyberspace is something else than GUIs. She continues:
Although this spatial property has been widely exploited in graphical applications, it is in fact independet of the computer's ability to display maps, pictures, or even three-dimensional models. It is also independent of its communicative function in linking geographically distant places. (ibid.)
This, to my eye, negates everything that has been said up to this point. Then:
The computer's spatial quality is created by the interactive process of navigation. We know that we are in a particular location becouse when we enter a keyboard or mouse commend the (text or graphic) screen display changes appropriately. We can verify the relation of one virtual place to another by retracing our steps. (ibid.)
Now, it is not clear if Murray is describing computer displays in general, or texts which portray a landscape, a diegetic space. The paragraph above might apply to this blog: when scrolling down this page (yes, I should tidy it up), the "screen display changes appropriately", scrolling up is "verifying the relation of one virtual place (the bottom of the page) to another (the top) by retracing our steps. This is changing the surface of the text, the signifiers. But I think Murray is realy meaning diegetic space, as she continues:
The text-based dungeons of Zork, the sequenced stilles of the enchanter's isles of Myst, the flat worlds of the multilevel maze games, the crow's waterfall visible in the Placeholder VR helmet, the continuous three-dimensional world of the new videogame dreamscapes -- all are realized for the interactor by the process of navigation, which is unique to the digital environment. (ibid.)
She then continues describing a dramatic moment in Zork. Now, Zork is also her example of the computer's participatory property. In Zork, a player can take part in a story, a narrative, by entering commands. It is not clear to me why this is a different property from the navigation of space. Navigation is also entering commands. Furthermore, why is this different, in essence, from the first Property, the Procedural? What procedures are there that take place without some initial input, from a user or some other source? Murray's example of the procedural is Eliza. Eliza reacts to user input , following rules. As does Zork.
Rather than separating between different "core properties", I believe Murray is pointing to genres or figures of computer text. Yes, of course, computer texts are procedural. We must never forget that. Some of these procedures -- most I ever use, actually -- frequently wait for our input. This is what is participatory for Murray, when it is affecting a story. It is a use of procedure to create a text that describes a coherent diegesis. When we realise how we can affect this diegesis (but not fully, that's the drive for going on), then we participate. "In a way, the computer [is] programming the player" (ibid, 77). And if this diegesis has a world, a diegetic space, that is understandable and traversable, then it is spatial. Murray's three first properties, procedural, participatory, and spatial, aren't core features of computer texts, but a ladder of rhetorical forms.
I think.
Today, at least.
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