A further narrative dimension is added by the technique of mise
en abîme, a reflexive structuration, which results in a front-to-back
dimensionality, thus creating a three-dimensional narrative
space. A reflexive structuration is given through the motif of the
printed book. The book is used as a means of orientation. But a secondimportant
function of the book lies in its mediation between the reader or user and
the narrative worlds. It is the entrance to
worlds created by an author or, as in Myst, worlds created by two programmers.
The book is the traditional interface. In the case of Myst this interface
is doubled in an interesting way: As interfaces of the medium computer,
the screen and the mouse are typically named. In Myst an additional interface
is chosen which illuminates the narrative function of the traditional printed
medium. The narrative space in Myst mirrors well-known narrative spaces
in a new dynamic and interactive medium. The spatial configurations and
elements in a computer game oscillate between being signs and being images.This
means that the images used in a computer game have to be read in away similar
to words in a written text. This reading process depends on the underlying
program which can be compared to the spatial
metaphor of traveling. This metaphor combines the static aspect which
is connected to space with the dynamics of time. To travel means to pass
different places in time.
As Tabbi and Wutz (1997) have shown, computer graphic interfaces construct
a rich 3-dimensional space through the successive layering of 2-dimensional
grids.
"These interfaces have been generally understood as visual and spatial.
A closer look at the sedimentary overwriting of these grids, however, belies
the attempted separation of time and space. A computer graphic is not in
itself spatial. ... Every location ... in the grid ... is in fact equidistant
from any other location; what separates one point from another is the processing
time it takes to link the locations. That many literary commentators continue
to regard the electronic image as primarily spatial and immaterial testifies,
not only to the abstract, unseen, and generally ignored processes that
underlie the operation of a microprocessor, but to the continuing power
of the "pictorial turn," a modernist aesthetic that seeks to turn temporal
processes into spatial ones" (Tabbi&
Wutz 1997).
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