Her talk was about digital interactive narratives and it focused on defining new forms of narratives suitable for digital media and on demonstrating the positive and negative features of some of the works that have been created to date. The point is that successful new narratives will bring together the richness, depth and complexity of traditional literature, embodied by the Bard and his Hamlet, and the technological power, role-playing fantasy and ultimate immersiveness of the Holodeck featured on Star Trek. The narrative of the future, according to Janet, should be a fully immersive yet literary experience.
History presents interesting precedents when it comes to defining new narratives.
In the late 19th century, the Lumiere brothers showed their film of a train leaving a station. This caused a panic in the cafe as people scattered away from what they thought was a real oncoming train. Janet calls the new digital narrative a 'cyberdrama'. As interactors, we implicitly expect the above qualities and we know how to behave within the narrative - we don't have to read a manual to participate in and enjoy the story. In digital narratives, the expressive form comes from exploiting the defining properties of the medium.