When the media scholar Janet H. Murray was asked to write a new preface to “ Hamlet on the Holodeck ,” her influential book, from 1997, about digital narrative, she was tempted to make it three words long: “I was right!” Depending on how generous you want to be, you could say that she predicted the constructive pleasures of Minecraft, the frustrations of Apple’s Siri, and the social story-worlds of massive multi-player online role-playing games (M.M.O.R.P.G.s). Her over-all argument was simple: though there is a tendency to think of the computer as “the enemy of the book,” it is in fact “the child of print culture,” a powerful representational medium of its own that promises to continue the evolution of storytelling and “reshape the spectrum of narrative expression.” Books are good at delivering essentially linear stories, she insists, while computers are good at telling stories of a different kind: procedural, participatory, encyclopedic, and spatial. And they’re particularly good at telling stories that reflect the digital age—stories about fractured realities, complex systems, and networked ways of being in the world.

Upon the book’s release, Michiko Kakutani , in the Times , dinged Murray for a “ utopianism ” that “colors all her arguments in this volume, leading her to ignore or play down the more disturbing consequences of technology while unabashedly embracing its possibilities.” Many digital-media scholars, meanwhile, thought that Murray’s view of the future was too shaped by the forms of the past: video games are not new kinds of novels, these critics said, but something entirely different. “Hamlet on the Holodeck” didn’t sit entirely comfortably with any crowd—but, then, neither did Murray, a lover of postmodern technology who hates postmodern theory, a digital-media scholar with the reference points of an old-fashioned literary critic, a literary critic who writes in the future tense. Murray began her career, in the sixties, as a systems programmer at I.B.M. She was only there to save money for graduate school, and she left as soon as she could to pursue a Ph.D. in English literature, at Harvard. But, unlike the novelist J. M. Coetzee, who also worked as an I.B.M. programmer in the sixties , she kept a close eye on the world she left behind. She never forgot the time a “hacker” colleague made one of the room-size behemoths toot an inhuman rendition of the Marine Corps Hymn.

As Murray told me recently over the phone, her world view as a media critic is largely shaped by what she learned in graduate school, where she focussed not on a single literary period but on the novel as it changed across the centuries. Her research gave her an evolutionary view of how narrative forms develop: after a new medium is invented, storytelling conventions don’t crystallize overnight; they get refined incrementally, often in complex dialogue with the needs, desires, and problems of the cultures that produce them. But her scholarly career was also influenced by her experiences at I.B.M.—and by the places where she ended up being a professor: first M.I.T., then Georgia Tech, places with an “engineering mentality” and an Enlightenment frame of mind. At M.I.T., her students showed her ELIZA and Zork, two radically different experiments in digital narrative: the former was a sophisticated chatbot; the latter was a text-based adventure game. Murray resolved to practice literary criticism not just by writing but by prototyping. With the students in her lab, she started trying to come up with as many new storytelling forms as possible. The goal was always to see if any of them might stick.

In other words, Murray became devoted to creating “incunabula,” a term meaning “swaddling clothes” that is used by book historians to describe awkward experiments produced just after the invention of the printing press. Digital incunabula are the main subject of “Hamlet on the Holodeck.” When Murray analyzes a video game, or a piece of hypertext fiction, or a primitive A.I. character, she seldom praises it as a complete or refined narrative experience. What she celebrates is potential. She compares Myst, for instance, a seminal first-person adventure game from 1993, to the juvenilia of the Brontë sisters, who told stories to one another about tense dungeon-crawls in a “regressive, violent, overheated emotional universe.” Fans of Myst and fans of the Brontë sisters seem equally likely to resent this comparison. But Murray’s point is that the juvenilia became “Jane Eyre,” and that rough-hewn digital stories are best understood as the evolutionary predecessors of forms that are yet to come.

Revisiting the book two decades later, Murray can assess which of the awkward amphibians she once championed have turned into stable species. In the first edition, she celebrated “multi-user domains”—hacked-together, text-based chat rooms that placed multiple people in the same fantasy-themed story-world—as a narrative form that leveraged the computer’s participatory powers. Now we have M.M.O.R.P.G.s. She celebrated the multiple branching paths of interactive fiction but lamented that the form was an obscure and mostly academic pursuit; now platforms such as Twine have made it democratic and easy to produce. Video-game stories have become richer, their conventions more recognizable. I asked Murray about “walking simulators,” a proliferating genre of narrative games that don’t involve combat but instead unfurl a story as you move through a detailed, elegiac, usually abandoned space. That the form has become familiar enough to earn a name seemed to validate her argument about the medium’s evolution. She agreed—up to a point.

Murray reminded me that the term “walking simulator” was likely pejorative at first, rooted in a “misconception that there are two different categories, narrative and game, and you’re either one or the other.” This is the dichotomy that comes up most often in criticism of “Hamlet on the Holodeck,” which inadvertently helped spark a largely tortuous debate in game-studies circles between so-called ludologists and narratologists: people who wanted to study games as abstract systems, on the one hand, and people who wanted to study them as narrative experiences on the other. In truth, no one, not even Murray, believed that games should be studied and valued for their narrative content alone. But she became the face of that particular straw man. As recently as this past April, the prominent video-game critic Ian Bogost, a colleague of Murray’s at Georgia Tech, assailed her book one more time—without naming her or it directly—in a widely shared piece that was provocatively, if misleadingly, titled “ Video Games Are Better Without Stories .”

In the original version of the book, Murray famously read Tetris as a narrative experience: a “symbolic drama” that immersed its player in an abstracted version of the frantic busywork of postindustrial modernity. To work tirelessly to slot blocks into the right spaces, never finishing, always failing, is to feel something like the Sisyphean struggle to complete a mountain of tasks in an ever-shrinking day. Her interpretation attracted jeers from self-identified ludologists; the games scholar Markku Eskelinen called it “ interpretive violence ,” chastising an apparent “determination” on her part “to find or forge a story at any cost.” In the new edition, Murray responds by forging a story about her critics. They want Tetris—or Candy Crush, or perhaps the screen itself—to be a refuge from narrative, she argues, because they’re embroiled in too much narrative already. “It’s a seductive fantasy, very fragile,” Murray told me—the idea that games or other software “can protect us from any reference to the life world,” and just be “an immersion in manipulating symbols.” The fantasy is pervasive: she suggests that GamerGaters, old-school cultural gatekeepers, ludologist hard-liners, and people on the subway are all alike in their implicit desire to imagine games as an otherworld, a playground separate from wider cultural forces.

For some, she writes, “objections to the possibility of deeply meaningful digital narrative forms” are rooted in “empty expressions of nostalgia for older media artifacts.” But for others it seems to be something else: a need to keep digital technology away from “the cultural and narrative dimensions of representation” altogether, as if it could remain a realm of pure function. For Murray, digital space must be understood as deeply enmeshed in the existing cultural terrain—and the digital moment must be understood as an extension of history, rather than a new beginning or a terrible end.

While Silicon Valley hubrists and Luddite humanists both see digital technology as an agent of disruption, Murray tells a story of continuity and growth, of computers inheriting and expanding, rather than upending, the landscape of human expression. Like many forward-thinking dispatches offered during the first dot-com bubble, “Hamlet on the Holodeck” can feel dated at times, superseded by a future that is, broadly speaking, darker and stranger than the one Murray anticipated. “I think I must be by temperament an optimistic person,” she told me. She quickly added, however, that she does not share the “naïve optimism” of the futurist Ray Kurzweil, for instance, who heralds the moment when human intelligence will merge with A.I.—or of the V.R. entrepreneur Chris Milk, who believes that virtual reality can instill empathy in people like a moral software update. She prefers the rationalism, and the humanism, of old-fashioned science fiction.

Even now—especially now—Murray’s book can feel like a lit-crit version of Spaceship Earth, the ride that chugs its way through the giant golf ball at the center of Epcot, depicting the history of communication as one unbroken, magnificent story that begins with cave paintings and extends through Steve Jobs. I find it hard not to feel a lot of skepticism when I ride Spaceship Earth. I find it hard not to feel a little moved at the same time. I know that at some point its creaky dolls will be replaced by something smooth and branded and full of ectoplasmic digital projections. And I know that when that happens, I’ll miss the kind of story it told.