In the chapter “From Additive to Expressive Form: Beyond ‘Multimedia'”, Murray claims that multimedia, or whatever people are referring to with the word, remain to be an additive form and have not yet been exploited of its expressive power, while the 2016 update illustrates how a lot of progress has been made in the industry ever since, in terms of the four affordances of digital environments: “procedural,” “participatory,” “spatial” and “encyclopedic.” In explanation for the terms “additive” and “expressive,” Murray says, “… additive formulations like ‘photo-play’ or the contemporary catchall ‘multimedia’ are a sign that the medium is in an early stage of development and is still depending on formats derived from earlier technologies instead of exploitig its own expressive power” (p. 83). Superficially, “additive formulations” refer to seemingly new media that present no essential breakthrough from their traditional predecessors, while “expressive” media are the ones that are actually innovative and significantly different from their predecessors. It seems to me that the two terms are more like two ends of a spectrum than they are definitive. There exist no standards with which we can define a medium as completely additive but not expressive, or vice versa. All new media, including VR, are to some extent more expressive compared to old ones; it is more a matter of degree of how much expressive power a medium has been exploited of. VR specifically, seems to be towards the more additive end in my opinion, given that it is still on an early stage of development and yet to be very accessible.
It appears interesting to me how Murray mentions the word “convention” a few times in different contexts. She attributes the success of Zork partly to how its designers used “literary and gaming conventions to constrain the players’ behaviors” (p. 96), while also pointing out that “hypertext fiction is still awaiting the development of formal conventions of organization that will allow the reader/interactor to explore an encyclopedic medium without being overwhelmed” (p. 105). Convention seems to be a constraining factor for new media to be more expressive; nonetheless, it is also important that new media break out of old conventions and build new ones. For instance, Murray categorizes e-book as an additive medium, but Kindle, the most famous e-book, channels some conventions of book and as a result, succeeds commercially. Would Kindle still be successful if it displayed text, rather than on separate pages like a book, on a continuous page where readers have to keep scrolling down? The question is, how do we build a new medium upon old conventions but not get contrained by them?