Johnson's account of Myst suggests that the game might be reduced completely to interface: that it could become, to adapt Haraway's terms, "all play," entirely disconnected from goals and outcomes, understood not as a dramatic stage governed by unity of time but as a persistent, stable environment open to leisurely exploration. I know that some people engage Myst on these terms, because like Johnson I am one of them. My first encounter with both Myst and Riven, taking in each case several weeks, began with aimless exploration, wholly driven by the fascinations of the interface. In each instance, though, I had on hand a Hints and Solutions book that could provide both help with particular puzzles and a general anatomy or 'walkthrough'; for the game. The presence of these revelatory texts puts another important wrinkle into the relationship of Myst and Riven to book culture. The solution book represents the linear reduction into which the game can always collapse, a kind of gravitational center for its various centrifugal energies. The attraction of this center can be very hard or ultimately impossible to resist. After many hours of dilatory play in which I solved occasional puzzles only in order to reach unseen portions of the world, I finally succumbed to temporal economy and took the book tour. Life is linear and short, but computer art, alas, tends to be fractal.

- Stuart Moulthrop, Misadventure: Future Fiction and the New Networks

Stuart Moulthrop's essay treats the games Myst and Riven as examples of new evolving forms of fiction. The term 'New Networks' of the essay's title is drawn from the work of Donna Haraway, and refers to an evolving networked, or information, society, replacing a hierachical industrial model. Haraway considers the social implications of such a transition, and suggests the disquieting threat of an emerging new order, where the seductive possibility of becoming immersed in 'play' leads to a dislocation from such concerns as practical morality and social justice. Moulthrop considers developments that have taken place in the thirteen years that have elapsed between the publication of Haraway's work and his essay. The emergence of shallow and sadistic games such as Doom and Mortal Combat, he suggests, appears to validate her hypothesis. By comparison with such games, the virtues of the morally complex Myst and Riven become apparent.

Moulthrop cites the work of Steven Johnson, which seeks to refute criticism from a traditional literary, or 'Gutenbergian', viewpoint, that Myst and Riven represent a shallow and debased genre, lacking the depth of character and plot afforded by traditional prose. Johnson insists that these games be treated as texts in themselves, to be evaluated in the context for which they were created, rather than by the standards of an inherently different medium. A player interacts with the elaborate interfaces of these games, he believes, much as a reader of traditional literature interacts with the written word.

The suggestion that Moulthrop identifies in Johnson's work, that Myst and Riven's complex interfaces can seduce the player into a state of detached play for its own sake, is implied, rather than directly stated. Moulthrop detects this tendency to lose sight of the greater goal in both his own and Johnson's playing experience. He interprets this as a negative symptom of the nature of the networked environment described by Haraway. His description of how he came to rely on a traditional linear text in order to navigate the complexities of a non-linear interface leads to the conclusion, expressed as a particularly succinct epigram, that that the seductive puzzle-solving nature of these games tends to obscure their underlying narrative. This, he appears to demonstrate, is inherent in their medium.