Fluid and organic content

Writing for the web, moreover, has its own unique rhetorical devices.

The use of hyperlinks, for example, effects the overall visual impression of a web document, the bits of coloured text adding credibility and suggesting further avenues of exploration, thus adding depth and authority to the document. The invitation for the reader to interact with the content creator or author is another rhetorical device unique to this medium; it suggests that content is fluid and organic, quite the opposite in fact, to content set in permanent type or print, and subtly suggests the potential for intimate interactive dialogue with the author.

And further rhetorical devices such as visual clues, icons, and typographic effects are utilised to aid in navigation, and allow the author some degree of control over where the user is likely to visit. (M.Milton)

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Multiple participants

Not only are computer-based forms of such fiction becoming widely available in new interactive forms, where the reader can participate actively in shaping the story, but network versions allowing for multiple participants are now emerging.

In terms of their potential for elaboration, and for a much increased payoff in suspense and personal engagement, networked interactive fiction games are a logical evolution both of current popular fiction and of arcade and video games. Their attractions will, of course, remove their participants yet further from the kind of engagement that has generally been considered appropriate for literary texts; as a result, literature, at least in North American culture, may be relegated to a status even more marginal than the one it occupies now.

Thus the revolution in network communications will perhaps bring about changes in the status of literature more radical than anything that we can envisage emanating from literature departments.

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Fragmenting

The selective interactivity of hypertext takes the possibility of fragmenting and juxtaposing to a higher level.

It remains to be seen whether the processing capabilities of the human mind are up to this level of complexity, or whether the point-and-click interactivity of hypertext merely allegorizes the aesthetic productivity of a certain form of imagination, without taking genuine advantage of the unlimited combinatorial resources of the electronic medium.” (Ryan)

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What is hypertext fiction

Hypertext fiction is a genre of electronic literature, characterized by the use of hypertext links which provides a new context for non-linearity in "literature" and reader interaction.

The reader typically chooses links to move from one node of text to the next, and in this fashion arranges a story from a deeper pool of potential stories. Its spirit can also be seen in interactive fiction.

The term can also be used to describe traditionally-published books in which a non-linear and interactive narrative is achieved through internal references. Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962) and Julio Cortázar's Rayuela (1963; translated as Hopscotch) are early examples (predating the word hypertext), while a common pop-culture example is the "Choose Your Own Adventure" format of young adult fiction.

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Author's job and interactive literature

Choose the future of interactive fiction

Books where you decide what happens sprung from the bedrooms of D&D-playing teenagers, but the form is having something of a revolution

Back in the 1980s, when most proto-geeks could only dream of owning a home computer that would run a primitive text adventure game in which you could PICK UP AXE and ATTACK ORC, the next best thing was, funnily enough, a book. And now they're back.

But it was a very special kind of book, which allowed readers to exercise some semblance of control over the plot through the decisions they took at the end of each segment.
These "choose your own adventures", half work of fiction, half roleplaying game, appear to be enjoying something of a resurgence, perhaps partly due to nostalgia and partly due to a generation weaned on the internet looking for the same interactivity in books.
If you want to explore this argument further, click on "Read More". If you want to take another path, then choose a different blog entry.

The re-emergence of the format has three main strands. Firstly, in what can only be pure nostalgia, the original "Fighting Fantasy" books have all been re-packaged and reissued. The book that started it all off, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, received the 25th anniversary treatment in 2007.

Just like early text-based computer adventure games, these gamebooks used the tools of heroic fantasy - dwarfs, goblins, quests and the like - as they both had their roots in insanely popular roleplaying games such as Dungeons and Dragons which arose in the 1970s. Fighting Fantasy books dispensed with the need for friends that made D&D so unwieldy. An American publisher, Wizard Books, re-released the original series of books and is adding new titles every year.
The second strand is the appropriation of the formula, in a very nudge-nudge wink-wink way, for a tale of thirtysomething angst called You Are a Miserable Excuse for a Hero, released in the UK by Virgin Books after success in the States. Bob Powers's book replaced the usual hack-and-slash fantasy stuff with choices such as "If you want to have sex with your ex-girlfriend, consider getting back together with her, then think better of it, go to page 183".

These modern rehashes look like a flash in the pan, with grown-up fans returning to the form in a blaze of nostalgia after an adult life spent getting used to web interactivity. Can a book replace a computer game, when a Nintendo DS is as easy to carry around as a paperback?
The last strand in the development of interactive fiction takes the idea in a different direction: it might be called a true web 2.0 version. In a similar way to how Elizabeth Baines wrote a blog-based novel last year with plot input from her readers, with varying results, new American publisher Underland Press is publishing weekly instalments of what it calls a "wovel" (it's a contraction of "web novel" - I know, I know, but give it a chance. It didn't take us long to get used to "blog", after all). Entitled The Living, it is a riff on the zombie genre and new instalments are posted every Monday. Depending on which way the vote at the end of each chapter swings, author Kealan Patrick Burke apparently writes the next chapter in accordance with the readers' wishes.

Whichever way the public takes it, Underland Press's The Living will eventually be released as a proper volume when the experiment is over. The question is, do readers really want the responsibility of driving the narrative, or is that the author's job? Make your choice now...

David Barnett

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Hypertextual experiment

Is there something personal in my work, other than my "personal" intellectual interests and political opinions?

There is always mention of mental relationship with otherness therefore. The work is also much more technically sophisticated, using HTML, Flash, sound software such as ACID, Photoshop, PHP, etc. At the end, the sound should be turned on for the whole thing because there is sound on the main menu page, but some pieces use sound and some don't.

Metabole is a collection of electronic textual experiments where the goal was to make philosophy interactive in a new and different way in each piece. I was experimenting with user interface design, and my goal was to have a unique user interface and programming in each text. For that reason, I did not make any traditional hypertext literature where you click on words in the text to get to new sections. Instead, each piece has its own kind of interaction. Some works are best seen as texts in their own right with fixed content, in which the user interaction just serves to explore the content, whereas other pieces are games or tools for users to create their own point of view. See the introduction for more on this.

In most texts, if there is fixed or dynamic content, it is on behalf of political reasons...

Flight of birds

Metaphors for interactivity in electronic narratives are rich and varied.

Some critics define the navigation actions taken by the reader as a kind of augury. In this interpretation, the reader is seen as the Roman augur, anticipating from the flight of birds the direction that the story will take. Some critics liken the electronic narrative to a game - one in which the reader becomes a player, selecting options to obtain a favorable outcome.
Others cite the Wunderkammer, holding that the electronic narrative provides the associational structure of a medieval cabinet or an assemblage by Joseph Cornell. And, still others describe the gathering of narrative incidents as bricolage – a wandering about, in which the reader uses whatever comes to hand to construct a personal collage - narrative. All of these metaphors provide insight into the process by which readers identify, select, and make connections between narrative elements in electronic literature.

However, each of them elides the complexity present in current electronic works. Comparing it to linear activities or even to physical spatial constructs may not adequately represent the nature of interactivity in electronic literature today. While electronic literature has considerable materiality, the syntax of interactivity is not so much a process or place, it is more like a language itself. As such, the links between electronic objects and between narrative events and outcomes have a flexibility akin to the grammar of transitions. Aspects of multilinearity, simultaneity, movement/resistance, and media oscillation all enter the inter-active potential of a hypermedia text (from M.C.Luesebrink).

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See that post with different algorithms in metabole

See the journal French Metablog with today different posts

Reality Mining

Reality mining explores a huge dataset on individual & group human behavior by capturing communication, proximity, location, & activity information from 100 subjects at MIT.

Several different interactive visualizations have been implemented to represent this huge, time-based dataset (approximately 350,000 hours or ~40 years of continious data on call logs, bluetooth devices in proximity, cell tower IDs, application usage, & phone status such as charging/idle).

So where's the value here? Taking the high road, MIT researchers say that you can use this sort of data to understand how organizational dynamics happen at work. You could streamline workflows and improve interoffice dynamics. As one example of reality mining, the Red Sox won the pennant during the study -- and the smartphones noted that it threw all the participants' behaviors into a tizzy. That reminds me of back during the first gulf war--Desert Storm--news outlets discovered that whenever Pentagon staffers stayed late and ordered lots of delivery pizza, something big was about to happen in the Middle East. So it sounds like we can think of Reality Mining as an automated way to collect intelligence about our lives through tell-tale signs like phone calls to pizza delivery restaurants.

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See that post with different algorithms in metabole

See the journal French Metablog with today different posts

Interactivity and Hypertext

In all cases of hypertextuality in Metabole, it is by using some hyperlinlinking functions that the user can "jump" from one node to another.

Then, we can extend the concept of interactivity, already utilized to describe one of the properties of a hypertextual page, to the whole hypertext. We can say that a hypertext is interactive because it allows the reader to choose for his or her own personal and often unique path of navigation through the nodes, and for the operations to carry out with the object-nodes present in each page-node.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/

See that post with different algorithms in metabole

See the journal French Metablog with today different posts

Alternumerics by Paul Chan

Alternumerics explores the intimate relationship between language and interactivity by transforming the simple computer font into an art form that explores the fissure between what we type and what we mean.

By replacing the individual letters and numbers (known as alphanumerics) with textual and graphic fragments that signify what is typed in radically different ways, Alternumerics transforms the act of typing into a digital performance and any computer connected to a standard printer into an interactive artmaking installation.