Is Hypertext Literature Dead? 208
First time accepted submitter dylan_k writes "In the 1990s and early 2000s, there was a lot of buzz about ideas like 'hypertext literature' and 'electronic literature.' Nowadays, it's easier to create those things than ever before, and there are plenty of digital texts but it just doesn't seem like authors are writing any new 'hypertext' literature these days. Why?"
Pet Food (Score:5, Insightful)
There was buzz about delivery pet food too.
Just because there's buzz, doesn't mean it's a good idea.
Re:Pet Food (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because there's buzz, doesn't mean it's a good idea.
I had not even heard of the term 'hypertext fiction' until I looked at the Wikipedia article. I thought he was talking about the New York Times. I can't imagine trying to either write it or read it as a novel. Basically it's a text based computer game. Apparently there isn't a whole lot of interest in same.
It's not dead, it just smells funny. (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know if I got the "hypertext literature" bit too well, but I think blogs are literature as much as books. So I don't believe that only because the format is different, "hypertext literature" is in itself dead.
crap idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Is there money to be made there? Then I'm in. (Score:2, Insightful)
Two words: Visual Novel
Yes, those Japanese "dating sims" (and Western analogues like the controversially acclaimed Katawa Shoujo) are precisely this. They're not only hypertext literature, they're multimedia. How much more 90s buzzwordy could you get?
Making those decisions is the writer's job (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Pet Food (Score:4, Insightful)
Quite frankly I find reading hypertext manuals and the like a lot more difficult than straight serial text with footnotes and references. But at least there's some justification for "click here to get more information on..." In fiction, it just makes things more awkward and hard to follow. It becomes a horrible distraction.
I'm reading it right now (Score:2, Insightful)
There's links all over this page!
Not a surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
As so often, the proponents of this forget that technology can only ease the least significant step in writing, namely replication. Creation of the content is a creative act and "hyperlinked" literature is very hard to create. I might also point out that there were examples of this long before the web, with manual links ("go to page xyz, section a") and that never caught on either, for exactly the same reason.
People that are surprised here do not understand content creation at all and vastly overestimate the worth of technology in aiding creativity. It is almost nil. What the Internet can do well in this regard is content delivery/content replication, but that is it. Does not make writing the stuff any faster or easier.
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
First, like any other piece of literature, you need a narrative that's going to keep the reader's attention. A fancy interface only goes so far if the underlying message is boring.
Second, you need an interface that's going to complement the story. If you litter your text with hypertext links and call it a day, you're doing favors to nobody.
Third, both writing and coding something worthwhile take effort, and doing both at the same time, with the intent of making them work well together, takes even more effort than doing either separately. Frankly, it's just not worth it much of the time.
There are narratives that work well in a hypertext medium, though. Two that come to mind are Hobo Lobo of Hamelin [hobolobo.net], a fable that's being written slowly but surely, and Bear 71, a 20 minute 'interactive documentary'.
Re:The opposite. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a gimmick, it's like 3D movies and internet-enabled television. While there might be a few success stories(Avatar, Hugo), there are mostly failures(most 3D movies and almost all 'smart' tv). That doesn't mean the success stories have no value, nor does it mean that there won't be more, but does the average reader want literature in the form of a reference work? Nope, just like the vast majority of movie goers don't want the hassle and extra expense of 3D, and the *extremely* vast majority of television buyers just want a great picture and shrug when someone tells them they can share their movie watching habits on twitter at the click of about 5 buttons. It's a format in search of an audience, and has been found wanting. It also complete ignores the fact that the entire point of literature is to chain together words in such an order that it can cause a universal reaction in an audience. All art seeks that universal experience. When you turn it into a wikipedia session, it might be interesting, but that doesn't make it either writing or popular.
This isn't intended to belittle any rare exceptions. It's just that, like evolution, the audience has voted. It's not thriving.
Because authors are not interested (Score:5, Insightful)
Authors are as a class people who are in love with words, specifically their own. When they write a novel, they want the reader to consume it from beginning to end, not missing a single word. So for them, there isn't much joy in pouring a significant amount of work into a target hypertext segment where 90% of the readers will miss it. And if it's going to be skipped over anyway, why waste time polishing their words? What's the point of them coming up with a secondary narrative flow that is in no way essential to the plot? On the other hand, if the hyperlinks are essential, meaning the reader is obliged to click on every link to get a full understanding of the plot, then at best it's no longer a novel, but a puzzle or gimmick. (Which are fine endeavors, no doubt, but the cross-section of high quality puzzle-creators and good novelists is rather small, and the people who care to do both at once, even smaller. (Think of parentheses as proto-hypertext, for instance. How many authors can successfully place parentheses within parentheses, without the whole exercise turning into a mess (and how many would even attempt such foolishness)?)) And at worst you have an exercise in tedium, both in terms of reading and in terms of creation.
Re:Because it is difficult (Score:4, Insightful)
Most audiences above the age of 6 just want to be told a story, not to direct it themselves. There just isn't a demand for choose-your-own-adventure storytelling.
Furthermore, there's little excess supply of it because how many writers want to tell stories that way? When I sit down to write a story, it's because I have a plot in mind for it, or at the least a character arc in which the protagonist begins at point A and ends at point Z. The possible detours off to M, Q, and V... just don't interest me.
What literary problem is it solving? (Score:3, Insightful)
What is the literary problem that hypertext is solving? In most cases there's no need for it. Infinite Jest might work better with hyperlinks -- if you can stand reading something like that on a screen.
There's tons of literature on the web now. If you write poetry or fiction and you're name isn't Stephen King or something, that's where you're publishing. In fact there is a good deal of literature in html format, but most of it doesn't use hyperlinks because the work doesn't call for it.
I write fiction and poetry and publish on the web. I'll use hyperlinks when i feel a need to. I haven't so far. Maybe when i set something in the mid-nineties...