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.
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.
Re:Pet Food (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Pet Food (Score:5, Informative)
Reading Microsoft manuals in their outdated help app is a pain.
Behold, a Firefox extension for reading CHM files. [mozilla.org] :)
Cool! Re: TreeStyleTab for Firefox (Score:2)
Re:Pet Food (Score:2)
Re:Pet Food (Score:2)
Good point. If I want a text based computer game, I'll play http://armageddon.org/ [armageddon.org] (such a cool game).
Re:Pet Food (Score:2)
CYOA books and IF are decidedly not hypertext literature. Heh, it many ways, they're superior as far as the goals of hypertext literature are concerned :)
It's not the "reader as a participator" generally so much as "reader as a co-author" that hypertext literature was aiming for. Unfortunately, the best it ever managed was "reader as as an editor" in deciding the order lexias ought be read, and it does an extraordinarily poor job of that!
Joyce's Afternoon made the best use of the medium, as far as I'm concerned. Even then, it didn't do much to enhance the rather thin story. Reading through it, I felt like a detective searching for the basic plot. (It worked, as far as suppressing the memory of the accident was concerned, and his participation in it.)
Still, to most readers, it's like they've been given a stack of note cards with bits of the story written on them, all tossed into a sack and jumbled up. Their participation ends at selecting a card from the sack, which they must put back in before randomly selecting another!
If that wasn't enough, the tools at the time were unimaginably poor. Eastgate's Story Space program was expensive and not terribly good. Readers who purchased hypertext works had to install each book they purchased on their computer just like an application! The terrible experience of actually reading a hypertext fiction after all that was just insulting.
As to the question "is hypertext literature dead?" -- It was dead 10 years ago, almost completely dead 15 years ago, and should have been killed 20 years ago. Hypertext literature was an over-hyped mistake that we all could have avoided had Aarseth and others decided to try and make their careers on something else!
Hell, even Aarseth has moved on -- like a rat escaping a sinking ship!
Re:had not even heard of the term 'hypertext' (Score:3)
We're still locked into the classical style from inertia by the big media companies that don't want to do any work to package 6 endings into a book.
Some of us get immersed in fiction and just want to read it passively. There are text adventures and novels, and videogames and movies. There is room for everything.
Jus befause you have a tool in your toolbox doesn't mean you need to use it, or even should use it.
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...
Re:What literary problem is it solving? (Score:3)
The only example of a literary work that I think might be improved by hypertext is the Bible. Possibly there are other works of the same kind. Maybe "Grimms Fairy Tales". Basicly collections of well known stories that already HAVE external links in the outside world. E.g., "Snow White" is linked to "Snow White and Rose Red", etc.
Or possibly some of Zelazny's works could have links to others of his works in the same universe. The links are already present, but they are currently implicit rather than explicit. OTOH, building them in would require holding off selling each work independently until after they were all written. Not feasible.
Possibly they would be a good idea when collections of an author's works all set in the same universe are republished, but putting them in ahead of time is just not reasonable. It's not that it's not narratively appropriate, it's that the whole piece isn't created at the same time.
Re:What literary problem is it solving? (Score:5, Informative)
the definitive "hyperlinks" for the bible were published in 1890 and known as Strong's Concordance (which is, btw, possibly the most badass-sounding book title in the history of english), or more accurately Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible. there's a modern hyperlinked version here [biblestudytools.com] based on it, called the Interlinear Bible, which is remarkably similar and effective.
the problem with hyperlinks in literature is, i think, that they have to be both thorough and noticeable in order to be any better than mere footnotes. however, this means that they are going to be distracting, and most readers will end up skimming through the entire book wikipedia-style instead of reading it. i remember reading some awful literature on a cd-rom on my middle school computers, that tried to exploit this, but it didn't work very well. i guess a custom reader could be made to restrict hyperlinks somehow, but this is aesthetically hard to design; will probably have compatibility problems; and may even be intrinsically frustrating to the reader.
it's notable that much of the function of Strong's Concordance is to help the dedicated reader work through translation issues. it's a "metatextual" scholarly tool.
some kindle books have a feature where you can read other peoples' annotations. i think it's kind of sleazy to put a social network in a book, but it's maybe the only literary hypertext that is actually at all functional right now. note, again, this is metatextual.
Re:What literary problem is it solving? (Score:2)
The only example of a literary work that I think might be improved by hypertext is the Bible. Possibly there are other works of the same kind. Maybe "Grimms Fairy Tales".
I could see Niven's Known Space series working well with hypertext, not that the stories would change much, perhaps abridged to reduce local retelling. Referencing concepts detailed in other works could make an interesting reread.
Problem is: who would tie into a multi-novel 8x the size of Lord of The Rings? And, what would the publisher try to charge for it? The result of these two factors leads to an audience approaching zero, unless the links were "pay as you click..."
Re:Pet Food (Score:2)
Just because there's buzz, doesn't mean it's a good idea.
Now that "Don't Be Evil" is dead, I think your statement above should be Google's new mantra! Only with a capital B.
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.
Re:It's not dead, it just smells funny. (Score:4, Informative)
Blogs are not hypertext literature any more than an webpage or a heavily annotated eBook would be considered hypertext literature.
Hypertext literature is an entirely different beast. Aaraseth's Cybertext: perspectives on ergodic literature discusses it at length. Unfortunately (or fortunately!) he's one of the few who took the medium seriously.
Janet Murray also writes briefly about it Hamlet on the holodeck and Nick Montfort (the average slashdotter should know who he is) mentions it briefly near the beginning of Twisty little passages.
For actual works of hypertext literature, you should check out Jackson's "Patchwork girl" and Joyce's "Afternoon". Of course, after you stumbled through those two, you'll see why hypertext literature never really took off
Because it is difficult (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Because it is difficult (Score:4, Interesting)
Yup. Samuel Delany tries a little of this here and there and it not only looks strange, it's also difficult to read. Hyperlinking is throwing off some ideas like multiple finishes to a novel. If it's going to flower as a new art form, it has to start with an idea that is really new and not just an obvious mechanism. It's probably even odds that someone has actually come up with genuinely new fiction that is enhanced a lot by its hyperlinking, and it's sitting on a drive someplace with the creator wondering what it is for.
Re:Because it is difficult (Score:2)
Imagine if you had a "choose your own adventure hypertext book" where each page only had 2 different options that don't ever merge. After 16 of these steps you'd have only:
1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + 16 + 32 + 64 + 128 + 256 + 512 + 1024 + 2048 + 4096 + 8192 + 16384 + 32768 + 65536 = 131072 pages to write.
So most authors would eventually merge many paths, but then it starts looking like a linear story. And for what benefit are those paths for? When you go to a restaurant for a good meal you might want some choice, but you don't want a zillion choices. You don't want to choose which herbs go in your dish etc, you want the Chef to make most of the decisions and hopefully you enjoy the final result. So you pick a book, and you hope the author has written stuff that you'd like.
On the other hand, I think it would be interesting if Tolkien was alive today and put his stuff on wikia or something. I might actually pay to access that
Re:Because it is difficult (Score:5, Funny)
1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + 16 + 32 + 64 + 128 + 256 + 512 + 1024 + 2048 + 4096 + 8192 + 16384 + 32768 + 65536 = 131071
FTFY
Come on, people! This is Slashdot! There is exactly one odd summand of the left-hand side, so the sum must be odd.
Re:Because it is difficult (Score:2)
But on the other hand, perhaps the genre is dead because no good authors chose to use it as a medium, only crappy authors picked it up. Or as the article mentions, the genre's works of Shakespeare may be sitting on some person's hard drive waiting to be discovered in the future, they are simply hidden for the moment.
Re:Because it is difficult (Score:2)
It is really hard to write fiction with multiple hyperlinked threads. It is also not very pleasant to read
Oh yeah, with this there can be no disagreement. As to that part of fiction that is called literature, I do not think that it is even possible to write it as hypertext.
Literature is a one dimensional thing: one word follows another, one sentence has meaning because of the sequence of sentences that came before it, each chapter or verse can be uniquely identified by a single number: its distance from the beginning. Other uses of language are not so limited: think of organizational charts, flow diagrams, and the like: you can jump in anywhere and have multiple choices of directions to folllow. But these are not literature.
A Euclidean definition of literature could start by saying that a piece of literature has no color, no taste, and no branches. It has only one point of entry, only one place of ending, and only one route between the two. Anything else, like fiction written in hypertext, might be good or bad art, but it is not literature.
We are going to need a new category for the emerging art of constructing pieces of fiction like the blueprints for the Starship Enterprise, the dictionaries and grammar of the Klingon language, and so on. Many of these works are essentially hypertext constructions, and some are quite elegant, definitely pieces of art. But they are not literature; they are representatives of a genre that we have not needed to name before now.
Re:Because it is difficult (Score:2)
Literature is not inherently one-dimensional. It's just almost always presented that way for many very good reasons. Economy of effort is one of those.
Consider, I believe it was, Rashomon. The same event cycle was repeated as seen though the eyes of several different characters. Quite effective. Definitely literature. Extremely difficult to do.
Whenever several narratives take place in the same "world", and interact, then each thread can be handled separately, yet it still makes sense to link them at the points of interactions. The link would involve seeing a single event through one character, switching over to seeing it through another character, and then continuing with the second character. This will usually be weaker unless the various narrative threads have previously been followed separately. So it would require more investment by the reader as well as by the author. Both of which are reasons why it is rarely done.
Re:even possible to write it as hypertext (Score:3)
Dickens is an interesting corner case. He wrote much of his work as serializations published monthly, a few dozen pages each month. The primary intent was probably financial but there were some very strong impacts on the art as well.
Financially, this was a very successful ploy as it allowed Dickens to write to the huge and under served market of common laborers who could not easily afford the price of a book, but could set aside a few pennies each month to buy the next installment. It was not uncommon in boarding houses, etc, for several persons to pool resources to make the purchases, with each installment handed down from one to the next. The approach made a lot of sense for the publishers as well, since the big up front costs of printing a run of books was avoided. So this was a tremendous marketing success, as big in its time as the first pocket MP3 players have been in our time. And perhaps the impetus for the "reading groups" we see today, where once everyone has read the next chapter, they all get together over cheap wine and pre-sliced cheese samplers to gossip about the characters.
But the impact on the art was also incredible. Dickens was getting feedback from his readers, and was clearly paying attention to it: minor characters that had struck a chord were given larger parts in later installments; some of the subplots were almost certainly proposed by readers. Dickens was perhaps the first to write an interactive novel.
He was also one of the first creative writers to run into the problem of deadlines. I don't think that anyone who has studied his works would disagree that he sometimes inserted fillers to round out his monthly quota. When he needed 2,000 words to properly handle the next plot twist but there was only room for 1,000 more words in the next installment, he would pad things out, sometimes with brilliantly detailed descriptions, sometimes the padding was not so brilliant, doing whatever it took to end up with an installment that ends properly with some kind of cliff-hanger. Some of that padding would definitely be better put in hypertext footnotes, or better yet, deleted entirely. But then you end up with a Readers Digest Condensed version, and not the real thing.
Even so, Dickens told his tales one word at a time, one sentence after the next, never side by each. There is never a time when he required the reader to absorb two different threads at once before going on to the next thing. Nor can you do that in literature-- the closest you can get is the use of flashbacks, etc, to loop the reader back through a sequence. But a tangled thread is still a linear thing.
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.
Re:Because it is difficult (Score:2)
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.
What about video games? Some of the most popular games are basically choose-your-own-adventure movies.
Re:Because it is difficult (Score:2)
Bullshit. I am 31 and I am very much into visual novels. Ever17 FTW.
crap idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:crap idea (Score:4, Funny)
... and discover girls
This is /. - please explain. Are they some sort of attachment for your game controller?
yes, yes they are. (Score:4, Funny)
for certain meanings of 'game controller'
Re:crap idea (Score:2)
Re:crap idea (Score:2)
Re:crap idea (Score:5, Funny)
To hit puberty and discover girls, go to page 23.
To become a eunuch go to page 82.
To hit puberty and discover unix, go to page 64.
Re:crap idea (Score:2)
To become a eunuch go to page 82. To hit puberty and discover unix, go to page 64.
Why would those have different paths?
Re:crap idea (Score:2)
To become a eunuch go to page 82. To hit puberty and discover unix, go to page 64.
Why would those have different paths?
Once you discover Unix, it helps to have an epic beard.
Was it born? (Score:2)
[Incidentally, does that make it an abortion?]
Just a hunch... (Score:2)
... but I would say lack of money, i.e. no commercial potential. Lots of endeavors are difficult, but if they pay off, great. If not, not so great.
for the same reason (Score:3)
The opposite. (Score:3)
I haven't read TFA, but if the summary is anything like right, then they are dead wrong. From very recently,
http://www.apple.com/education/ibooks-textbooks/ [apple.com]
http://www.pottermore.com/ [pottermore.com]
And more people are reading more than ever before using hypertext - fiction, fact, opinion - every kind of literature you can think of. I think it's called the web, or something.
Re:The opposite. (Score:3)
To clarify:
The books that existed before Hypertext came along were the way they were because of the medium. Books are linear, searching is a PITA, pictures were expensive and static..
HTML and related technologies changed that. Many forms of delivering literature have flourished - youtube.com, 4chan.org and bbcnews.com spring to mind of examples of completely different formats of delivering content that can include story-telling, education and much more.
There's more literature out there than there ever has been before, and a lot of it is hypertext. Is all of it good, or high quality, or of lasting value? Of course not. But then there's plenty of dross printed on dead tree too.
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.
It happened, but it was called "games" (Score:5, Interesting)
The concept of "literature" as purely book-bound started to die when Dickens published as serials in magazines, short stores and bound novels, and also by reading extracts from his work on lecture tours. It was inevitable that ideas like hypertext would find new forms of expression. The premise of the article seems to be as if the car industry had developed by building tractor units to replace horses, and then never got around to the idea of combining them with the passenger wagon. The first motor vehicles were simply tractors. We don't look at the roads now and say "Whatever happened to the idea of pulling carts with engines?"
Re:It happened, but it was called "games" (Score:2)
As evidence that time is required, let us look at what we currently consider literature, the novel. The novel was well on it way by the late 17th century, but it was over 100 years later when "The Novel", what we now call literature was in full bloom. Take, for example, Sense and Sensibility, Madam Bovery to suggest classic english works. Sure we had literature prior to that, Shakespeare, The Canterbury Tales, The Iliad, Beowulf, but this is not considered modern literature. It was the literature of the time, and it evolved over time, until we are now at the Novel as Literature, and which certainly will evolve to something else, and maybe has with the like of Vonnegut.
While some may want to kill an idea after only a few years, typical for people who are afraid of losing power due to a paradigm(and yes I heave read the book), such naysayers are never the authority on the future.
Because it sucks (Score:4, Interesting)
Because it turns out that it is great for documentation, hence Wikipedia, but a really lousy way to tell a narrative.
Re:Because it sucks (Score:4, Interesting)
I like to read up historical topics on Wikipedia, and all those branches and different developments and final reunion of history lines are really faszinating and a good read. So yes, hyperlinking can be a very interesting way to tell a narrative, which in turn consists of many different interwoven narratives.
There are also narratives you can easily turn into hyperlinking, so for instance Michael Ende's Never Ending Story [wikipedia.org] has lots of points which you could turn into hyperlinks - often there is a substory indicated but not written down, instead you find the sentence: "but this is a different story and shall be told at another time".
Or imagine all those fan fiction written for the likes of Star Trek or Star Wars, which takes some characters and develop a separate story around them - they could have been turned into hyperlinks woven into the main story.
The Silmarillon stories could have been hyperlinks inside of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, and the Disk World novels form a large network of stories which are connected by places, names and concepts - and which could be hyperlinked at those connections.
The main problem with that concept is that it is a gargantuan task to write all those sub-plots and sub-stories, make them consistent with the main story, and don't lose your drive. I guess not many writers are productive enough to give it a try.
Re:Because it sucks (Score:2)
Some interesting effects are showing up. After an initial exponential burst, growth in terms of pages added is more or less linear, with some expectation that it will eventually level out. Interval between page edits is another interesting measure. After the initial burst it seems to be fairly constant, despite the increase in absolute number of pages over time.
I don't know that we can necessarily take this behavior as a way of bounding other forms such as hypertext literature, but it may help to inform what to look for. If the entire body of hypertext literature is growing at anything close to a linear rate, that would put it in pretty much optimal company. We shouldn't be too surprised if its growth falls short of that measure.
Making those decisions is the writer's job (Score:5, Insightful)
Very few linear narratives are literature (Score:3)
And in the last century, Ulysses is a work of literature in which not very much happens and there is little plot, it is just the (frequently very entertaining) account of two very different people wandering around Dublin on 16th. June 1904, and the way in which their paths cross.
There is no reason why a hypertext should not be literature, and the objection only makes sense if you think literature is storytelling - which most of it is not.
* I know people from many other cultures have the tendency to obey orders even from crazy people, but Moby-Dick is above all an
novel.
Re:Very few linear narratives are literature (Score:2)
Re:Making those decisions is the writer's job (Score:2)
Not such a tiny minority, but gaming (both computer and pen-and-paper) is much better way to achieve this than "hypertext literature".
Re:Making those decisions is the writer's job (Score:2)
Re:Making those decisions is the writer's job (Score:2)
A tiny minority want to do hypertext stories, but the minority that wants to get a created world and be thrown in it to buildtheir own story is not so small. It's estimated that 20 million people have played Dungeons and Dragons. The problem isn't that people don't want to build their own stories in a structured setting, the problem is that hypertext sucks at that--gaming does it much better.
Re:Making those decisions is the writer's job (Score:2)
gp. When I last read "hypertext fiction", it was actually called a MUSH. Multiple authors participated with each other in creating an interactive, reader driven story. The branching paths are simply too much work to depend on a single author for.
The problem with MUSHing was that simply some people are better storytellers than others. That, and the griefers, of course.
Never forget this classic: (Score:2)
Brad: The Game [bradthegame.com]
Back when I had an overnight job I spent a whole night playing around on that twisted "chose your own adventure" game/hypertext story.
Really, I think the best "hypertext" books were the Broaderbund Dr. Seuss stories I got for my daughter. They really were pretty cool and brought the book to life. The Ted Talk [ted.com] I watched last night sort of approached the subject as well.
Exceptionally annoying (Score:3)
Though it wasn't hyperlink, I have read a few works of fiction that seemed to think it was neat to put gobs of stuff in footnotes. Now these weren't footnotes that explained obscure things the reader might not know to be skipped if you understood, it was explaining a completely fictional concept/historical event in the universe of the work in question.
This thoroughly breaks the flow no matter how you slice it. If you can't work some material more naturally into the narrative than hyperlinks/footnotes/jarring parentheticals, then something is very wrong. It severely detracts from the enjoyment of the story if I stop mid sentence to read it. If I chose to defer reading the material, then some things may make no sense until I get to the footnote and I have to figure out where the footnote ties back into the narrative in some cases where it isn't quite self-evident.
Re:Exceptionally annoying (Score:3)
I do hope you're not talking about Terry Pratchett who tends to make footnotes just a part of the fun.
Motteux translation of Rabelais (Score:2)
I'm reading it right now (Score:2, Insightful)
There's links all over this page!
There's a whole lot of it. (Score:2)
Submitter, meet Wikipedia.
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.
Re:Not a surprise (Score:2)
And it was doable before. My point is that it has not gotten a lot easier to do due to technological advances and hence is rare.
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'.
It's still there in scientific and legal books (Score:2)
Of course, it always was (;-)) Hyperlinks were invented for footnotes and case citations.
For a quick look, see What's hot on CanLII This Week [www.slaw.ca]. I love the Leroy Smickle case described there (go to then end of the case link for the link array )
In literature, of course, they're pretty much a done fad.
--dave
Killed by a bad spoof (Score:3)
The genre was killed off by a gag book in 2003, "Escape from Fire Island. [amazon.com] It's a gay zombie hyperlink novel: "If you run toward the nearest ferry terminal, turn to page 44. If you flirt with the cute twink, turn to page 55. If you throw caution to the wind and join the nearest circuit party, turn to page 80." It was published as a paper book, and was badly timed -- the gay novel boom was over, and the zombie novel boom was years in the future.
writing (Score:2)
Because hypertext doesn't lend itself well to fiction. There isn't really much that you can add to a story with hypertext, and while a branching storyline sounds interesting in theory, that's exactly what it is: An interesting idea. By now the idea has been explored and found to be lacking.
Hypertext is great for non-fiction text, and I hope that the "revolution in textbooks" that Apple is trying - and the momentum that this will create for competition, results in more utilization in that sphere. A history book would be excellent if it were heavily interlinked, because most historic events are heavily interdependent with other events, with persons, locations, etc. etc.
The artform followed the wrong link... (Score:2)
Interesting that TFA has this quote near the bottom:
“With the rise of the Web, writing has met its photography. ..a technology so much better at doing what the art form had been trying to do..” — Kenneth Goldsmith
I completely disagree. Photography and painting are different art forms; and telling a story linearly is different from giving the reader the option of following different paths through a hypertext document.
Bottom line is that good writing is already hard to do, adding this extra dimension makes it beyond the ability of most writers (and readers).
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 authors are not interested (Score:3)
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.
Actually, if something isn't pie-in-the-face obvious, 90% or readers will miss it anyway. Even *intelligent*, *attentive* readers. Extracting nuance from a story is a tricky and unreliable process. So you can either talk down to your readers, or you can try to make the story work on more than one level. The advantage of not talking down to your readers is that you're more likely to produce a story that readers can read over and over again.
Sometimes authors put in details that only a one-in-a-million reader will notice. Tolkien did that in the scene where Bilbo gives Frodo the sword Sting. He doesn't just hand the sword over, he drives the sword into a wooden beam in Eldrond's house and Frodo takes it out. Decades later Tom Shippey pointed out that this is almost certainly a deliberate echoing of Odin in the Völsunga saga driving his sword into the tree Barnstokkr which grows in the hall of King Völsung so that only Sigmund is able to draw it out again. Once your attention is drawn to that detail, what had previously seemed like a throw-away scene starts to open up different layers of meaning.
Boundary issues (Score:2)
Hypertext doesn't respect intellectual property boundaries. Linking is stealing! </sarcasm>
Maybe... (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you believe hypertext is done evolving? (hint: the creator of word hypertext, Ted Nelson, doesn't think so - see quote, below).
Hypertext is still very young compared to writing. Our species has been working on writing for over 5,000 years [wikipedia.org], and on hypertext for about 60 years (original memex article, 1945 [theatlantic.com] (a fascinating read, btw - worth ten minutes of your time)
2) Who even likes non-linear stories?
Show me any medium where non-linear fiction is popular. Did you actually enjoy Memento [imdb.com]? There are precious few examples of popular non-linear fiction in any medium, including hypertext. (by "precious few" I mean that percentage-wise you can round the amount of non-linear works down to zero and still be reasonably close to the actual number).
3) Non-linear may just be too much work to read? (related to 2)
Humans love stories, but they have significant processing limitations [wikipedia.org]. Fiction is supposed to be entertaining (or at least interesting). (Hypothesis: reading non-linear fiction requires too much work to be fun, so nobody likes it.)
4) What if you are looking in the wrong place for non-linear "fiction".
Try here with games like Adventure, A History [rickadams.org] for your fiction.
Or possibly here: simulation games [slashdot.org]
In these cases, "fiction" has proven very popular indeed.
("But, But, that isn't serious fiction!"
*shrug* Maybe not.
But then again, maybe games and simulations are simply what non-linear fiction looks like.
Centuries from now, scholars may be studying the ground breaking work of great non-linear authors likeWilliam Crowther [wikipedia.org] and John Carmack [wikipedia.org] in much the same way that visionary creatives like Shakespeare [wikipedia.org] and Mary Shelly [wikipedia.org] are studied today.
So... about the evolution of HyperText:
Ted Nelson, the creator of the term hypertext, was unimpressed with HTML:(excerpt from here) [xanadu.com.au]
Trying to fix HTML is like trying to graft arms and legs onto hamburger. There's got to be something better-- but XML is the same thing and worse. EMBEDDED MARKUP IS A CANCER. (See my article "Embedded Markup Considered Harmful", WWW Journal, 1997 or 1998.) The Web is a special effects race, FANFARES ON SPREADSHEETS! JUST WHAT WE NEED!. (Instead of dealing with the important structure issues-- structure, continuity, persistence of material, side-by-side intercomparison, showing what things are the same.) This is cosmetics instead of medicine. We are reliving the font madness of the eighties, a tangent which did nothing to help the structure that users need who are trying to manage content. The Xanadu® project did not "fail to invent HTML". HTML is precisely what we were trying to PREVENT-- ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can't follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management. The "Browser" is an extremely silly concept-- a window for looking sequentially at a large parallel structure. It does not show this structure in a useful way.
(emphasis added).
Ted raises some interesting points; it is hard for me to think that HTML is the be-all and end-all of information.
I don't know that his "zigzag" thing is ever going to get traction, but
Re:Maybe... (Score:2)
As I stated in another thread in this article: gaming.
Re:Maybe... (Score:2)
I started writing my post when there were like eight posts on this topic, so I think I missed yours.
What I think is really interesting about TFA [nocategories.net] is the author Dylan Kinnett [nocategories.net] seems to have put some real effort into writing actual non-game hypertext fiction (e.g. books with links). [amazon.com]
I wonder if Dylan has ever thought of games. (I'm guessing not.)
*shrug* Maybe they would enjoy writing story arcs for games.
As I stated in another thread in this article: gaming.
Re:Maybe... (Score:2)
For a popular nonlinear work: Homestuck.
The entire (albeit vaguely defined) genre it belongs to is almost exclusively nonlinear as well.
Re:Infinite Jest (Score:2)
It looks interesting!
An interesting question "the fine article" didn't address is, "What makes a story linear vs non-linear?"
Actually TFA (author = Dylan Kinnet?) only talked about hypertext in general terms, and didn't say anything about how hypertext might be a good thing for litereature, just that somebody made some noise about it during the time of The First
Dylan did mention a few practical reasons why hypertext isn't useful in literature, which basically boil down to "hypertext is still young."
But Dylan's choice of title for TFA, "The Death Of Hypertext" is at best sensationalistic. Hypertext is far from dead.
The kindest thing I can think of to say about TFA is (to borrow Pauli's observation [wikipedia.org]) is to say that "It's not even wrong."
Hmm.
A more useful title would be "Why Aren't Hypertext Novels Commercially Popular?" excerpt from Dylan's list of hypertext literature: [nocategories.net]http://nocategories.net/hypertext [nocategories.net]
"A House Without Walls" is made out of one thread of the story I told with my first Hypertext. "A House Without Walls" is an allusion to the Orpheus myth. Two young lovers enter a psychological hell of their own making and attempt to escape. The narrative is designed to be read on an electronic device. It contains links, providing the reader a variety of disjointed paths through the text.
(empahsis added)
Since "A Hours Without Walls" [amazon.com] is only a $1, maybe I'll check it out and see if I can gain more insight about why hypertext literature isn't taking the world by storm. Maybe. (Wow! "Disjointed paths through a text about a psychological hell of their own making" you say? Sounds great!)
As for nonlinearity....
It is worth specifying which dimension's linearity we're talking about.
The obvious dimension one is the story's timeline - as created by the writer (or story's timelines in a presumably non-linear work).
Another dimension is the timeline of the story as perceived by the reader.
While I'm not a mystery-novel fan, I have heard some people like reading the "surprise ending" first and then going back to the beginning of the book.
*shrug* That is non-linear, kind of sort of.
The other use for hypertext I can see to add footnotes, but that just seems like "FootNotes 2.0" - the medium for written word (things like ereaders & tablets) needs at another decade or two to find its ubiquitous formats (and it won't be just one format).
Maybe somebody will come up with an awesome "multiple points of view" genre where every character's arc + interactions w/other characters & events is traced out and the reader can "browse" around "story space". *shrug* Maybe.
Because (Score:2)
Evolutionary Road Kill (Score:2)
Dude. I know the concept, thought I invented it while pulling an herbally influenced all nighter in college. I stayed up endlessly trying to write James Joyce worthy digressions and offshooting paragraphs which violated the system (both because I was violating the rules on "digression", and because I had a term paper due I was procrastinating). The next morning, I found out it was crap, or at best would have taken an exponential number of days to edit. For now, traditional allusions and/or sequels are the way to go, time is better spent writing a linear story with foreshadowing and allusions to other works.
Someday, perhaps, a future, more highly evolved being may find hypertext lit enjoyable as an art form, but I doubt they would want to read MY hypertext lit, which would seem to them like a volume of encyclopedias written by second graders or cave men. That future being will find anything we write to be sophomoric, but will perhaps get high and try to invent calculus literature, to be pondered by a yet further evolved being...
simple! (Score:2)
Hypertext fiction needs multiple authors (Score:2)
A lot of people pointed out various problems with hypertext fiction, but I think one of the bigger ones is the fact that an author wants a story read from beginning to end so that they don't waste effort on stuff the reader won't read. A lot of people have also mentioned that most examples of hypertext fiction have instead been called games, and I think a successful one would probably need to be approached more like developing a game than writing a story, with multiple writers branching off of a main trunk and working collaboratively. It could be an opportunity to explore different characters, ideas or settings that the trunk hints at but doesn't develop fully. So, in a sense, one could consider all of those "universe" novels (e.g. Star Wars universe, Star Trek universe) to be hypertext fiction of a sort, since that's essentially what they do.
Re:Hypertext fiction needs multiple authors (Score:2)
I don't really have any links on their process, but I have a friend who worked on Skyrim.
Broadly, different designers get to come up with their own ideas, and as a group they decide which to include. Once something is in, it sounded to me like a single writer/designer has a great deal of creative control over the particular quest lines they work on.
So you want to write a hypertread novel? (Score:2)
I'm thinking actual novel, not a pick your own adventure.
Why not do it through an intricate set of links on character's names? Every name when mentioned the first time in interaction, would be linked to the current story from their point of view. It would be interesting as a collab.
Everyone writing one POV, but must interact per scenes.
I would go with an arc and definite plotline, and leave ALL subplots to the interaction as it developed.
Re:So you want to write a hypertread novel? (Score:2)
Interesting that one of the Torch novels set in Weber's universe and one of the Harrington novels have an identical (word-for-word) chapter that appears in both where those two major branches came together for a bit.
I wrote a hypertext document once (Score:2)
Debunking the Epicurean Fallacy [fatherspiritson.com]
Many years ago I wrote hyperfiction... (Score:2)
In fact it's still probably http://www.journeyman.cc/~simon/bookshelf/hyper/mgi/ [slashdot.org]"> the largest hyperfiction ever written. It's not very good and I'm not very proud of it. The reason people aren't writing things called 'hyperfictions' any more is because they're now writing things called 'role playing games' - but they're still immersive non-linear narratives.
There's a lot; it's just not mainstream. (Score:2)
How to say? (Score:2)
I guess the main reason is that it is very difficult to really use the possibilities in the right way. What replaces the storyline? I think what comes closes to "Hypertext literature" are games. And even there the balance between the hardcore gamers, who want to explore the level for 80h and the casual gamers who want to finish the game in an evening usually goes wrong.
The SCP Foundation (Score:2)
Re:One man's Britannica is another man's Dickens (Score:2)
Re:One man's Britannica is another man's Dickens (Score:2, Funny)
Considering how much fiction is on Wikipedia, I think the man's question is valid.
Re:One man's Britannica is another man's Dickens (Score:2)
Well, I for one consider "Literature" to be a narrative flow set out by the author, that I enjoy following. So "Hypertext Literature" is not dead or alive, it's an oxymoron.
"Literature" in itself of course *maybe* just evolved in a day and age where it was the only technical means to convey either storytelling or discussion. Which both have a feedback from the audience. And I think "Hypertext Discussion" is pretty alive today, and there might be good ways to create hypertext storytelling experiences.
In "storytelling" for example, the storyteller just telling the "and then the prince arrived on his mighty stallion" might be interrupted by the question "when was the stallion born and where?" by someone in the audience. *THAT* could be implemented quite good in hypertext.
Re:One man's Britannica is another man's Dickens (Score:2)
In "storytelling" for example, the storyteller just telling the "and then the prince arrived on his mighty stallion" might be interrupted by the question "when was the stallion born and where?" by someone in the audience. *THAT* could be implemented quite good in hypertext.
It could also be implemented quite well by telling the person asking the question to give up with the irrelevant questions. Possibly followed by the application of a captive-bolt gun.
Re:One man's Britannica is another man's Dickens (Score:2)
You mean you never read those "choose your own adventure" books as a kid, keeping a stack of two or three pages back with your fingers in case Captain Kirk died so that you could pop your way back up the stack and try another path? Now imagine that, but with a back button.
Or perhaps better literature....
I could see this being interesting with an ensemble cast in which you get to choose which people to follow, and you end up reading the story from different perspectives, learning what the other characters were doing from conversations, etc.—one story, many variations.
Re:One man's Britannica is another man's Dickens (Score:5, Informative)
The best case for Hypertext Literature is the old Choose Your Own Adventure books. Those evolved into the old Infocom games which turned into the Sierra games which turned into RPG games which evolved into MMOs. If you want to do Hypertext Literature, pick one of the various forms of evolution and be done with it.
Re:One man's Britannica is another man's Dickens (Score:3)
FWIW I think authors tend to be quite precious when it comes to their manuscripts - they have firms ideas how the plot should play out, so giving the reader a choice in the matter will only appeal to a particular kind of jobbing writer. It's probably for the best - imagine how confusing it would be discussing a story with your friend, when you both took entirely different choices during the process of reading it.
Re:One man's Britannica is another man's Dickens (Score:2)
In fact, according to wikipedia "Texts based on factual rather than original or imaginative content, such as informative and polemical works and autobiography, are often denied literary status, but reflective essays or belles-lettres [wikipedia.org] are accepted." So wikipedia says wikipedia may not be literature, but Cracked.com is.
(Note that i'm not going to argue about the quality of Cracked.com, but the question wasn't if any _good_ hypertext literature was being written
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?
Re:Err, excuse me... (Score:3)
...but isn't it everywhere around us and called 'the Web' ?!?
It amazes me to see so many people claiming Wikipedia, the web or even bloody YouTube refutes the article's thesis. These are not literature in the sense TFA uses -- just as pre-web media like the daily paper, ads, movies, TV shows, encyclopedias ...
Re:Err, excuse me... (Score:2)
Re:Hypertext lousy for storytelling (Score:2)
You've never heard my wife tell stories, its completely non-linear with plenty of non-sequester tangents that revelel more than the main story arc does, before abruptly switching back to the main story, which now is really just a tangent to the previous tangent. You can participate in the piece, but emphasizing a word in the story with a facial remark or a brief "huh?" which will will start off another tangent related to that word, which may or may not become the main story.
Its pretty awesome to behold. I think I'm the only one who really loves her stories.
Re:Mac programs to create such documents? (Score:2)