On a related note, I can spend hours and hours trawling through the star wars wiki [0]. It absolutely feels like a hyperlinked generalisation of reading a novel or series of novels. I haven't even read the books bar one or two lent from a friend when I was a teenager. There's a whole world to explore there in semi-dramatic text format. You can follow links that catch your interest and spin off on a tangent, never feeling compelled to follow and understand some central plotline. You can go from reading about how Darth Maul didn't actually die in Phantom Menace, to the ancient history of the Sith, to the invasion of the galaxy by the enigmatic Yuuzhan Vong and before you know it, half a day has passed.<p>[0] <a href="http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page" rel="nofollow">http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page</a>
I designed We Tell Stories for Penguin back in 2008, at Six to Start. It won Best of Show at SXSW in 2009:<p><a href="https://www.sixtostart.com/we-tell-stories/" rel="nofollow">https://www.sixtostart.com/we-tell-stories/</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Tell_Stories" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Tell_Stories</a><p>It told stories through Google Maps, blogs, real-time writing, and infographics. Sadly the website was ordered to be removed by Penguin, despite the fact we offered to continue hosting it for free ¯\_(ツ)_/¯<p>Also Smokescreen for Channel 4, which won Best Game at SXSW in 2010:<p><a href="https://www.sixtostart.com/smokescreen/" rel="nofollow">https://www.sixtostart.com/smokescreen/</a><p>This had gameplay and stories told via analogues of Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. All done in HTML - no Flash! Again, this was taken down by Channel 4, like tears in the rain etc etc.
I've studied this. There is an old art-form, there is extensive literature on this, there are professional organisations, there are annual conferences (the next major one being Electronic Literature Org. 2019 – ELO2019 – is in Cork[0], Ireland, where I study – please come, we'd <i>love</i> to have you).<p>When was this article written? Let's <i>not</i> call this hyperliterature. It may come as a surprise to some but words have meaning. And some of those meanings have been allocated. Hypertext fiction[1] (and poetry) is already a thing.<p>Source: two people very close to me wrote their dissertations on this topic and I edited one of them.<p>[0] <a href="http://elo2019.ucc.ie/cfp/" rel="nofollow">http://elo2019.ucc.ie/cfp/</a><p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_fiction" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_fiction</a>
Do I have to be the one to say it? ... Homestuck definitely fits within this category. I think a lot of experimentation within comics and webcomics is under-recognized in this area.
How does one preserve these for posterity? I realized this when I was re-reading Grant Morrison's Superman Beyond - I had lost the 3D glasses that came with the book. Newer printings did away with the anaglyphic panels, and the impact of the story of Superman seeing the reader is diminished.<p>This was something that is less than 10 years old - can you imagine what would happen if this were 100 years old?
nowadays one can make an interactive "book" bitemporal. That is, facts/history depend on when they have happened, and when one learned (=read) about it... So if u reread something in the first half, after u read the middle, u read different version of it..<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_database" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_database</a><p>And then multi-viewpoint - different characters tell the story in different ways, with very different timelines of who learned what when.<p>so when u're reading it as character A, in middle of story part of the then history changes completely because u learn something about B in the past.. While from point of view of B, that is well known since beginning, etc.<p>But sadly, these need far more programming than any book-writer can do, and proper "engine/interpreter" to "play" the result.
I wonder if <i>Return of the Obra Dinn</i>, despite its graphics, couldn't be considered a form of hyper-<i>radio</i>. Because to be honest, it felt more like an interactive radio play, with the graphics mostly existing to supplement the audio.
it's hard to add visualizations to a text-driven story without it being gimmicky or distracting.<p>i can't really think of an example of hyperliterature that has stuck with me outside of the annoying bloomberg article animations they tried for 6 months and dropped sometime last year<p>i think that's why plot-rich video games are so popular as an alternative means of storytelling - they're based around really good writing, but also involve some core interactive mechanics that keep the audience engaged, challenged, and empathetic rather than distracted or frustrated<p>interesting concept, can it be extended outside of a few webpages and apps?
There's a good, though not well-known author Espen J. Aarseth. he analyses non-ergodic literature within the scope of computer technology, and how the latter enables the creation of texts that are not linear. An easy example would be an old-school RPG game where you can replay the game and choose different paths, which builds up to a different narrative. There's no one story and you can't define an author, because the ending depends upon the user's choices, so the "reader" participates in the "writing" process. Here's his one article that can be found online<p><a href="http://art-tech.arts.ufl.edu/~jack/courses/f06-dig4581/papers/non-linear/aarseth.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://art-tech.arts.ufl.edu/~jack/courses/f06-dig4581/paper...</a>
Gamebooks[1] used the interactive story idea in a paper form quite a while ago already.<p>1. <a href="http://www.abandonia.com/en/gamebooks" rel="nofollow">http://www.abandonia.com/en/gamebooks</a>
I would think the "Visual Novel" and "walking simulator" games would fit in this category as well, where you observe a largely static story interactively.<p>Tacoma is a great recent example of the latter.
I’d really like to use git repos for fiction; use commits and forks and merges to tell a story that is far larger than any snapshot of the repo’s content. This could be as simple as creating a fictional creative process for some work, or as complex as an entire fictional community collaborating on a document
This is very cool but I found the color shifting highly disruptive to actually soaking in the text...
<a href="https://www.jamesyu.org/hot-spot/" rel="nofollow">https://www.jamesyu.org/hot-spot/</a><p>And then the text moves. Nope.
Star Gauge [1] is fascinating.<p>Thanks OP.<p>> The outer border is meant to be read in a circle. The grid is known as a palindrome poem, and can be read in different ways to generate over 3,000 shorter poems, in which the second line of every couplet rhymes with that of the next.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Su_Hui%27s_Star_Gauge" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Su_Hui%27s_Star_Gauge</a>
You can make the case that a lot of graphic narratives fall into the hyperliterature category. Electric Sheep Comix [1] stands out for me as someone who really experimented with what the early web could do for graphic novels (stories told in two dimensions, infinite scrolls, temporal progress within different frames at different times...)<p>[1] (partially NSFW) www.electricsheepcomix.com
Wow, "Windrift" looks pretty freaking cool. I'm inspired to play with it. Thanks for the list. Be sure to check out "Unflattening" by Nick Sousanis!<p><a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674744431" rel="nofollow">http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674744431</a>
I really enjoyed <a href="https://readtapestry.com/" rel="nofollow">https://readtapestry.com/</a> and all the tap essays people had published via it. I think they "pivoted" and closed it down several years ago though... so it all seems lost now. :(
A guy posted his Shown HN: here that was hyperlit-meets-DnD game/engine that was exceptionally good and worked very well on mobile. I wonder what happened that, I was super super impressed by it. It was very good at scope.
Also, there is Kate Pullingers 'Breathe.
<a href="http://www.katepullinger.com/breathe/" rel="nofollow">http://www.katepullinger.com/breathe/</a>
Borges!
Here is an attempt to wikify one of his stories.
<a href="http://tlon-uqbar-orbis-tertius.wikia.com" rel="nofollow">http://tlon-uqbar-orbis-tertius.wikia.com</a>
i haven't played this yet, but i think the game is about surfing an older styled version of the net. seems vaguely relative: <a href="https://aetherinteractive.itch.io/subserial-network" rel="nofollow">https://aetherinteractive.itch.io/subserial-network</a>
This is not a new idea. Playing with the boundaries of presentation in literature is just a subset of post-modernist lit.<p>If you want a prime example, OP, you should look into 4chan /lit/'s massively collaboratively written post-ironic tome "Hypersphere"[1]. It's the epitome of this sort of hyperliterature.<p>[1] <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L10Cbgj7CUEAe1-LwwNfYY1BkVaO8x976IkAtcL1Ll4/edit" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L10Cbgj7CUEAe1-LwwNfYY1B...</a>