'storyspace' and some hypertexts

okay, no hypertexts. all the ones they linked to as an example of the stuff those serious hypertext writers were putting out were only available on cd! and all from the same company!

is there an interesting issue here to do with writer's tools, and what it means that you're replacing a pen (£0.29) with a software suite ($295)?

some hypertext fictions (via wikipedia:)

http://www.sunshine69.com/69_Start.html
http://www.unknownhypertext.com/
http://www.thetherapist.com/
http://www.yorku.ca/caitlin/waves/navigate.html

'hypertext' at the 'electronic literature directory' (via 'wikipedia':)

http://directory.eliterature.org/browse.php?t=1

the last of those four would belong on the 'filthy, filthy books' thread, if it was a book.

which it isn't.

That naughty one: Bad art, bad stories, bad HTML. Do they teach you to do this in art schools these days? I've seen a few too many art exhibits that have involved similar combinations of bad art with even worse confessional-style short short stories.

yes, but you still looked at the naughty one first, didn't you?

you're right about the bad art. the bad (or at least the circa-95-looking) web design seems to be a feature. i haven't looked at the stories enough to get any sense of it as more than softcore porn, i guess.

the company therapist has a structure i find kinda interesting, and isn't offensive to the eye so much. but it rests on these long pages of transcribed dialogue which appear to have been written by someone with a sorta average-to-mediocre ear for dialogue.

so what was your favorite choose your own adventure?

I have a soft spot for R.A. Montgomery's works, since my friend wrote a great, great song about him. I can't remember if he wrote my favorite, which was all about trying to find -- what was it called, Serendipity? Some paradise place where you can't choose to go there and you can't be forced to go there. And sure enough, even though there was a two page description of arriving at Seredipity and the happy ending there, none of the other story segements led there (because that would have involved either making a choice or being told to go to that section). And yes, I checked each segment in the book, twice, before getting the idea (but I was young then).

that is a lot cooler than my tastes in those things. i preferred the fighting fantasy ones, and i preferred the dorky ones of those with more maths, and i even preferred the lone wulf ones to those.

I was pretty shameless about reading them, although something about the ones that had questions like "if you have silver key, go to page 32" struck me as too easy to cheat to -- until I saw that some of them would punish you for saying you had something you couldn't have, something that didn't exist.

it's only cheating inasmuch as finding out the ending of a movie before you watch it is "cheating", anyway.

The "naughty" one's pretty great, in my opinion. And no, it's not softcore porn. There are some lesbian scenes, but come on now.
I personally think this stuff is pretty cool; I've even taught some classes in it. It seems to be roundly dismissed by a lot of people for being "trendy," which it isn't, at least anymore. I mean, the hype (such as it was) has died down by now, and it's not considered "the wave of the future" or anything like that, and all the better. You're just left with some quirky, adventurous work that failed to change the world. Some of it's pretty funny too.

okay, no hypertexts. all the ones they linked to as an example of the stuff those serious hypertext writers were putting out were only available on cd! and all from the same company!

Well, yeah, it's all through Eastgate, which produces Storyspace and publishes work written with the software. This was the biggest (only?) overture hypertext made into anything resembling commercial publishing; the web-based work's available free to anyone with an internet connection. The eastgate texts are no more expensive than a cd, and by and large they're worth it. (At least check out Patchwork Girl.)

It seems unfortunate to me how this material gets sniffed at nowadays. The theoretical writing surrounding it did it a disservice, I think, touting it as the next big thing, the death knell of the print novel, blah blah. Well, no, obviously it wasn't. In retrospect I think that techno-utopianism was a symptom of, or precursor to, the dotcom boom. Since people have come to take a less utopian view of the internet, along with the obvious failures of the overblown theory, this material has been dismissed, and that's a shame. I mean, yeah, it's not as revolutionary as the writers clearly thought it was (though the degree of faith in the "movement" certainly varies. The auto-theorizing in the Unknown sounds pretty weak to me now.) But, like, there's good writing here, y'know? Hopefully that comes through now that the crap surrounding it has fallen away.

That's kind of rambling, but I felt I needed to leap to the defense here. More organized ruminations available upon request.

Incidentally, I think the link between these and choose-your-own-adventures is pretty tenuous. I mean, yes, there's more than one plot line and there's a certain amount of (at least explicit) reader agency here, but the kinds of choices you're asked to make in a CYOA are different from a hypertext. The choices at the end of a page in a CYOA are dependent on plot, which is almost never the case in a hypertext. Rather, the links embedded in any given page have a more associational relationship to the page to which they link. Like, look here: http://www.yorku.ca/caitlin/waves/barbie.htm If you click on the link that says "she got to undress all the other Barbies," that takes you to a page telling about an early sexual experience with another girl. There's no connection there in terms of plot or causality, but something closer to the layering and accumulation of images you get in a poem. That's a pretty obvious example, but you see stuff like this happening all the time, playing with the relationship between the link and its referrant.

Obviously I'd like to ask "what on earth was so good about the naughty one, which I found so wretched and pointless", but that is probably not a question that can be answered easily. So instead I will ask, since you have an interest in hypertexts, whether you'd like to address my comments about this idea of being compelling, and how the way most hypertexts are structured cut against any chance of the text being compelling (until it is far too late, perhaps).

How much of the "naughty one" did you actually look at?

And do you mean that they require more reader impetus than most print novels, they pull you along less? Well, yeah, I suppose so. Look, if you approach it as an experimental piece, trying out some different approaches to narrative that may or may not work, it can be interesting, fun even. If you're predisposed to turn your nose up at anything like this, well.

Which is kind of a non-answer, I know, but really, what could I possibly say to make you think it's worthwhile? I like the playfulness of these texts, the meanderingness. I like to think of reading one as wandering through a museum for a while, not really knowing if I'll see anything but enjoying the feeling of wandering and taking in what I see. And if I come back later I might go down another wing. What's wrong with that? If these texts were shoved at you as the next big literary thing, then yeah, it'd be worth getting annoyed at them. But it's an experiment that mostly failed. Which isn't to say that it didn't produce some interesting work in the process.

(xpost)

I am not predisposed to turning my nose up at experimental work, I don't think.

And do you mean that they require more reader impetus than most print novels, they pull you along less?

I mean good writing is a system of challenges and rewards. A lot of good writing starts off with a reward -- the typical great first line. Sometimes it starts off with a challenge -- something unexplained, but curious enough that you want to find out what is going on; this is both true of, say, the first half-sentence of Finnegans Wake, and with a more traditional in media res start, "Achilles was mad", a quick intro to the thorny problem to get you hooked before settling back with a calmer explanation that you are invested in because of your interest in the thorny problem.

But let's look at the "naughty one": Let's say the very first image you see is the cover, which is ugly enough but not enough to slow you down for long. You click on "listen". A menu comes up (on my system, one of the selections gets rerendered, making me think this was not very well implemented). Eight options, most of them sentence fragments, summing up the ideas: kissing girls, desire, and the vague menace of "she was warned".

None of that is exceptionally interesting, but "kissing girls" is first, and it might have some puririent appeal, so let's give that a try. Oh, wait -- rolling over menu options causes what appears to be jaggy clip art that hasn't been formatted to fit properly in the box it pops up in. And a little text off to the side. "Kissing girls" has a picture of a young girl, so OK, we have more context for what kind of "girls" are in question here. A few sentences of text appear about a scenario where girls in a school are stronger than boys, and the girls grab boys to corral and kiss them. OK. Sure. Let's see what that's about. Click.

This page seems to open in a new window, which is annoying, and is one of the ugliest designs I've seen since, well, since the last time I tried to look at a web-based hypertext. A jaggy, purple-saturated picture of a kiss fills an iframe -- in fact, it overfills the iframe, and you have to scroll around in it to see the whole picture. The background of the main frame is some hideous grey pattern, and there is a list of links on the side, mostly of people's names. No other text. But you can click on the jaggy kissing picture.

Now the hideous iframe background changes to green, and the overuse of certain Photoshop filters that come with the program becomes more apparent. Because the hideous background makes it hard to read the text, it has been made several sizes larger than you'd expect. The short text makes "kissing girls" out to be an adjective and noun: it is not about the act of kissing girls, but rather about girls who kiss. A few more details about these girls who kiss: "The girls I knew were at once cruel and curious and kind and wanting. At home, under the bed, in older sisters' closets, we kissed each other."

Well, this is not what I'd consider great writing, although it does have the flavor of mediocre writing that wants to be great. I don't yet care about these girls or the boys they kiss, and the only reward has been promises scenes of underaged lovin'. The most promising links are the "cruel and curious" or "closets, we kissed"; I think I chose "closets" the first time I tried to read this, but let's pick "cruel".

Now, suddenly, I have the option of listening to the stories (in wav files!?). If there's a hideous background to this page, it's taking a while to load. Meanwhile more awful jaggy clip-art. Let's look at the text, though: A story of a girl who is the friend of our narrator, with whom she kisses boys; they also kiss each other. The writing has become completely terrible: "At six she had an attractive, wandering hazel eye. I would brush the hair off her face, her earnest hands trying to stop me." Too many adjectives, phrases joined awkwardly: This is how you mark your writing as "literary". "Vanessa had always roamed shopping malls alone; quarries." It takes a certain kind of tin ear to pass off a consonant cluster such as /mtsh/ as smooth writing, and there is no reason to force a pause there to accent those words. Highlighting the prettiness of the word "quarries" with awkward grammar does not redeem this.

At this point, the garish art and the garish language have completely turned me off. There are no questions in the text that I am hungry for the answers to, since so far it has repeated the same thing three times in increased detail: They were schoolgirls, they humiliated boys, they kissed each other. The only reason I could possibly want to keep reading this is for the pornography of it, and even that I could find better written elsewhere if I really wanted it, and so it is here that I leave this work aside.

It offered me no challenges, and gave me no rewards except light pornography. It also bombarded me with awful pictures and design and with ungainly prose.

Oh, I forgot to mention how click on another link causes the navigation to reload in the iframe. Ugh.

I like to think of reading one as wandering through a museum for a while, not really knowing if I'll see anything but enjoying the feeling of wandering and taking in what I see. And if I come back later I might go down another wing. What's wrong with that?

This is why the Wikipedia is so awesome. But the Wikipedia combines its compelling form with compelling content, and I just haven't seen a unified literary work that does that yet. It's totally possible. Not that I remember thinking this work was so great, but doesn't Dictionary of the Khazars work along those lines? Hypertext on paper? It's better than most of the acutal hypertexts I've seen, at least.

CYOA and hypertext are very different, but my suggestion is that most of the CYOA I've read has worked in a way that hypertext doesn't. Even the earliest CYOA I know about (written by Raymond Queaneau in the 1960s, a short experiment with the idea) seems to understand how this form would function in a way that most hypertext writers don't.

Which is to say: If you are turning your story into a museum, well, in a museum each object is selected because it has some value in itself, usually. And then the connections between objects adds up to more than the sum of its parts, ideally.

Well, do what you like. It's not pornography, for whatever that's worth, and that seems like a pretty reductive view to take. It's about memories, how they blur together and reconnect and overlap, and the art reflects this. It's loud, yes, and oversaturated, but I like the density of it, like wandering around in the attic of someone's mind. I don't know, I think it's interesting work, mostly in terms of the form. Having taught classes on hypertext before, it was interesting to look at this in relation to other web-based hypertexts, most of which use hardly any graphics at all. This represents an extreme of the genre.
Personally, I don't have a problem with the writing, or at least I don't find it as offensive as you do. I don't exactly love the writing, either, but it doesn't get in the way, either. Which is guarded praise, sure, but it's worth reading, at least for how it plays with narrative and causality.

xpost Well, it's all in how you look at it, isn't it? If you go in looking for connections you'll find them. If you go in thinking it's rubbish, you'll find that.

Plenty of people think Finnegans Wake is crap, too. Not to put this on the same level, of course, but you've got to be willing to play ball with it.

I read three sections of the text, and it told me the same story three times, just in greater detail, without making the story more interesting. This does not imply "you will be able to make interesting connections". To reuse the Wikipedia example, it is as if every article in the Wikipedia said the same thing. (Which could be a fun idea, if it were done well, I suppose.) Now, obviously I didn't look at every page in the story, but I'd argue that in a well-written hypertext, this alleged misreading shouldn't be possible. If it is about memories and connections, then I should quickly be discovering issues about memory or quickly be making connections between things.

(One way of doing that, which is very common in the interactive fiction or even RPG world, is through a sort of "gated entryway": You are forced through a set of events/texts, establishing the world and what is going on, before you are let loose on the bulk of the experience. Think of, if you're familiar with it, Ocarina of Time, and how you start out with very few options until you are familiar with the mechanics of the universe, and then you are set loose to run all the way across Hyrule and do what you want. A similar techique could have been used here if it wanted me to think the text was about memory and connections rather than about how "transgressive" it is to talk about elementary school lesbian make-out sessions.)

Do you think I'm not willing to play ball with the text? I mean, you're acting as if I'm not open to hypertext, that am not inclined towards accepting a text that is written in a nontraditional manner, etc.

It's true that I was not willing to keep reading a text that I found, after the first ten or fifteen minutes of reading, totally uninteresting and garish until I found it interesting. Is that the same as not playing ball with a text?

Lyn Hejinian's "My Life" is perhaps a text that uses the poetic qualities that hypertext allows without literally being a hypertext. It's a great book, too.

It is, yeah. I don't know, I probably shouldn't discuss this stuff, I have too much personally wrapped up in it.

Is there, to make a comix analogy, a "Maus" of hypertext? I have heard of (and read) a few pioneers in the genre, but is there one which is considered so classic that it would be enjoyed by "anyone"?

uncle buddy's phantom funhouse!!! (requires hypertext -- oldsKOOL)

it was also the only one i rilly liked. there was some shorter more conceptual stuff that was more a predecessor of internet art -- i.e. superbad &co (which is still shockingly alive as a concept-genre) -- than of a new novelistic form.

the problem is that i think most tried to explore *narrative* as the key element of a novel (as well as its supposed "limitation") whereas they shoulda been looking (as did uncle buddy) at polyphony. so what you got were disjointed textual chunks rather than an interaction of voiced objects. in doing so they actually stripped the narratorial voice of its dialogic character to a degree, rendering it at once more omnescient and more arbitrary so wound up conceptually closer to, say, L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E than to a variation on the novelistic form as such (much less an expansion).

i also never understood how the practical response to the theoretical claim "all texts are open to multiple determination" could be "aha! i will write a text open to multiple determination!" i mean, duh, just write anything then.

victory garden had enough plot that you could force it into a story if yo wanted, but it was barely worth it except as a conceptual exercise, i think.

becuz they were a genuine literary movement rather than a pre-thought conceptual move, the 60s metafictionalists and experimental descendants of such i think ended up with a way better grasp of turning their innovation towards some actually powerful work.

i mean real for-print novels generally have been in an organic shift from serialism over the past century as a whole -- generally involving successive audacious fits and starts. for fucks sake you can take dos pasos' USA and cut it up into a linked hypertext any number of ways. i don't think it would work better, but with a smart enough plan, it would probably work just as well, at least.

Cortazar to thread.

253 is a novel (there is a book version as well) that uses hypertext links to shift you about the story. Although the story is built from a knowledge of all characters.

i remember really liking 253 reading it on paper.

On the train ride up from Los Angeles yesterday I read an interesting and thick essay by Brian Kim Stefans (not on his website, as far as I can tell) called "Stops and Rebels: A critique of hypertext", which had a lot more to do with "computer poetry" than hypertext, it seems (it was revised greatly from its original 1996 incarnation, where presumably it had more to do with hypertext itself), but:

"...the transparent hyperlink places a huge burden on the imagination of the reader in rendering the transitions between texts interesting, informative or aestetically pleasing. this has been borne out by history: as internet art and theory have progressed, artists have discovered that the ability to click through one text to reach another has proven to have fewer essential aesthetic or philosophical properties than were initially thought to be the case."

...skim, skim...

Well, it goes on for a few pages, and I can't find anything that summarizes it quite well enough, but it does a good job of describing how the link functions (or fails to function). (Of course, it does this in comparing it to the "computer poem", which is his preferred mode, and which perhaps has some issues that he doesn't take into account, but that is another story for another time.) The essay (from his book "Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics") seems worth checking out (at least, for Pr0000000de) (if he hasn't already).