MetaFilter: What happened to hypertext fiction?
Am I the only one who is sad that hypertext isn’t much more than plain old webpages that are fairly static (DHTML notwithstanding)?
Again, look at any reasonably sophisticated videogame like Deus Ex or Fallout or GTA IV. The people who imagined hypertext novels were thinking too small. Artists can create entire worlds now to explore along a nearly infinite number of degrees of freedom. Why limit yourself to one dimensional text with a few branches?
.. Has anyone actually tried to read any of the early hypertext stories? Good lord, what a frustrating experience. It truly was an experiment in just how far down the rabbit hole you can go before you become utterly confused and have lost any grasp on the thread you thought you were following. My mother has Alzheimer’s and a hypertext story must surely be what her day is like, as you jump from one focus to another and forget where you were two pages back.
.. Whoa. I take that back. A couple of the entries totally fall under the hypertext banner and they are amazing. Check out The Play and The Binary.
.. I thought this was perceptive and could also be applied to contrasting hypertext with IF. Hypertext fiction is stateless: no past, no future, only the current page. This makes it a fundamentally different experience, not just vs. novels, but also vs. (most) interactive fiction. In novels, there’s a clear beginning and end; likewise, in most interactive fiction, some of your actions will affect the world of the story, so you can also divide things mentally into cause and effect, past and future. Hypertext doesn’t have that anchor.