The End of Books--or Books Without End?

Abstract

In 1986 John McDaid, then a fellow graduate student at New York University, suggested I meet Jay Bolter, who arrived bearing a 1.0 beta copy of Storyspace. When he opened the Storyspace demo document to show McDaid and I a cognitive map of the Iliad represented as a hypertext, my fate was clinched in under sixty seconds. I had seen the future, and it consisted of places, paths, links, cognitive maps, and a copy of afternoon, a story, which Jay also gave us.Within a week, I had upgraded my Macintosh, changed disciplines, and begun work on a dissertation proposal using the same 1.0 beta version of Storyspace, the equivalent of volunteering as a crashtest dummy to check the safety of cars during head-on collision.After weeks of alternately immersing myself in afternoon and losing data to system crashes every ten minutes, I admitted I needed some direction and began frantically trying to locate Michael Joyce, listed on the Storyspace startup dialogue box along with Bolter and William Smith as the authors and developers of Storyspace. The third Michael Joyce in the Jackson, Michigan, white pages answered the phone with a deep, resonant voice."I'm looking for the Michael Joyce who wrote afternoon," I said quickly."Yes, but you can't know that," he said, ‹rst, not realizing I had a copy of afternoon, then: "And who are you?"The rest, as they say, is history-and also the beginning of this book.Even the most haphazard reader of this book will recognize that, without Jay Bolter, Michael Joyce, and Stuart Moulthrop, my work would not exist. Their ideas, interactive texts, critical writings, and work on interface design have long provided me with both rich fodder for my research and an abundance of ideas, methods, and critical and theoret-ical approaches to interactivity in general. Together they have inspired me in every sense of the word.To Gordon Pradl I also owe several debts: for his insights on the distinctions between "inner-" versus "other-directed," for introductions to many of the sources that have informed my entire outlook on reading and interactivity, and for giving me the right shove at exactly the right time. Contents An Interactive Narrative Timeline viii 1. Introduction: The Book Is Dead, Long Live the Book! 1 2. Books without Pages-Novels without Endings 11 3. What Interactive Narratives Do That Print Narratives Cannot 37 4. Charting Maps and Raising the Dead: Readers' Encounters with Hypertext Fiction 63 5.

A Future for Hypertext Fiction

“…That position is supported by the literature, even among those who are hypertext advocates (Bolter, 2001;Douglas, 2000;Kendall and Réty, 2000;Landow, 1997;Murray 1997aMurray , 1997b.…”

On the writing, reading and publishing of digital stories

“…When talking about an endless, shapeless hypertext narrative the readers talked about boundaries and missing meanings. The book can be considered a technology to look at for the clues its physicality gives to the reader (Douglas, 2001;Duguid, 1996). Pullinger's story Inanimate Alice stood out as the reader's unanimous favourite: it stated it would take 5 minutes to read, provided feedback as the story developed by displaying a list of clickable icons (each image corresponding to the story snippet content) thus allowing the reader to move about.…”

“…Yet Leroy and Pattyn 2 use digital narrative to refer to "stories told upon, with and by computers and their respective users". Douglas (Douglas, 2001) similarly uses digital narrative to refer to narrative-focused computer games using it as a contrast to hypertext fiction.…”

The evolution of authorship in a remix society

“…Intertextuality: The notion of intertextuality considers texts as networks of associations with other texts which may be extraphysical to the work itself [5]. Barthes saw this intertextuality as beginning with the author as text, and extending to material drawn from other authors and society at large.…”