Interesting Links for 7-10-2011

[andrewducker]

• When politicians open their mouth are they actually saying _anything_?
  (tags: politics uk media)
• Turns out that it's _easy_ to create an invisiblity cloak.
  (tags: society funny comic homelessness invisiblity poverty)
• Italian Wikipedia Shuts Down in Protest of Ridiculous Law
  (tags: wikipedia law italy)
• Mozilla/Enterprise IRC log. Fascinating to see the misunderstandings and clashes.
  (tags: firefox mozilla development software)
• Banks and supermarkets are to be able to sell consumer legal services
  (tags: law uk)
• Why the hypertext novel didn't take off.
  (tags: hypertext fiction technology literature)
• A Lesson in Treating Illness - Steve Jobs and alternative remedies
  (tags: Cancer health medicine Alternative SteveJobs)

Comments

[birguslatro]

I think the problem with the hypertext novel is it sticks decision-making in the middle of reading a paragraph. Our minds rebel against that kind of mixture.

And I say paragraph (instead of story), since text adventures had a long enough run to be worthy of being called a successful genre. The difference is placing the decision-making withing a block of text, not at the end. It kills the flow in the reader's mind. And a good story needs to flow.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Oh, thanks for the link to the Salon article on hypertext fiction - as it happens, I'm just writing slides for a lecture on the subject next month (will post links on LJ if anyone's interested, once I'm finished).

As I see it, the crisis in hypertext fiction is almost entirely because the most outspoken proponents have taken the view that the 'correct' form of hypertext fiction is that of literary hypertext fiction. There is hypertext fiction out there being published today that they have almost completely ignored, much of it in the tradition of Choose Your Own Adventure novels. I'm looking at a copy of Create Your Own Jane Austen Adventure - published 2007 - which is a fine a metanarrative parody/commentary on Pride and Prejudice as I've ever read.

Similarly, there are a growing number of hypertext comics (by the likes of Chris Ware and Jason Shiga) that never get a mention.

The hypertext literati (as I think of them) still seem to be obsessed with a handful of works (Joyce's afternoon, Moulthrop's Victory Garden, etc) that are showing their age (in terms of the clunkiness of their interfaces), and that fall into the 'worthy but dull' category, in my view. Meanwhile, they've made some pronouncements on 'popular' hypertext fiction (for want of a better way of distinguishing it from literary hypertext fiction) that are faintly dismissive; to quote Mark Bernstein (of Eastgate Systems, the main/only publisher of 'serious hypertext':

"The association of hypertext narrative with Edward Packard's children's series, "Choose Your Own Adventure", confuses more than it illuminates."

The gist of this argument seems to be that CYOA effects multiple readings only at the level of story (the things that are supposed to have happened), whereas (serious/literary) hypertext fiction considers multiple readings at the narrative level (the way in which the things that are supposed to have happened are related to the reader).

I'm going to stop here - this should probably be an entry in its own right.

[andrewducker]

For what it's worth, I agree - and additionally I know there's a constant level of enthusiasm in the IF communities as well.

I'll look forward to your post!

[nmg.livejournal.com]

IF is interesting - in Twisty Passages, Nick Montfort is quite disparaging about the state of hypertext fiction, but also views CYOA and its ilk as being distinct from IF because IF "simulates complex worlds beneath the generated texts".

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the salon article (the site makes my workstation grind to a halt and look like it's on the brink of catching fire) so I may be at peril of looking foolish, but I have to say that my hypertext novella seemed to have worked fairly well, at least with its target audience, anyway. Admittedly it was helped by how I and a co-conspirator rolled it out, a scene at a time twice or thrice a week, so perhaps it was more towards the "performance art" end of the spectrum... but I'm told by folks reading it years later that it holds up fairly well.

-- Steve agrees that "lit'ry" hypertext novels tend to be dull grinds for those not obsessed with obscure literary schools.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the pointer to your novella - I'll give that a look when I get the chance.

[undeadbydawn.livejournal.com]

the invisibility cloak...

this was first pointed out to me, personally, by a viciously effective Spitting Image sketch, to the soundrack 'walk on by' [which my mother eerily mistook for an attack on Thatcher, rather than a pointed criticism of the entire nation]
then by Neil Gaiman in Neverwhere.

still very effective, and good to see it again