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Is Hypertext Literature Dead?
First time accepted submitter dylan_k writes "In the 1990s and early 2000s, there was a lot of buzz about ideas like 'hypertext literature' and 'electronic literature.' Nowadays, it's easier to create those things than ever before, and there are plenty of digital texts but it just doesn't seem like authors are writing any new 'hypertext' literature these days. Why?"
There was buzz about delivery pet food too.
Just because there's buzz, doesn't mean it's a good idea.
I don't know if I got the "hypertext literature" bit too well, but I think blogs are literature as much as books. So I don't believe that only because the format is different, "hypertext literature" is in itself dead.
Maybe human brain is massively parallel at physical level, but it is NOT multithreaded when it comes to consiousness and thinking. It is really hard to write fiction with multiple hyperlinked threads. It is also not very pleasant to read, therefore not much demand and not much supply. Simple.
because it's a crap idea, just like choose your own adventure books stop being interesting once you hit puberty and discover girls
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Considering how much fiction is on Wikipedia, I think the man's question is valid.
That programs with goto's are not more readable than the ones without them. Programming and writing literature are both exercises in attention span management.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Two words: Visual Novel
Yes, those Japanese "dating sims" (and Western analogues like the controversially acclaimed Katawa Shoujo) are precisely this. They're not only hypertext literature, they're multimedia. How much more 90s buzzwordy could you get?
I haven't read TFA, but if the summary is anything like right, then they are dead wrong. From very recently,
http://www.apple.com/education/ibooks-textbooks/
http://www.pottermore.com/
And more people are reading more than ever before using hypertext - fiction, fact, opinion - every kind of literature you can think of. I think it's called the web, or something.
The concept of "literature" as purely book-bound started to die when Dickens published as serials in magazines, short stores and bound novels, and also by reading extracts from his work on lecture tours. It was inevitable that ideas like hypertext would find new forms of expression. The premise of the article seems to be as if the car industry had developed by building tractor units to replace horses, and then never got around to the idea of combining them with the passenger wagon. The first motor vehicles were simply tractors. We don't look at the roads now and say "Whatever happened to the idea of pulling carts with engines?"
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Because it turns out that it is great for documentation, hence Wikipedia, but a really lousy way to tell a narrative.
It's really very simple. When you're reading literature, you WANT the writer to have made those decisions. That's the writer's job. The story decisions are the heart of what makes a collection of stories into literature. Otherwise, you're just creating a world and throwing a reader into it to do the work of building his own story. There's nothing wrong with it for the tiny minority who want to do it, of course, but for the vast majority of people, having someone else make those artistic decisions and give them a satisfying story -- with interesting twists along the way before arriving at an interesting end -- is what makes reading literature worth doing. The people who favor the reader-driven plots don't really understand what literature is. As others have pointed out, hypertext stories are simply games. There's nothing wrong with that format, but it's neither fish nor fowl. People who want a good linear narrative story are best served by a traditional book. Those who want an interactive game are best served by graphics-heavy games. Hypertext stories serve a tiny niche that will never grow, IMO.
Though it wasn't hyperlink, I have read a few works of fiction that seemed to think it was neat to put gobs of stuff in footnotes. Now these weren't footnotes that explained obscure things the reader might not know to be skipped if you understood, it was explaining a completely fictional concept/historical event in the universe of the work in question.
This thoroughly breaks the flow no matter how you slice it. If you can't work some material more naturally into the narrative than hyperlinks/footnotes/jarring parentheticals, then something is very wrong. It severely detracts from the enjoyment of the story if I stop mid sentence to read it. If I chose to defer reading the material, then some things may make no sense until I get to the footnote and I have to figure out where the footnote ties back into the narrative in some cases where it isn't quite self-evident.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
As so often, the proponents of this forget that technology can only ease the least significant step in writing, namely replication. Creation of the content is a creative act and "hyperlinked" literature is very hard to create. I might also point out that there were examples of this long before the web, with manual links ("go to page xyz, section a") and that never caught on either, for exactly the same reason.
People that are surprised here do not understand content creation at all and vastly overestimate the worth of technology in aiding creativity. It is almost nil. What the Internet can do well in this regard is content delivery/content replication, but that is it. Does not make writing the stuff any faster or easier.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
First, like any other piece of literature, you need a narrative that's going to keep the reader's attention. A fancy interface only goes so far if the underlying message is boring.
Second, you need an interface that's going to complement the story. If you litter your text with hypertext links and call it a day, you're doing favors to nobody.
Third, both writing and coding something worthwhile take effort, and doing both at the same time, with the intent of making them work well together, takes even more effort than doing either separately. Frankly, it's just not worth it much of the time.
There are narratives that work well in a hypertext medium, though. Two that come to mind are Hobo Lobo of Hamelin, a fable that's being written slowly but surely, and Bear 71, a 20 minute 'interactive documentary'.
Well, I for one consider "Literature" to be a narrative flow set out by the author, that I enjoy following. So "Hypertext Literature" is not dead or alive, it's an oxymoron.
"Literature" in itself of course *maybe* just evolved in a day and age where it was the only technical means to convey either storytelling or discussion. Which both have a feedback from the audience. And I think "Hypertext Discussion" is pretty alive today, and there might be good ways to create hypertext storytelling experiences.
In "storytelling" for example, the storyteller just telling the "and then the prince arrived on his mighty stallion" might be interrupted by the question "when was the stallion born and where?" by someone in the audience. *THAT* could be implemented quite good in hypertext.
The genre was killed off by a gag book in 2003, "Escape from Fire Island. It's a gay zombie hyperlink novel: "If you run toward the nearest ferry terminal, turn to page 44. If you flirt with the cute twink, turn to page 55. If you throw caution to the wind and join the nearest circuit party, turn to page 80." It was published as a paper book, and was badly timed -- the gay novel boom was over, and the zombie novel boom was years in the future.
for certain meanings of 'game controller'
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
And in the last century, Ulysses is a work of literature in which not very much happens and there is little plot, it is just the (frequently very entertaining) account of two very different people wandering around Dublin on 16th. June 1904, and the way in which their paths cross.
There is no reason why a hypertext should not be literature, and the objection only makes sense if you think literature is storytelling - which most of it is not.
* I know people from many other cultures have the tendency to obey orders even from crazy people, but Moby-Dick is above all an
novel.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Authors are as a class people who are in love with words, specifically their own. When they write a novel, they want the reader to consume it from beginning to end, not missing a single word. So for them, there isn't much joy in pouring a significant amount of work into a target hypertext segment where 90% of the readers will miss it. And if it's going to be skipped over anyway, why waste time polishing their words? What's the point of them coming up with a secondary narrative flow that is in no way essential to the plot? On the other hand, if the hyperlinks are essential, meaning the reader is obliged to click on every link to get a full understanding of the plot, then at best it's no longer a novel, but a puzzle or gimmick. (Which are fine endeavors, no doubt, but the cross-section of high quality puzzle-creators and good novelists is rather small, and the people who care to do both at once, even smaller. (Think of parentheses as proto-hypertext, for instance. How many authors can successfully place parentheses within parentheses, without the whole exercise turning into a mess (and how many would even attempt such foolishness)?)) And at worst you have an exercise in tedium, both in terms of reading and in terms of creation.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
The best case for Hypertext Literature is the old Choose Your Own Adventure books. Those evolved into the old Infocom games which turned into the Sierra games which turned into RPG games which evolved into MMOs. If you want to do Hypertext Literature, pick one of the various forms of evolution and be done with it.
...but isn't it everywhere around us and called 'the Web' ?!?
It amazes me to see so many people claiming Wikipedia, the web or even bloody YouTube refutes the article's thesis. These are not literature in the sense TFA uses -- just as pre-web media like the daily paper, ads, movies, TV shows, encyclopedias ...
Do you believe hypertext is done evolving? (hint: the creator of word hypertext, Ted Nelson, doesn't think so - see quote, below).
Hypertext is still very young compared to writing. Our species has been working on writing for over 5,000 years, and on hypertext for about 60 years (original memex article, 1945 (a fascinating read, btw - worth ten minutes of your time)
2) Who even likes non-linear stories?
Show me any medium where non-linear fiction is popular. Did you actually enjoy Memento? There are precious few examples of popular non-linear fiction in any medium, including hypertext. (by "precious few" I mean that percentage-wise you can round the amount of non-linear works down to zero and still be reasonably close to the actual number).
3) Non-linear may just be too much work to read? (related to 2)
Humans love stories, but they have significant processing limitations. Fiction is supposed to be entertaining (or at least interesting). (Hypothesis: reading non-linear fiction requires too much work to be fun, so nobody likes it.)
4) What if you are looking in the wrong place for non-linear "fiction".
Try here with games like Adventure, A History for your fiction.
Or possibly here: simulation games
In these cases, "fiction" has proven very popular indeed.
("But, But, that isn't serious fiction!"
*shrug* Maybe not.
But then again, maybe games and simulations are simply what non-linear fiction looks like.
Centuries from now, scholars may be studying the ground breaking work of great non-linear authors likeWilliam Crowther and John Carmack in much the same way that visionary creatives like Shakespeare and Mary Shelly are studied today.
So... about the evolution of HyperText:
Ted Nelson, the creator of the term hypertext, was unimpressed with HTML:(excerpt from here)
Trying to fix HTML is like trying to graft arms and legs onto hamburger. There's got to be something better-- but XML is the same thing and worse. EMBEDDED MARKUP IS A CANCER. (See my article "Embedded Markup Considered Harmful", WWW Journal, 1997 or 1998.) The Web is a special effects race, FANFARES ON SPREADSHEETS! JUST WHAT WE NEED!. (Instead of dealing with the important structure issues-- structure, continuity, persistence of material, side-by-side intercomparison, showing what things are the same.) This is cosmetics instead of medicine. We are reliving the font madness of the eighties, a tangent which did nothing to help the structure that users need who are trying to manage content. The Xanadu® project did not "fail to invent HTML". HTML is precisely what we were trying to PREVENT-- ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can't follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management. The "Browser" is an extremely silly concept-- a window for looking sequentially at a large parallel structure. It does not show this structure in a useful way.
(emphasis added).
Ted raises some interesting points; it is hard for me to think that HTML is the be-all and end-all of information.
I don't know that his "zigzag" thing is ever going to get traction, but
What is the literary problem that hypertext is solving? In most cases there's no need for it. Infinite Jest might work better with hyperlinks -- if you can stand reading something like that on a screen.
There's tons of literature on the web now. If you write poetry or fiction and you're name isn't Stephen King or something, that's where you're publishing. In fact there is a good deal of literature in html format, but most of it doesn't use hyperlinks because the work doesn't call for it.
I write fiction and poetry and publish on the web. I'll use hyperlinks when i feel a need to. I haven't so far. Maybe when i set something in the mid-nineties...
There's a program called Tinderbox for the mac that can be used to build hypertexts.
The old "adventure" games like Colossal Cave adventure, are called "interactive fiction" these days, which says it all.
FWIW I think authors tend to be quite precious when it comes to their manuscripts - they have firms ideas how the plot should play out, so giving the reader a choice in the matter will only appeal to a particular kind of jobbing writer. It's probably for the best - imagine how confusing it would be discussing a story with your friend, when you both took entirely different choices during the process of reading it.
We're still locked into the classical style from inertia by the big media companies that don't want to do any work to package 6 endings into a book.
Some of us get immersed in fiction and just want to read it passively. There are text adventures and novels, and videogames and movies. There is room for everything.
Jus befause you have a tool in your toolbox doesn't mean you need to use it, or even should use it.
Free Martian Whores!
Dickens is an interesting corner case. He wrote much of his work as serializations published monthly, a few dozen pages each month. The primary intent was probably financial but there were some very strong impacts on the art as well.
Financially, this was a very successful ploy as it allowed Dickens to write to the huge and under served market of common laborers who could not easily afford the price of a book, but could set aside a few pennies each month to buy the next installment. It was not uncommon in boarding houses, etc, for several persons to pool resources to make the purchases, with each installment handed down from one to the next. The approach made a lot of sense for the publishers as well, since the big up front costs of printing a run of books was avoided. So this was a tremendous marketing success, as big in its time as the first pocket MP3 players have been in our time. And perhaps the impetus for the "reading groups" we see today, where once everyone has read the next chapter, they all get together over cheap wine and pre-sliced cheese samplers to gossip about the characters.
But the impact on the art was also incredible. Dickens was getting feedback from his readers, and was clearly paying attention to it: minor characters that had struck a chord were given larger parts in later installments; some of the subplots were almost certainly proposed by readers. Dickens was perhaps the first to write an interactive novel.
He was also one of the first creative writers to run into the problem of deadlines. I don't think that anyone who has studied his works would disagree that he sometimes inserted fillers to round out his monthly quota. When he needed 2,000 words to properly handle the next plot twist but there was only room for 1,000 more words in the next installment, he would pad things out, sometimes with brilliantly detailed descriptions, sometimes the padding was not so brilliant, doing whatever it took to end up with an installment that ends properly with some kind of cliff-hanger. Some of that padding would definitely be better put in hypertext footnotes, or better yet, deleted entirely. But then you end up with a Readers Digest Condensed version, and not the real thing.
Even so, Dickens told his tales one word at a time, one sentence after the next, never side by each. There is never a time when he required the reader to absorb two different threads at once before going on to the next thing. Nor can you do that in literature-- the closest you can get is the use of flashbacks, etc, to loop the reader back through a sequence. But a tangled thread is still a linear thing.
Will