On a related note, I can spend hours and hours trawling through the star wars wiki [0]. It absolutely feels like a hyperlinked generalisation of reading a novel or series of novels. I haven't even read the books bar one or two lent from a friend when I was a teenager. There's a whole world to explore there in semi-dramatic text format. You can follow links that catch your interest and spin off on a tangent, never feeling compelled to follow and understand some central plotline. You can go from reading about how Darth Maul didn't actually die in Phantom Menace, to the ancient history of the Sith, to the invasion of the galaxy by the enigmatic Yuuzhan Vong and before you know it, half a day has passed.
I don't want to be a downer, and I'm glad you enjoy it, but...
I find that engaging with fictional universes this way really exposes the man behind the curtain - contrivances that we forgive because they further the plot within the context of a story suddenly stand out as hugely improbable, or inconsistent with the rest of the universe. Stories are only really designed to feel realistic from a particular perspective - when you glom them together, you don't really get a very coherent universe. It may be a ticklish premise that Darth Maul actually survives and goes on to do this or that, but when you've been reading about Jedi and Sith who've all cheated death in some improbable way dozens of times each, it stretches credibility. It may be fun to read a story about a tiny ship with more destructive power than the Death Star, but if you've just been reading all about the Death Star and how hard it was to build then it starts to raise uncomfortable (and unanswerable) questions about the underlying universe.
I understand that. It's likely to be an inevitable artefact of translating from stories to hyperlinked fiction. Somehow I'm able to suspend incredulity for the most part, but I get that not everyone would be able to. Perhaps - hopefully - in the future there will be original hyperlinked fiction that doesn't have this problem.
It told stories through Google Maps, blogs, real-time writing, and infographics. Sadly the website was ordered to be removed by Penguin, despite the fact we offered to continue hosting it for free ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also Smokescreen for Channel 4, which won Best Game at SXSW in 2010:
This had gameplay and stories told via analogues of Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. All done in HTML - no Flash! Again, this was taken down by Channel 4, like tears in the rain etc etc.
Another comment mentioned audio, so I'll also volunteer our Zombies, Run!, which is not just a bunch of zombie groans in your ears (a common misunderstanding) but actually a 300+ episode audio drama/game where you are a running in a zombie apocalypse, and you hear updates and instructions from your radio operator via your headphones.
I've studied this. There is an old art-form, there is extensive literature on this, there are professional organisations, there are annual conferences (the next major one being Electronic Literature Org. 2019 – ELO2019 – is in Cork[0], Ireland, where I study – please come, we'd love to have you).
When was this article written? Let's not call this hyperliterature. It may come as a surprise to some but words have meaning. And some of those meanings have been allocated. Hypertext fiction[1] (and poetry) is already a thing.
Source: two people very close to me wrote their dissertations on this topic and I edited one of them.
Do I have to be the one to say it? ... Homestuck definitely fits within this category. I think a lot of experimentation within comics and webcomics is under-recognized in this area.
there are a few other tangentially related webcomics things that come to mind and you might be interested in: xkcd Time and https://xkcd.com/1110/ along with the whole idea of the infinite canvas.
How does one preserve these for posterity? I realized this when I was re-reading Grant Morrison's Superman Beyond - I had lost the 3D glasses that came with the book. Newer printings did away with the anaglyphic panels, and the impact of the story of Superman seeing the reader is diminished.
This was something that is less than 10 years old - can you imagine what would happen if this were 100 years old?
This is an important question. I read an article (can't find it now) about museums tackling this problem for their digital born art. The idea is to encapsulate the binaries that run the art in some way that is human readable, or at least, in a way where humans could re-engineer the software, so you don't run into issues where in a thousand years there are no more Flash players.
It's a hard problem if you consider long time scales.
Maybe I didn't parse it but is there anything here that couldn't be preserved as a video? Video can be stored as a series of images, which can be (and often are) stored as a list of RGBA values. Those are as timeless as a WAV file (a series of amplitude values) or a vinyl record.
It would be trivial to read those 1e5 years from now, assuming we're still around and not living in caves.
Worst case scenario, we're back to oral histories, right? :) I f things go south, I am ok with just having that. I mean: What will be the whispered form of Super Mario World in 1000 years
It's been remarked that present culture is over-dominated by the recapitulation of 'baby boomer era culture' (for lack of a better word) and that youth revolutionary culture has been largely subsumed by it. (Is there anything now among 15-30 year olds that is as 'shocking' as rock and roll used to be? I can't say I can find anything. To be sure, there is plenty about which the older generations complain in relation to the younger, but that isn't the same.)
The other thing is, we're never going to stop loss (or, that is, that would be what my money would be on). We'll always be subject to the framing problem. And we might be better off to try and manage our anxiety about the world changing. Because that, to me, seems the real fear: we accept that, for us to exist as we are, the world had to change [at many points] but now we want to arrest, we are the pinnacle of humanity, the only means by which we can remain thus is for either the future never to come (change to be averted indefinitely) or for (as William Gibson pointed out) we have to imagine our future descendants as evolved to the point where their spindly legs and effete physiques barely managed to hold together beneath the crushing power of their ginormous brains[1].
Perhaps this is also connected to why so many complaints are lodged against franchises such as Star Trek and Star Wars and Doctor Who: we're no longer twelve, and we're never going to be again, and we can't get it back no matter how hard we try.
But, also, perhaps it's an idea we're going to have to get used to in a big way, because, if the state of all that currently rapidly decaying early film stock is any indicator, and I would bet that it is, the state of copyright, which will become only more oppressive as the 'knowledge economy' does more of whatever it keeps doing, half of the twentieth century and perhaps everything between now and some truly dystopian societal collapse stands likely to suffocate beneath the oily sea of private ownership where (in some cases) the only person with the rights to a given cultural artifact is the third cousin twice removed of the someone aunt's brother's half-sister's niece by a second marriage, who is currently in a vegetative state, never to emerge; whereas, on the other hand, we have cultural artifacts merely have to owner that anyone can identify at all. So I would be tempted to say that I would wonder if, looking back, future archeologists, if there is any such thing, are going to have quite (generally while imbibing large quantities of alcohol) a time hypothesizing as to why there was such a cultural dark age around this point in history.
Or maybe it's that we have reached and gone past the 'Death of God' (in the actually sense that Nietzsche meant it) and in the interregnum between that which came before and that which came after, we are trying to patch over the destruction of tradition by simply replacing it, trying to fill-in the gap. But, like cracking open someone's chest to replace a meat heart with a plastic toy replica, it just won't work. And neither can it be replaced with a heart from a corpse.
William Gibson's take on this stuff is that subcultures get commoditized a lot quicker - the gap between someone inventing a genuinely new and different style of music and playing it to their mates, to it being in the pop charts and used for advertising, is now collapsed into months or weeks.
Seemingly the only way to resist commoditization was to maintain an extremely shocking subculture of dadaist obscenity; memes that the "normies" wouldn't dare co-opt. That period concluded with the recent US presidential election; 4chan culture is now presidential.
As I said, obviously, the older generation still casts aspersions at the younger, as likely always be. But my point is, at from my view, I can't identify anyone culturally ascendant in the way, say, Elvis was, something uniquely tied to another, as it were, ascendant culture. Even something like, say, Lady Gaga, to me me, seems more David Bowie 2.0 than anything. There doesn't seem to be any flappers, any jazz. Even rap predominates not from the millennial generation but from the 70s and, most predominantly, Gen X. But, of course, maybe the problem is expecting, that's part of the problem, possibly, of existing in that interregnum, it's in normalized and tacitly internalized for some of us to think in terms of cultural churn, of course, while we're probably looking for the very opposite.
And I would agree that capitalism has gotten very good at assimilating and anesthetizing culture. (One need only look at surrealism to see that; or the more recent bourgeois appropriation burlesque.) But in that regard, and in light of this discussion being prompted out of the disappearance of mediums themselves and that which is transmitted through them, as Hans Richter pointed out, gathering together a retrospective on surrealism in a place of cultural sanctioning (a museum) was borderline trivial, whereas so much of the object generative output of the Dadaists was fashioned with and from materials with a life expectancy of a McDonald's hamburger wrapper.
(On your last sentence) In one respect, this is very interesting in that, if you want to take Will Self as... Well, let's just say, for the moment, that he is predominantly factually correct in the idea there can be no more avant garde, that there's nothing that can't be said. This then may be existential threat there is to capitalism. That is, we say there is nothing that that capitalism, like some sort of immune response can't envelope and neutralize, then what of the fundamentally apocalyptic nature of capitalism? Which why I will still, only half jokingly, say that Francis Fukuyama, in his ardent support, came the closest any human may ever come to killing capitalism single handedly.
So we need degeneracy in order to define ourselves, yet by merely referencing the same recycled degeneracy, we separate definition. The problem is, is former traditions that existed, the given present generation were not just one with the prior generation, but that generation was in turn subsumed in the larger idea stretching back through the millennia. However, now, that is not the case. Now, with the domination (for lack of a better word) of 'Boomer' culture, Gen X and the Millennials (allowing for little use any of those terms possess) are rolled into the 'Boomer' culture, whereas the 'Boomer' culture breaks from everything before, standing at this post WWII level where the Enlightenment has culminated in the twentieth centuries great project of ultimate modernity. And that's fundamentally different. It's one thing to say that we that we are all together in a given idea of history and culture and place that seems beyond the scope of us all that molds us all; however it is another to be impressed upon to recreate the image of the previous generation, and image with no more depth to it than that of previous generation; here, I think, the dynamic is too close; that is, it is difficult, say, to argue directly in any embodied way with cultural history that is just an idea, however, to sit across the table from that which seeks to replicate themselves in you, seemingly, for the simple egotistical nature of such, is something that will inspire reaction to and, likely, against. Yet, where can this reaction go if everything can be commoditized and therefor anesthetized, rendering it an agent of the creation of the very thing rebelled against?
So they will sell the rebellion. (Let us bring out the freedom torches, please.[1])
Perhaps, then, the next generation will have to extended even the Dadaist project, and make themselves the shoddily constructed cultural products which disappear from history, disintegrating in what trickles through the gutter.
nowadays one can make an interactive "book" bitemporal. That is, facts/history depend on when they have happened, and when one learned (=read) about it... So if u reread something in the first half, after u read the middle, u read different version of it..
And then multi-viewpoint - different characters tell the story in different ways, with very different timelines of who learned what when.
so when u're reading it as character A, in middle of story part of the then history changes completely because u learn something about B in the past.. While from point of view of B, that is well known since beginning, etc.
But sadly, these need far more programming than any book-writer can do, and proper "engine/interpreter" to "play" the result.
Sounds like the way some multiple-storyline games do it. It's all the same meta-story but it's different depending on how you play it.
Guild Wars 2 does something similar but it's all one overarching story and depending on what choices you made at the start, you get different parts and with a different spin. Play through the main story multiple times on different characters and you start seeing "oh this guy is mad about X which is a consequence of Y that my other character Z did". It really ties the world together.
I wonder if Return of the Obra Dinn, despite its graphics, couldn't be considered a form of hyper-radio. Because to be honest, it felt more like an interactive radio play, with the graphics mostly existing to supplement the audio.
it's hard to add visualizations to a text-driven story without it being gimmicky or distracting.
i can't really think of an example of hyperliterature that has stuck with me outside of the annoying bloomberg article animations they tried for 6 months and dropped sometime last year
i think that's why plot-rich video games are so popular as an alternative means of storytelling - they're based around really good writing, but also involve some core interactive mechanics that keep the audience engaged, challenged, and empathetic rather than distracted or frustrated
interesting concept, can it be extended outside of a few webpages and apps?
What about wiki-based storytelling, like the SCP Foundation database? It would fit the "hyperliterature" label in the sense that you discover the world and setting through a non-traditional hyperlink-based medium, and although the visual elements are limited, they are present (images, redactions, presentation of the content as a document...).
I think visual novels are an interesting example of this. The non-textual elements are very limited, yet that tiny bit of interaction totally changes the experience.
And they're usually weird anime porn, which makes them completely unpalatable to almost everyone. It's a shame, since I think the medium is cool.
"Unflattening"[1] is hands-down the best example of this kind of juxtaposition and interleaving of text and image I've ever seen. The fact that it uses these paired media simultaneously to demonstrate and explore the topic of how they relate, is uniquely satisfying to my mind. Highest possible recommendation.
>"The primacy of words over images has deep roots in Western culture. But what if the two are inextricably linked, equal partners in meaning-making? Written and drawn entirely as comics, Unflattening is an experiment in visual thinking. Nick Sousanis defies conventional forms of scholarly discourse to offer readers both a stunning work of graphic art and a serious inquiry into the ways humans construct knowledge."
Meh. I found HoL to be extremely over-rated, and more gimmickry than meaningful content. I got the impression that Danielewski was trying way harder to write "a post-modern novel" or "an ergodic novel" than he was trying to write "a good novel". That is, the focus was too much on the gimmicks: the multiple narrators, the typography/layout stuff, etc., as opposed to being a genuinely compelling story.
> i think that's why plot-rich video games are so popular as an alternative means of storytelling - they're based around really good writing, but also involve some core interactive mechanics that keep the audience engaged, challenged, and empathetic rather than distracted or frustrated
I'm not sure I agree here. The power of a medium is not in its ability to tell a well-written story, because such a story can easily be made good in any medium. Instead, it is in the ability to make what is a mediocre or fairly cookie-cutter story into an engaging one.
For video games, that feature is essentially interactivity, or the ability of the player to feel that they are actually causing the story to move forward. Ōkami is a game whose story boils down to an anthology of Japanese mythology and folktales with a loose framing device, but is widely praised for the fact that its core mechanic (the use of calligraphy to attack) is tightly intertwined with its graphical display and underpins the framing portion of the sory it tells. Return of the Obra Dinn tells a story reminiscent of any urban legend of a ship's disappearance, but what makes it interesting is that you experience the story backwards and only short snippets of it as people die.
The Harmonia format would be pretty awesome applied to nonfiction, I think (e.g., crowd-sourced marginalia). Closest application I can think of is Fermat's Library [1].
I was initially skeptical but found
Wattpad's tap stories pretty awesome in practice [2].
Generally though, you're right, the "killer app" hasn't been discovered yet. But I certainly find the innovation exciting!
I agree: with any new format, it's super hard for the story to stand out because the format itself becomes the story. So you get this sort of chicken and egg problem, because if there's not enough stories to drive a particular format, then that format dies.
Game narratives are great, but I'm personally more interested in non-agency type formats, because I think there will be relatively much more demand for that.
There's a good, though not well-known author Espen J. Aarseth. he analyses non-ergodic literature within the scope of computer technology, and how the latter enables the creation of texts that are not linear. An easy example would be an old-school RPG game where you can replay the game and choose different paths, which builds up to a different narrative. There's no one story and you can't define an author, because the ending depends upon the user's choices, so the "reader" participates in the "writing" process. Here's his one article that can be found online
I would think the "Visual Novel" and "walking simulator" games would fit in this category as well, where you observe a largely static story interactively.
I’d really like to use git repos for fiction; use commits and forks and merges to tell a story that is far larger than any snapshot of the repo’s content. This could be as simple as creating a fictional creative process for some work, or as complex as an entire fictional community collaborating on a document
One problem with traditional fiction narratives is its dependency hell. Think your code is bad? A single word in a novel could have dependency on any arbitrary set of other words. Let's say you need to change a character's inner flaw. Wow, that could change all the conversations they have in your narrative to remain a consistent person.
I believe this is the reason why longer form fiction is typically written by a single author, or a small set of very tight-knit authors.
But that's not to say this couldn't work. I just think you need a very particular type of story that you're telling, and a set of people involved who work well together.
> The outer border is meant to be read in a circle. The grid is known as a palindrome poem, and can be read in different ways to generate over 3,000 shorter poems, in which the second line of every couplet rhymes with that of the next.
You can make the case that a lot of graphic narratives fall into the hyperliterature category. Electric Sheep Comix [1] stands out for me as someone who really experimented with what the early web could do for graphic novels (stories told in two dimensions, infinite scrolls, temporal progress within different frames at different times...)
I really enjoyed https://readtapestry.com/ and all the tap essays people had published via it. I think they "pivoted" and closed it down several years ago though... so it all seems lost now. :(
A guy posted his Shown HN: here that was hyperlit-meets-DnD game/engine that was exceptionally good and worked very well on mobile. I wonder what happened that, I was super super impressed by it. It was very good at scope.
This is not a new idea. Playing with the boundaries of presentation in literature is just a subset of post-modernist lit.
If you want a prime example, OP, you should look into 4chan /lit/'s massively collaboratively written post-ironic tome "Hypersphere"[1]. It's the epitome of this sort of hyperliterature.
[0] http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page