Hyperliterature
jamesyu.org
jamesyu.org
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.
https://www.sixtostart.com/we-tell-stories/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Tell_Stories
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:
https://www.sixtostart.com/smokescreen/
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.
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.
This was something that is less than 10 years old - can you imagine what would happen if this were 100 years old?
It's a hard problem if you consider long time scales.
It would be trivial to read those 1e5 years from now, assuming we're still around and not living in caves.
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.
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/16/william-gibson...
There's always something for parents to panic about: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/pa/article-6019499/What-dr...
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_database
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.
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 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?
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!
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.
>"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."
1. http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674744431
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.
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.
http://art-tech.arts.ufl.edu/~jack/courses/f06-dig4581/paper...
Tacoma is a great recent example of the latter.
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.
And then the text moves. Nope.
Thanks OP.
> 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.
[1] (partially NSFW) www.electricsheepcomix.com
It's called "Insignificant Little Vermin"
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.
[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L10Cbgj7CUEAe1-LwwNfYY1B...