Tagged: hypertext

Actively interacting interactively

The importance of interactivity in digital texts and how that differentiates old and new media.

Not all digital texts are interactive, but those that aren’t could usually be taken out of the computer and played by another medium.

Ryan asks what this might mean for narrative form and storytelling, and as a self-diagnosed, scaffold-loving, traditional narrative fanatic, I am also interested in what the future might look like in an ever-expanding networked media.

I really like these diagrams of plot graphs Ryan provided – they offer a range of perspectives on narrative that don’t necessarily have to conform to the traditional structure.

I found most interesting what Ryan raised in the last section, that interactivity is an umbrella term that covers a wide variety of relations between the user and the text. So far in the examples of hypertext I’ve looked into, at least online, I’ve had to simply click different sections and links and I’ve been transported to a different story segment. But where else could this idea of interactivity lead as technology progresses? Admittedly, I’m still transfixed by the idea of a build your own adventure theme park, but the directions that could be followed… I can’t begin to fathom.

  • Links:

On Evan Williams’ newly launched publishing platform, Medium, a big focus is on sharing and collaboration. Articles are arranged by themes so that readers can contribute and gravitate toward content that fits their likes. The comments are set up to aid in that too. They’re not at the end of the piece, but sprinkled throughout, paragraph by paragraph. The aim is to foster dynamic discussions around what you’re interested in.

“The crowd can actually improve the quality of the content,” says Williams, who also co-founded microblogging site Twitter. “Our goal is to create a better place to read and write.”

– The Publishing Industry’s Secret Sauce Is You

Television has already grown to have what AMC calls the “two–screen experience” with certain shows. The new NBC show, Hannibal (which I recommend highly), live tweets during its episodes, and Sam Witwer live tweets during the SyFy show Being Human for both the East and West Coast air times.

So let me bring this back to the issue that spurred this blog: ensemble casts and the changing nature of big movies.

– A Different Kind of Experience

The world’s first interactive street-furniture installation is for Nokia’s N-90 and the moment it detects a pedestrian it springs into life. The monolith-like installation first swivels either right or left to ensure that the creative message is directly in front of the consumer. It then snaps a photograph of the person and displays it on a screen.

– Street Furniture Gets Interactive (2006)

There is no way to deny that fact static pages just don’t cut it anymore. With every company combining social media profiles with their standard websites, designers are discovering more and more that creating a successful site means embracing interactivity.

Internet users view countless websites each day, so as a brand you need to figure out how to stand out and make your mark in the mind of the viewer. One of the best ways to do this is to incorporate interactive elements on your site. The goal is to draw the customer in and engage them through interactive element—innovative scroll navigation, animated characters or unique click controls. Whatever you choose to do you have to make it worth talking about.

– Interactivity Is King

Interaction is something as simple as pressing Space to make the story continue, and as complex as deciding the fate of a universe based on your actions. Such interactive storytelling breaks down into three rough categories. There are games that wish to tell you their story, and ask you to complete tasks that allow it to be told. There are games that have stories which can go in multiple directions, and allow you to choose which of these pre-determined routes to take. And there are games that provide a template in which you can tell your own story.

– Games Are The Ideal Place For Telling Great Stories

A very important factor of interactivity in games is how the player experiences and learns about the story. Audio, visuals, and other elements of a game help to create truly interactive experiences.

– Interactivity as it Relates to Video Games and Story

I’m a hyperhypo

  • I’m feeling thoroughly confused about hypertext the more I read about it. To me it seems like it is one of those things that you have to be enveloped in to understand – from the examples I’ve read online I feel I have an understanding of what hypertext is, however the theory surrounding it is exhausting.
  • I gather the non-linear aspect and the challenging of the narrative and the literary form – something I find quite interesting and amazing: how can people make these beautiful and intricate stories that can be read like a pretzel and still make sense?! But personally I’m still drawn to the story as a having a distinct thread, a definitive sense of change and growth, however I’m willing to admit that that may be simply because that’s all I’ve ever been taught before: the linear is ingrained just as the essay, just as the one size fits all approach to education.
  • A big design fiction-esque question raised in Landow‘s piece on hypertext is how it might affect the literary form. Blogs may be a perfect form to me at the moment. I love the idea of being able to read a piece with a definitive beginning and ending, yet also given the option to explore within the story. I can come back to the section I was up to, or I can read from start to end and then go through the 57 tabs I opened.
  • I like the idea that “hypertext … makes certain elements … stand out the first time” – going back to the blog example, there’s something about the blue underlined text that encapsulates the same way the yellow highlighted section in a reading does.
  • “Hypertext story space is multidimensional and theoretically infinite.”
  • Sometimes I finally feel like I understand hypertext, then go on a website devoted to a hypertext story and all I feel is welling rage and fury because I DON’T UNDERSTAND.
  • I’m trying to remember that it’s not broken just because it’s uncomfortable, to make it relevant, and just because I don’t get it doesn’t mean it’s ‘bad’, but this is a hard practice when my precious scaffolding of beginning, middle, end is taken away. I’m acknowledging I like the scaffolding.
  • Ok breathe Zo, breathe. Douglas‘ explanation of the Titanic choose-your-own-adventure actually sounds really cool: “It is 9.30PM: you have slightly more than four hours to wend your way through a series of tortuous plots and subplots, deciding which to follow and which to bypass, before the ship begins her plunge to the ocean floor.”
  • Hmm, perhaps hypertext has a place in theme park type scenarios? What if that Titanic CD-ROM could be played out in a theme park inside a huge ship, with its “elegiac music,” “eight decks of public rooms” and “well-written characters”.
  • I’m intrigued by Douglas’ question of whether future readers will read print works differently to how they do now with the increase in interactive mediums. This is very interesting, and now I am recalling my feelings of inadequacy at predicting the future. I’m sure it’s true that I listen to a vinyl record differently to how my father would have in the 70s – I can pick the differences between the vinyl and an mp3, which I am accustomed to, with ease. I too wonder what specifics will be picked up when future readers read a print text, just as I can get transfixed on the sound of the needle being placed on a record, or that unique sound of dust that doesn’t exist in a digital rendering.
  • Ok, off to have hypertext dreams.

 

Writing about hypertext by writing in hypertext, or:

the only way to learn how to ride a bike is by riding a bike.

… to unify and and organize in the right way, so as to clarify and simplify our computer and working lives, and indeed to bring literature, science, art and civilization to new heights of understanding, through hypertext.

The ‘cloud’ we use, both cloud services and file sharing services, as well as the ….. sphere of endless websites all linking, borrowing and reappropriating each other ….. however Nelson’s article also makes it clear how far there is to go.

What if, what if, what if! Certainly there are also endless opportunities to revolutionise and keep literature, science, art and civilisation evolving as new service emerge out of ideas born from design fiction and diegetic prototypes.

 

This diagram from the reading shows the concept of moving from hard copy to soft copy, and I think a modern equivalent to some extent is Ancestry.com – a website specialising in making hard copy documents available online (for a price).

In fact this reading is quite prophetic, expecting the increase in cloud-like software and even the changes in organisations such as schools and universities. What is most terrifying is perhaps that 2020, the year that Nelson asked readers to imagine as far off in to the future, is now not so far away at all. But undoubtedly even in the next mere seven years, what technologies and gadgets that will be used most prolifically haven’t even been conceived yet.