
Hyperliterature - jamesjyu
https://www.jamesyu.org/hyperliterature.html
======
n4r9
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.

[0]
[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page)

~~~
dTal
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.

~~~
n4r9
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.

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adrianhon
I designed We Tell Stories for Penguin back in 2008, at Six to Start. It won
Best of Show at SXSW in 2009:

[https://www.sixtostart.com/we-tell-stories/](https://www.sixtostart.com/we-
tell-stories/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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/](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.

~~~
adrianhon
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.

[https://zombiesrungame.com](https://zombiesrungame.com)

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igravious
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.

[0] [http://elo2019.ucc.ie/cfp/](http://elo2019.ucc.ie/cfp/)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_fiction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_fiction)

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Palomides
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.

~~~
jamesjyu
Added! Funny enough, I had heard of Homestuck, but never actually read it.

~~~
Palomides
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/](https://xkcd.com/1110/) along with the whole idea of
the infinite canvas.

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chewxy
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?

~~~
jamesjyu
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.

~~~
w1nt3rmu4e
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.

~~~
GuiA
But then you’re not preserving the interactive piece of work; you’re merely
recording a performance of it.

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svilen_dobrev
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..

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_database](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.

~~~
taneq
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.

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vanderZwan
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.

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roymurdock
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?

~~~
unhammer
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Leaves](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Leaves)
is an amazing piece of ergodic literature, in printed form.

~~~
patcon
Agreed. Really great book. That and Cloud Atlas are my favourite non-linear
books (pls forget the movie)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Atlas_(novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Atlas_\(novel\))

~~~
raywu
Loved Cloud Atlas's structure. Hyperion and Infinite Jest also come to mind.

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BenjaminBlair
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

[http://art-tech.arts.ufl.edu/~jack/courses/f06-dig4581/paper...](http://art-
tech.arts.ufl.edu/~jack/courses/f06-dig4581/papers/non-linear/aarseth.pdf)

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shmerl
Gamebooks[1] used the interactive story idea in a paper form quite a while ago
already.

1\.
[http://www.abandonia.com/en/gamebooks](http://www.abandonia.com/en/gamebooks)

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falcolas
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.

Tacoma is a great recent example of the latter.

------
mattbierner
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

~~~
jamesjyu
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.

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keyle
This is very cool but I found the color shifting highly disruptive to actually
soaking in the text... [https://www.jamesyu.org/hot-
spot/](https://www.jamesyu.org/hot-spot/)

And then the text moves. Nope.

------
raywu
Star Gauge [1] is fascinating.

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]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Su_Hui%27s_Star_Gauge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Su_Hui%27s_Star_Gauge)

~~~
fromthestart
I think they might be stretching the definition of poetry a bit here.

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evrydayhustling
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...)

[1] (partially NSFW) www.electricsheepcomix.com

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chrisweekly
Wow, "Windrift" looks pretty freaking cool. I'm inspired to play with it.
Thanks for the list. Be sure to check out "Unflattening" by Nick Sousanis!

[http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674744431](http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674744431)

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duck
I really enjoyed [https://readtapestry.com/](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. :(

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323454
oh my god the football one is the greatest thing of all time. if you have like
3 hours to kill go for it

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Mizza
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.

~~~
lizardskull
I tried to find this link and could not discover the post. Would you please
respond with a link to it. Thank u

~~~
Mizza
It took my like half an hour to find!

It's called "Insignificant Little Vermin"

[https://egamebook.com/vermin/v/latest/](https://egamebook.com/vermin/v/latest/)

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dirkk0
Also, there is Kate Pullingers 'Breathe.
[http://www.katepullinger.com/breathe/](http://www.katepullinger.com/breathe/)

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songeater
Borges! Here is an attempt to wikify one of his stories. [http://tlon-uqbar-
orbis-tertius.wikia.com](http://tlon-uqbar-orbis-tertius.wikia.com)

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psychometry
Hypertext should be the default format for a lot of novels, too. DFW and
Nabokov both have works that are well-suited to the format.

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jbump
i haven't played this yet, but i think the game is about surfing an older
styled version of the net. seems vaguely relative:
[https://aetherinteractive.itch.io/subserial-
network](https://aetherinteractive.itch.io/subserial-network)

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aj7
Would love to see the original HyperCard reappear.

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evanmichaelkyle
Also called a Hypertive (hypermedia narrative)

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celebril
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.

[1]
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L10Cbgj7CUEAe1-LwwNfYY1B...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L10Cbgj7CUEAe1-LwwNfYY1BkVaO8x976IkAtcL1Ll4/edit)

