Hypertext Primer - First Installment

Participants in cyber-culture have a tendency to divide themselves up into small, self-enclosed communities that tend to become rather exclusive, less perhaps because of the intentions of any of their participants than because of the very peculiar ontological status of these little associations. They never rent meeting halls, they seldom break bread together and they exist in the physical world only on tiny lumps of graphite and silicon distributed randomly about the surface of the world. This new way of finding companions has brought happiness to many lonely people and inspiration to many others living in intellectually restrictive environments, but it has also often led to a strange insularity that creates borders where there is simply no reason for them to exist. One such border lies between computer gaming enthusiasts and fans of hypertext literature. The former are a widely diverse crowd ranging continuously from QUAKE-addled pre-teens to the hipster bohemians of the IF underground. The latter (at least to my limited purview) would appear to be a pretty well-read, buttoned-down crowd whose main distinguishing feature is that they seldom stray far from the academy.

A couple of things distinguish hypertexts from traditional, Infocom-style IF games. Their look is a little different, since they are produced so as to have an HTML (or HTML-like) interface, with illuminated links representing the main options available to the player/ reader, rather than a simple command line like the sort used in TADS and INFORM games. As far as the experience of reading them goes, what mainly distinguishes a hypertext from an IF game is what enthusiasts (and detractors) of the genre refer to as its "statelessness." To put things a little over-simply: as one moves through a hypertext narrative, no information about one's progress is saved as data that influences the story's future development. Thus every time you come back to a link and read a piece of text, you're in the same position that you were in the last time you visited it, at least as far as plotline goes ( though of course some very subtle and sophisticated narrative effects can be brought about through the device of deliberate repetition). No dead trolls, no magic portals that won't open till you've picked up the blessed whup-ass stick - a hypertext is a play of surfaces across the mind, with no hidden mechanisms humming away to influence the order of events. The effect is a little disorienting to those of us used to the semi-linearity of a well-plotted IF game, but the change can often be a pleasant one.

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