Hypermedia fiction: A medium of forking paths

Abstract

Hypermedia is becoming an increasing part of our reading and viewing experience. This paper uses some key examples of hyperfictional literature and film as bases for discussing some of the narrative and cognitive consequences of these new media. Does the interactive nonlinear medium of hyperfiction or hypermediaftction force us to question our identity as narrative creatures? Stories would seem to be part of our being human. We are narrative beasts and not just because we tell stories. But, in a sense, we are our narrative: life is a story. To read or view written or visual materials interactively is to face choices in what is given to us and to have to take action to get on with the ‘story’. This is a performance which disrupts, even suppresses, our most ingrained ways with stories. A hyperfictional narrative does not exist except in the making of it by the reader or viewer out of raw materials supplied by the ‘original author’. In the making of this kind of fiction, we take command of the direction of the narrative and in doing so we take command of our selves in a way that departs irrevocably from that quiet, relatively passive state of conventional reading and viewing. In that traditional state, we give up to the spell of the novel or film. Can we, in the more commanding state of hyperfiction reinstate what we enjoy about fiction when the world of the novel or film is something we actively make? And, do we, in this kind of engagement with text and pictures, draw on another form of narrative intelligence and a different line of imagination?. © 1997, Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.