- Introductions: what's our story?
- From text to hypertext: what is the Web?
- Meet Twine and play around with it.
In pairs, ask your neighbours to tell you their story and then tell it to everyone else.
">https://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5163-->Interactive / nonlinear stories existed before videogames!
To make a Dadaist poem
- Take a newspaper.
- Take a pair of scissors.
- Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
- Cut out the article.
- Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
- Shake it gently.
- Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
- Copy conscientiously.
- The poem will be like you.
- And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.
Jorge Luis Borges (1941)
In the short story a character named Ts'ui Pên tells everybody that he wanted to write a book and build a labyrinth. Nobody ever found the labyrinth, only a very confusing and contradictory book. We then discover that the book is the labyrinth. In the fictional book, every chapter is followed by "every" possible continuation.
Raymond Queneau (1961)
Derived from a set of ten basic sonnets, they are printed on card with each line on a separated strip, like a heads-bodies-and-legs book. All ten sonnets have the same rhyme scheme and employ the same rhyme sounds. As a result, any line from a sonnet can be combined with any from the other nine, giving 1014 (= 100,000,000,000,000) different poems. Working twenty-four hours a day, it would you take some 140,000,000 years to read them all.
Aka Choose Your Own Adventure in the 1970s and 80s
You can find many of them on Project AON
HyperText is a word Ted Nelson coined in the 60s.
A system of non-sequential writing that would allow the reader to aggregate meaning in snippets, in the order of his or her choosing, rather than according to a pre-established structure fixed by the author.
We're now familiar with hypertext because of the World Wide Web (invented in 1989) but in the 80s it was quite a weird thing, with a literary potential.
The Web is not the Internet.
If the Internet is a global brain (infrastructure), the Web is all the memories and thoughts that run on top of it.
The Internet started as a military project shortly after WW2. Fearing a soviet nuclear attack, the American army designed a resilient de-centralised network: if one node goes down, communication can still happen between the other nodes.
Internet expands beyond the military and is adopted by business and academia. People start sending emails.
The WWW started as a way of linking academic documents together, over 2 computers in Switzerland.
Tim Berners-Lee (TBL or Timbo):
Wouldn't it be great if I could have all my research data always available on this computer, and people can just fetch it from there, rather than me having to send emails? In fact, wouldn't it be great if all the information in the World could be always available? If every piece of data had an address where we can find it, like we find people at certain addresses?
This is not an actual quote from TBL, but rather an interpretation of what he may have thought before inventing the WWW
Timbo's idea: hypertext + Internet = WWW. He specified a set of rules (HTTP) for computers to exchange documents over the Internet, and a standard format for these documents (HTML).
Timbo invented the WWW in 1989. The rest is history.
See this introduction!
Try to keep each passage to one or two paragraphs.
Don't provide many choices, provide interesting choices.
Think about how your story can be delivered:
- Spatial? Metaphysical? Puzzle?
- Self-aware / self referential?
- First, second, third person?
- Multiple endings?
- Multiple beginnings?
- Do you control an avatar?
- Does it have graphics?
- What's the relation between graphics and text?
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