2012

No Longer No Sense of an Ending

In his PhD dissertation, Cybertext, game studies scholar Espen Årseth argues that the linearity and interactivity of a literary work have little to do with whether it was realized in print or on a computer. His most conspicuous example is the millennia-old I Ching, which is both non-linear and interactive. Årseth also showed how hypertext could be more linear than a regular paper book; it’s possible to skip around in a book, but in hypertext, we can only follow the links that the author has set out for us. As I became more comfortable with what was initially a challenging concept, I began to think about what it is, then, that makes hypertext interesting.

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