On 1/28/06, Sai Emrys <sai@...> wrote:
> From an offlist email (w/ permission):
>
> On 1/25/06, Yahya Abdal-Aziz <yahya@...> wrote:
......
> > 12. Your explication of non-linear fiction immediately put me in mind of
> > "interactive novels", which sometimes require a truly admirable degree of
> > cleverness in branching and rejoining different plot threads to achieve
> > given states of knowledge at various points.
> If you are thinking of e.g. Choose Your Own Adventure books, those are
> not nonlinear at all; they are merely branching (or 'customized')
> linear. (Viz: the scene in /The Princess Bride/ where the kid corrects
> the grandfather and says how the story is obviously *supposed* to go -
> the story would still be linear either way, it's just a change in how
> it turns out.)
The earliest Choose Your Own Adventure
novels were simple tree structures, but some later
ones, and many of those in other series (e.g.,
GrailQuest) were more complex networks.
> Every one that I have seen is exclusively intended to have one path
> *at a time* that is possible; attempting to keep track of the full
> tree
...or network?
>is extremely difficult. They definitely don't take advantage of
> the actual structural net as an object in itself, which is what I was
> imagining non-linear fiction (or poetry) would be like.
Some hypertext fiction, as best as I can tell, is
something like this: the various branchings of the
network don't represent alternate ways the story
can turn out, but alternate facets of the story
one can attend to at any given time; one is encouraged
to read much if not all of it and get a feel for how
the bits connect. In theory the same structure
could appear in a paper book with sections and
branchings.
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry