Adventures in Hypertext

The Fox and the Stork: An Interactive Fairy Tale

I created a hyperlinked version of Choose Your Own Adventure story on Aesop’s fable The Fox and the Stork. This was a story I enjoyed as a child – the animals struggling to eat properly from dishes were, and probably are and will always be, relevant to smaller humans who are not the best at table manners either. However, the moral of the story is not to eat properly, but be nice to others, since what goes around comes around, or in a more religious tone, as you sow, so you reap.

To comment on the creation process first, as I was trying out Twine I was reminded of the plot board that some playwrights use as part of their creation method. They write one scene or idea on one sticky note, then place it temporarily in an act of their play. As the ideas accumulate, sticky notes fill each act and the board. As they do so, the playwright changes where to put a particular scene by moving the notes around within the board, developping the plot.

What is common between the plot board and Twine is the flexibility that it gives to creation and the visualization of their creation. What is a mundane activity of scrolling, copying and pasting, and reorganizing in a linear text becomes an essential part of the creation in them, and presented in an eye-friendly and possibly inspiring format.

Now, on to the genre and interface. I agree with my peers that there are clear advantages of using hyperlinked interfaces like Twine for presenting Choose Your Own Adventure books. The advantages include intuitive navigation, spoiler-safety, ease of sharing, to name a few. Rebecca Hicke, a student in the previous iteration of this course, suggested that the digital CYOA format can increase the didactic value of moral stories like Aesop’s fables, since CYOA genre is usually narrated in the first person and the endings seem like direct consequences of the player’s choice.

I think what Rebecca is pointing at is the heightened sense of agency that a CYOA book may give to its reader, since they can now directly influence the story. However, unless specifically designed otherwise, the reader cannot still expect what’s to come in a CYOA book, so the consequence of their choice might seem arbitrary or unexpected. The implication of this in a moral story is that the reader might feel unfairly punished instead of trying to learn from their ‘mistakes’ (Who could expect to be eaten by a wolf just because they built a nice house out of their favorite material, but not bricks?).

These questions regarding “Adventures in Hypertext” are under a traffic jam: they’re at the intersection of story, genre, and interface. It seems to me that any Twine story has a particular feeling about it, perhaps like playing an old video game but with a modern font, and I am not sure if that is originating from the particular bibliographic features of Twine or from more general features of hypertextual, non-linear storytelling interface.

But actually, any literary text is at such an amalgam of elements. Emily Dickinson’s poetry book that you may have at home, for example, is an intersection of content (‘story’), poetry (genre), and codex (inteface). It’s that this combination is so familiar to us that its constitutients are unmarked. On the otherhand, Twine, at least for me, is a ‘marked’ interface, and I cannot help but get distracted by its appearance. I wonder if it is a matter of familiarity, or if there are ways to improve the reading experience of hypertextual non-linear stories.

Sources

• The image is by Jordiferrer – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25764300
• The story was created with Twine