Against Hypertext

1. Against Hypertext A look at Stephanie Strickland’s The Supremely Fictional Importance of Hypertext

2. Modes of interaction A look at the process • Interpritive • The personal interpritation of content • Conection with • Reader response • Semiotic • utilitarian • Utilitarian • Graphic design • Apparatus • (Connection with HCI) • Explicit • Overt participation • Rules in games • procedural • Cultural participation • Outside of single text • (Conection with Re-Mix)

3. Systems for explicit interaction : beyond the computer p 3 • Sports • Jazz • Games • Letters to the editor • Architecture • Hypertext All incorporate a dynamic

4. Content Based Indebted film or novels Pregenerated combinatorial System Based Emergent Bottom-up Computational Structure “While there are examples of emergent texts in non-electronic media, what I am calling system-based interactive texts are much more at home in digital media then content-based ones” p 4

5. Down with text • --”the ecstasy of play is not merely a matter of literary style.” • But if your ambition is to fulfill he unfulfilled promise of “new media”…..you are best served to look beyond writing, beyond poetry,beyond hypertext” (p5)

6. problems with hypertext • Presumes reader will look at ever link • Robbed of dynamic consequence • Choice = reinforced rigidity of author • Based on the presumed superiority of text (p4) Discussion on open work Mise-en- scene Artaud

7. Disclaimers • Concepts; not Categories(p 155) • Forget the computer(p156) • Defining to understand not explain(p155) • To create new work Accepts the overlap and is looking for useful differences Example “in what way might we consider this thing a narrative thing” p157

8. The “Game-Story”

9. Narrative,Interactivity, Play, and Games:four Naughty Concepts in Need of Discipline

10. Game ---- Story • Two concepts into four parts • Narrative • Interactivity • Play • Game Goal “to bring insight to their interrelations and provide critical tools for others

11. Narrative Based on J. Hills Miller • Has an initial state, a change of state and insight brought on by the change of state. • Personification of events through a medium. -representational • Representation constructed by patterning and repetition P 156

12. Goal shouldn’t be to replicate “existing” forms. p. 157

13. Interactivity • Cognitive Interactivity or interpretive Participation with a text • Functional Interactivity or Utilitarian Participation. • Explicit Interactivity or Participation with Design choice • Meta-inactivity or cultural Participation with a text

14. Play • Game Play, or Formal Play • Ludic Activities, or Informal Play • Being Playful (state of mind) Each is incorporated in the next

15. “Play is the free space of movement within a more rigid structure. Play exists both because of and also despite the more rigid structures of a system.” p.159

16. Games • A Voluntary interactive activity in which one or more players follow rules that constrain their behavior, enacting an artificial conflict that ends in a quantifiable outcome. Play emerges as the free space of movement within more rigid structure. p.161

17. The Mix

18. Ms Pac-Man • Narrative introduce by cabinet graphics • Experience composed of entire arcade game and environment • Does not provide the same pleasure as a novel or film…..why should we expect it to?”

19. Games have Narrative • The same elements played out differently • Artificial representation • Quantifiable • How do we capitalize on the unique attributes of games?