• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 460 0

is multiple and undefined; the latter addresses one reader, and that reader’s role is defined as the character of Omina. These two stories come from different, but related genres—tabletop role-playing and gamebooks. Both genres emerged around the same time in the 1970s, a key time in the development of interactive fiction. The drive to create interactive fiction began well before the Internet or videogames became mainstream. In their historical accounts of the development of interactive fiction, both Jay David Bolter (1991) and Damien Katz (2004) look as far back as the 1941 text “Garden of Forking Paths” by Jorge Luis Borges. As early as this, we see a frustration with the limits of print media. Bolter (1991) explains, “For Borges literature is exhausted because it is committed to a conclusive ending, to a single storyline and denouement” (p. 139). To be renewed, literature must embrace possibilities rather than shut them off (Bolter, 1991, p. 139). For some, this possibility of renewal existed in digital and electronic writing, which appeared to offer a flexibility that written prose did not. However, the rise of interactive fiction is not limited to the development of any one media.

What is interactive fiction and how does it operate? The term interactive fiction has been used to refer to a variety of texts from more standard literary works with interactive qualities, to hypertext, to adventure games, to role-playing games (RPGs). Although all fiction requires some participation of readers as they form the story in their minds, interactive fiction is more actively produced or navigated by the audience. Scholars have used a variety of concepts to highlight this difference from traditional texts, including terms such as emergent stories, ergodic texts, and cybertexts. Ryan (2003) defines an emergent story as one “that is produced dynamically in the interaction between the text and the reader” (p. 258). Following Genette and Chatman, Aarseth (1997) uses the term “erogodic” to describe texts which require “nontrivial effort” to navigate (p. 1). Ryan (2003) explains that ergodic texts create a feedback loop in which the user can go back and forth experiencing the story in a different sequence (p. 206). Aarseth goes on to favor the term cybertext as a medium that allows for texts that have both ergodic and narrative elements. Cybertext is not a genre, but a “broad textual media category” (Aarseth, 1997, p. 5). All of these models for interactive texts are helpful in defining interactive fiction, yet the differences among them highlight the fact that there are multiple types of interactivity.

A key difference is that when Ryan (2003) talks about emergent stories, she talks about the sort of interactivity that is productive. She defines productive action as anything “that leaves a durable mark on the textual world, either by adding objects to its landscape or by writing its history” (Ryan, 2003, p. 205). Examples of productive interactivity include such texts as amusement park rides, children’s make-believe games, interactive drama, and MUD (Multi-User Domain) (Ryan, 2003, p. 287–331). These interactive genres blur the boundaries between authors and audiences, allowing those who participate in the interaction to help add to the world of the story.

In contrast, Aarseth (1997) shows how the user of text-based adventure games is separated from the author or narrator or creator1 through interactive negotiation with the computer interface (pp. 111–114). Interactivity here is selective. In the model of cybertext, the event and the progression of the events is separated by the negotiation between user and interface (Aarseth, 1997, p. 126). The reader must solve the puzzle in order to access the story. There is a correct choice that must be selected to open the right path to reach the story. In this process, Aarseth (1997) sees that the idea of a traditional story does not hold up, and that “instead of a narrated plot, cybertext produces a sequence of oscillating activities effectuated (but certainly not controlled) by the user” (p.