Non-linear/interactive narratives

Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths; a hypertext project of the novel:
http://www.geocities.com/papanagnou/index.htm

"The concept Borges described in "The Garden of Forking Paths" - in several layers of the story, but most directly in the combination book and maze of Ts'ui Pen - is that of a novel that can be read in multiple ways, a hypertext novel."

Hypertext:

"Let me introduce the word "hypertext" to mean a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper. It may contain summaries, or maps of its contents and their interrelations; it may contain annotations, additions and footnotes from scholars who have examined it. Let me suggest that such an object and system, properly designed and administered, could have great potential for education, increasing the student's range of choices, his sense of freedom, his motivation, and his intellectual grasp. Such a system could grow indefinitely, gradually including more and more of the world's written knowledge. However, its internal file structure would have to be built to accept growth, change and complex informational arrangements." (T. Nelson, A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate, 1965)


"Exploratory hypertexts encourage and enable an audience (users or readers are inadequate terms here) to control the transformation of a body of information to meet its needs and interests. This transformation should include a capability to create, change and recover particular encounters as versions of the material, i.e. trails, paths, webs, notebooks, etc.[...] Ideally, an exploratory hypertext should enable its audience members to view and test alternative organizational structures of their own and, perhaps, compare their own structures of thought with hypertext and traditional ones.

The transformation of knowledge which an audience works upon an exploratory hypertext, in some important sense, parallels and rehearses the prior constructive encounter of its authors associative thought processes. In this instance, however, the word parallel is almost certainly metaphoric language and inadequate at that for a process which is sometimes orthogonal, sometimes congruent, sometimes isomorphic, but always, in some important sense, anticipatory.The authors and audience of hypertexts share a transforming interrelationship. They are, to use an overused term, co-learners. Even the most transparent exploratory hypertexts involve a shared process of mapping this interrelationship." (Michael Joyce, Siren Shapes: Exploratory and Constructive Hypertexts, 1988)

Storyspace project (unfortunately, not shareware)

Some art projects; on storytelling and city space:

http://www.nighthaunts.org.uk/
http://www.nightjam.org.uk/about.php

The other projects by Scanner: http://www.scannerdot.com/sca_001.html

MIT course on interactive and non-linear narrative