Questions for October 9
“A reader, however, strongly engaged in the unfolding of a narrative, is powerless. Like a spectator at a soccer game, he may speculate, conjecture, extrapolate, even shout abuse, but he is not a player. Like a passenger on a train, he can study and interpret the shifting landscape, he may rest his eyes wherever he pleases, even release the emergency brake and step off, but he is not free to move the tracks in a different direction. He cannot have the player’s pleasure of influence: “Let’s see what happens when I do this.” The reader’s pleasure is the pleasure of the voyeur. Safe, but impotent.
The tensions at work in a cybertext, while not incompatible with those of narrative desire, are also something more: a struggle not merely for interpretative insight but also for narrative control: “I want this text to tell my story; the story that could not be without me.” In some cases this is literally true. In other cases, perhaps most, the sense of individual outcome is illusory, but nevertheless the aspect of coercion and manipulation is real. ”
I would argue that cybertexts are predominantly falling under the illusory category in the sense that while the readers’/players’ actions may lead to different outcomes/ narrative progression it ultimately results in the same vein as the footnote analogy. IE The narrative has already been created and the closing of branching paths results in a singular, predetermined (prefabricated) story. Does true cybertextuality necessitate a text being created simultaneously to the spectator experiencing it?
Does the rise of digitally produced stories (games, VR, AR etc.) necessarily coincide with an increase in ergodic literature? [Stories, games, narratives which require more from the reader, gamer, spectator than merely placing eyes on a page]. It seems to me that because of the nature of the nonergodic literature being defined by what it is not (minimally interactive) that the goalposts of this threshold of interactivity would be constantly shifting as readers become more literate in the new artform.
I haven’t come across the idea of the multicursal labyrinth before. What are some other examples of multicursal labyrinths (traditional literature or otherwise)?
I’m not sure I understand Aarseth’s example of the Egyptian hieroglyphics being an example of non-linear text. He claims that “this layout allowed a nonlinear arrangement of the religious text in accordance with the symbolic architectural layout of the temple.” But doesn’t the assemblage of the wall inscriptions require a linear arrangement? The placement of the text on the walls must be read in a specific order for it to make sense – it was not merely added for ornamentation but to describe the entombed person(s).