I had never heard of Titanic: An Adventure Out of Time before so it’s piqued my interest when it was used as a basis for discussion of Hypertext. Long before the likes of Dragon Age, Fable, Mass Effect, The Walking Dead (the game, that is) this game existed allowing players to choose their own branches of conversation. As a gameplay mechanic this is great fun for a player, but as a story form it’s a brilliantly dynamic way of giving a sense of agency to the players.

It seems to me that through the development of hypertexts the more fragmented it is, and the more control a user has over their interaction with it, the more hypertext it is, as it gets further and further away from the traditional text. An issue arises though: at what point does the hypertext stop being a story, and start being the user’s own writing? I mean, it really depend on how the hypertext is portrayed. To not be considered a story it would have to offer infinite choices to the user, similar to real life. A number can never reach infinite, so I guess a Hypertext could never reach that point.

I figure then, Hypertexts are not entirely freeform. A story world would have to be constructed first and then from that the writer would have to break apart the narrative and then reconstruct it loosely enough to allow multiple branches of narrative.

I kind of lost where I was going with that but ANYWAY. I think I was trying to work out the reason Hypertext exists in story form. Although, at that, can we definitively call a Hypertext story hypertext? Is Hypertext not a form that allows it’s reader to enter at any point and travel to another, not strictly, linear point? Perhaps, pertaining to the title of this post, Hypertext is always approaching writing – in that it tries to offer a fluid, user driven narrative experience – but never reaches it simply because the option available have already been defined by the writer.

Regardless, I will not hesitate to champion the conversation branches of Mass Effect.