Playing the Text, Performing the Future (eBook)

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Felicitas Meifert-Menhard, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.

Felicitas Meifert-Menhard, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany.

1 Introduction: Narrating the Future in Text 11
2 The Tellability of the Future 20
2.1 The Shape of Narrative – The Shape of Experience 21
2.2 The Shape of the Future 26
2.3 What If…? Thinking Beyond Actuality 35
2.4 Pre-Text and Prototype: Cybertext and Ergodics 37
2.5 Shaping and Experiencing the Storyworld: Agency and Immersion 39
3 Textual Future Narratives – Form and Structure 43
3.1 Narrating the ‘Not-Yet’: Issues of Mediality 44
3.1.1 Tempting Teleology 47
3.1.2 Problematical Presence 49
3.1.3 Imagining Optionality 51
3.2 Nodes and Bifurcation: The Essence of Future Narratives 55
3.3 Architecture, Run, Protocol: A Three-Level Narratological Model for FNs 57
3.4 The Responsiveness of the System: Activity vs. Interactivity 63
3.5 A Word on the Reader or: The Reader as Player 67
3.6 The Necessity of Possibility: Do We Have to Play? 70
3.7 A Typology of Textual Nodal Situations 72
3.8 Transitions Between Nodal Situations 74
3.8.1 Internal Page Transitions 74
3.8.2 Page-to-Page Transitions 76
3.8.3 Shuffling 77
3.8.4 Link-to-Link Transitions 78
3.8.5 Dynamic Input 78
3.9 The Visibility of Nodes: Indication 79
3.10 How to Choose? Information 81
3.11 Narrative Negotiation of Possibility: Mediation 85
3.12 Nodal Power 88
3.13 Nodal Structures in Textual Future Narratives 92
3.13.1 Directedness: The Arborescent Structure 93
3.13.2 Circulation: The Network Structure 95
3.13.3 Exploring and Returning: The Axial Structure 98
3.14 Issues of Navigation and Space 100
3.14.1 The Spatial Topology of Future Narratives 103
3.14.2 Spatiality in Textual FNs 104
4 A Typology of Future Narratives in Print and Digiture 108
4.1 Imaginative Explorations of the Future: Chance, Choice, and the Resistance to Closure 110
4.2 What Next? Open-Ended Narrative 112
4.3 Testing the Boundaries of the Printed Format: Multi-Linearity, Multifurcation 116
4.3.1 Non-linearity vs. Multi-linearity 117
4.3.2 Problematical Presence: Multiple Endings 119
4.3.3 Crucial Junctures: Forking Paths 122
4.3.4 Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Stories 127
4.4 Text as Play: Games, Combinatorics, Multimodality 134
4.4.1 Game Novels and Combinatorics 135
4.4.2 The Multimodal Novel 141
4.5 Moving Into the Electronic Medium: Digital Multiplicity 144
4.5.1 Interactive Fiction 145
4.5.2 Hypertext Fiction 152
4.5.3 The Visual Novel 163
4.6 Approaching the Boundaries of Textuality: Narrative as Collaborative Performance 165
4.6.1 Pen-and-Paper Role Playing 167
4.6.2 Alternate Reality Gaming 170
4.6.3 Forecasting Games 173
4.7 Where Will We Go From Here? 174
5 Selected Readings of Future Narratives: From Print to Digiture 177
5.1 The Imaginative Exploration of Chance and Possibility: Paul Auster’s The Music of Chance (1990) 177
5.2 Pick Your Own Path, Then and Now: An Inside Look at Choose-Your-Own-Adventure 186
5.2.1 Edward Packard, The Cave of Time (1979) 186
5.2.2 Anson Montgomery, The Golden Path Volume One: Into the Hollow Earth (2008) 192
5.3 The Novel as Branching Structure: Svend Åge Madsen’s Days With Diam or Life at Night (1994) 197
5.4 Prose as Path: Jacques Roubaud’s The Great Fire of London (1991) 207
5.5 Temporal Experiments in the Digital Web: Stuart Moulthrop’s Hegirascope (1995/1997) and Pax (2003) 215
5.6 Do It Again, and Better This Time: Andrew Plotkin’s Spider and Web (1997–98) 223
Works Cited 233
Index 245