The Art of Hypertextual Books and Random Access

Christian Swinehart has created a fantastic website that visualizes and explains the different possible reader paths of interactive fiction (sometimes better known as Choose your Own Adventure stories). It’s a fascinating exploration of the medium that looks at how the navigation works and how it parallels modern software.

He explains:

It is less surprising that this kind of interactive, hypertextual book happened at all than that it happened so late in the life of the book as a medium. One of the fundamental properties of books as objects is their ability to be dealt with in a random access fashion. All those loose paper edges let you jump to a page more or less directly, without having to go through all the intervening material as you would with an ancient scroll (or ancient audiotape).

Historically, reference books have made use of this aspect most directly. Dictionaries cut indentations into the pages to help you find the neighborhood of your entry then let you flip along glancing at guide words to finish your search. Likewise encyclopedias use their alphabetical organization (itself a fairly recent innovation) to allow for a kind of hyperlinking as one entry typically references several others.

Outside of the realm of task-oriented books, this sort of hopscotch across the contents is a rarity. And the cyoa books are actually not exceptions in this respect, for they too are books that perform a task. But rather than being a definition retrieval system or associative datastore, their interactive function is to create a gameworld for the reader. This is part of the wonder of these books – they took a pre-existing set of interface conventions designed for utilitarian search tasks and mapped a new activity onto it. They were effectively a new kind of software application for the oldest information-display platform we have.

CYOA

[via Information Aesthetics]