Readers must keep track of the structure of the story or the information. The first is a space of physical metaphors used in user navigation, whether desktop or dungon. The second refers to the conceptual possibilities within the work. The first is the exploration of the map; the second is the exploration of possibility. * In artifactual fiction, the space is the information space-- the file folder or pile of manuscripts in We Descend. But We Descend also takes place in a setting which is more fully understood as the reader progresses through the work. Readers can choose to review the stack itself or browse through the stack using links which correspond with that reader's understanding of the physical layout of the places described. * Interactive Fiction often presents a space in which the player-character may move and act. There is a tendency to visit each area, which authors sometimes limit by imposing time limitations on characters. * Works which have a model of causality may be read/played numerous times by readers who wish to consider all alternatives.

Electronic texts are not static. There are many ways in which the work can change over time: * "Faith, An Expanding Multiverse in Five Movements" by Robert Kendall is an example of an electronic work which is very procedural-- the text changes frequently-- but which is still highly authored and minimally participatory. * A regular hypertext's lexia (pages, components) remain static at all times. Thus, while users may view lexia in different orders, such works are not very procedural. This is the case in We Descend * Some works of Electronic literature are also Participatory, which implies that the work is procedural. * The examples in this lecture have all been pre-written, but a system like Eliza is generatively procedural; it need not be written by an author. C.F. Ludology. * Facade is also procedural in an Eliza-like way. Although it has predefined scenes, characters, and some text, much of the work is generated by algorithm in response to text input. * A StorySpace hypertext, built with guard fields, has a system of rules which modifies the pages available based on what the reader has already seen. In this sense, the work is procedural. * A StorySpace hypertext, managed through Guard Fields, can give the impression that lexia have changed, even though they are new lexia. Such a work gives the impression of being procedural, and is thus effectively procedural. * Interactive Fiction is, of course, procedural. But it varies in its procedural nature. Some works define the objects, the map, and the world very carefully, and just let things happen. Other works are more explicitly authored. See Adventure vs Montfort's recent work. The IF world at the moment seems to be very interested in systems which allow them to define physical worlds easily.

Electronic works invite user participation. This participation need not be procedural, but it tends to be so. * Participation could involve the clicking of a link to determine where to go next. This happens in Kendall's Faith and in We Descend, and generally in Kinetic Poems and Hypertext. This is not limited to electronic works. See LIterary Machines and the Choose Your Own Adventure series. * Interactive fiction, which invites the reader to enter text is participatory. In interactive fiction, that text modifies the overall story, not just the text, so it is also procedural. * Participation can be textual without being procedural. A simple storytelling system which invites users to write text at each stage and displays them at the end would be participatory but not procedural. * It is thus not necessarily the case that entering text makes a work more participatory. Both CardSharp and StorySpinner are interesting cases of very participatory, procedural works in which users do not enter text. These systems preserve the potential for a wide (but finite) set of stories which are still based on completely pre-written texts arranged by the author.

Readers tend to explore of the available information, which leads to scattered patterns of reading. There is also a corresponding tendency of hypertext writers to structure their works in consonance or opposition to this tendency. Terms which link elsewhere may link to an explanation of the term. Or, it might direct the reader to something very different. Ryman's 253 and Bly's We Descend are good examples of works which embrace the encyclopedic tendencies of Electronic Literature. Ryman includes entries on each passenger, each car, and each outcome. Bly's work is a fictional archive. Both depend on reader interest in considering as much information as possible. Note: consider the Nominative nature of links, esp in relation to Wikipedia. Look at Ryman's trick links which take readers unsuspectingly to the moment of the crash, as a reaction against this nominative tendency.

If electronic literature empowers characters and Tragedy disempowers them, can Electronic Literature present Tragedy?

This is supplementary information to a lecture by J. Nathan Matias at Cambridge University on 5 Nov 2007. Students browsed this page using a WIFI network set up just for the lecture.

I want you to listen, and it might be too interesting

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According to Mr. Fugard, performing ''Antigone'' in South Africa was just as dangerous as performing ''The Island.'' '' 'Antigone' is the most powerful political play ever written,'' Mr. Fugard said by telephone from what he calls his ''home away from home'' in San Diego. ''It is the first play that raised the issue of standing up and being counted in a situation that involved oppression and injustice. The entire time we were working on it, the government was harassing us, barging into rehearsals and confiscating manuscripts. Several members of the group were arrested and sent to Robben Island on trumped-up charges.'' The central action of ''The Island'' is the effort by two prisoners to stage ''Antigone'' as a form of protest in prison. The story of a grieving woman forbidden to give her brother an honorable burial, the play has always resonated with political dissidents, as has Antigone's choice to sacrifice her life in a challenge to the unjust laws of Thebes. ''The Island'' works on three different levels that heighten its universality: Antigone's burial of her brother defies the repressive state, just as the characters in ''The Island'' denounce apartheid by performing ''Antigone'' for their guards and fellow inmates on Robben Island, at the same time that Mr. Kani, Mr. Ntshona and Mr. Fugard were risking arrest by staging a play that challenged the government. Mr. Fugard remarked on the parallels to another performance of the play in a different time and place. ''During the German occupation of France,'' he said, ''Jean Anouilh produced a version of 'Antigone' in Paris. In an exact parallel to the situation on Robben Island, the first five rows of German jackbooted officers admired what they thought was a straightforward piece of classical culture, but the French audience behind them knew what it was about.'' Speaking of the actor Shark's performance of ''Antigone'' at Robben Island, Mr. Fugard continued, ''the Boers were in the first row and enjoyed it, but the prisoners were the ones who got the real message.''

In Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet Murray describes a large selection of electronic literature, defines a set of commonalities, and speculates on theoretical possibilities of electronic literature. Her list of properties appears in the marginal notes to this lecture.

Even if we could experience Hamlet on the Holodeck, it wouldn't work. Tragedy requires that the characters be blind (as we ourselves, at times, are blind). If you let a sane and sensible reader-protagonist into the room, everything is bound to collapse. Take Hamlet: it's absolutely obvious that he should go back to school, get roaring drunk, get laid, and await his opportunity. He knows this. Horatio knows this. Ophelia knows this. Even Claudius and Gertrude know -- why else send for his college pals? Nobody can bring themselves to say the words -- that's the tragedy. But, if you're the sane and sensible character with Hamlet on the Holodeck, what's to stop you? Only brute force and error messages ("You can't do that") that call attention to the arbitrary boundaries of the world. If you make Hamlet a game, it has to be rigged so that actions taken by a reasonable and sane reader-protagonist -- not to mention a wildly inventive one -- do not derail the train of events that must ensue if this is to be Hamlet and not, say, Timon of Athens or A Midsummer Night's Dream. It's not just Hamlet. Oedipus needs to get out of town and change his name, to enter the Foreign Legion or the Witness Protection Program. Antigone needs a long talk with her rabbi. Juliet needs to tell her parents exactly what she did last night. She can't, of course, but what's to stop you? This game is rigged and, more importantly, the game constantly calls our attention to the fact that it is rigged. Whenever we struggle against the bonds of fate (and the boundaries of the system), we're told, "I don't understand." The more we struggle -- the more conviction and intelligence be bring to the action -- the greater the likelihood that the system will find no appropriate response. The artist's struggle to convey difficult truths is inevitably superceded by the reader-protagonist's struggle to do difficult or at least interesting things with a necessarily recalcitrant world-model.

WEB master Borges The greatest influence on the Argentine writer was a phenomenon invented after his death. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Douglas Wolk Dec. 6, 1999 | It was Borges, Borges himself, who provided the key. Once I discovered it, of course, I realized that the clues are everywhere in the three volumes of the great Argentine writer's collected works recently published -- on the occasion of his centenary and in new English translations -- by Viking Press. Borges was fascinated by the idea of a hidden truth only accessible to the most dedicated reader; for instance, in a 1938 book review, and again in 1941's "A Study of the Works of Herbert Quain," he proposes a mystery novel whose true solution is not the one presented by the detective, but hinted at by a single casual phrase. It was in the story "Pierre Menard, Author of the 'Quixote,'" that I found just such a phrase, a tip-off that the greatest inspiration for Borges' work was a phenomenon that wasn't invented until four years after his death in 1986: the World Wide Web. Borges writes that his fictional author "has (perhaps unwittingly) enriched the slow and rudimentary art of reading by means of a new technique -- the technique of deliberate anachronism and fallacious attribution. That technique, requiring infinite patience and concentration ... fills the calmest books with adventure." Of course! Nothing could be more Borgesian than ignoring linear time; in the meticulously perverse logic of his stories, essays and poems, it's only natural that an author would be influenced by events yet to occur. With the patience and concentration Borges demands, it can be seen that his understanding of the Internet was absolute -- we who are merely its contemporaries can't possibly enjoy his perspective. And reading Borges' cryptic, deadpan paradoxes as commentary on the wired world does, indeed, deliver a jolt of recognition. I am not the first to point out that Borges' great invention, the Library of Babel, that immense, honeycombed labyrinth containing every possible text -- true, false and gibberish -- is a fanciful metaphor for the Web. As we become more familiar with the Internet's applications and idiosyncracies, the parallels planted in Borges' work become more clear. What are the "infinite stories, infinitely branching" of his character Herbert Quain's book "April March," if not hypertext? What is the purpose of Ireneo Funes, the paralyzed young man unable to forget any aspect of anything he has ever seen, if he is not to represent search engines burdened with memories of long-inactive links? What is Tlön, the virtual world in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" that gradually overtakes the real one, if not the cyberspace for which the physical world is rapidly becoming a quaintly antiquated sketch? Canny Borges never names the Web, of course: As "The Garden of Forking Paths" points out, in a riddle whose answer is chess, the only word that cannot be used is "chess." But the meaning of his parables is specific and undeniable. The Aleph in the fiction of the same title, the portal through which one can see every point in the universe, is Netscape Navigator in all but name. The Zahir, an object that changes its form over time but monopolizes its owner's attention forever, is none other than Microsoft Internet Explorer, as anyone who's tried to unstick it from a computer's operating system only to click fatally on an innocuous icon will tell you. (Consider, in fact, the alphabetical remove of Borges' names for the browsers, his subtle jest on the Alpha and Omega of his new world.) "The Lottery In Babylon" -- in which all people in a society change their stations constantly, power and wealth springing up instantly and evaporating immediately, in ways dictated by blind chance -- is an idle fantasy if one ascribes no other meaning to it. Read as Borges no doubt intended, as a precise allegory of the dot-com IPO market and internal Web commerce, it becomes a scathing satire, and far more severe and elegant. For that matter, Borges' fictions, poems and articles are liberally hyperlinked to each other: His motifs of labyrinths and tigers and Dante appear again and again, coyly alluding to their sister pages. The learned allusions he loved so well are links to outside pages; it is one of his finest jokes that his reviews of imaginary volumes and quotations from imaginary authors are, quite simply, dead links. It's not yet certain what relevance all of Borges' works have to the Web, of course; it's too new a technology for some of his meanings to become clear. I look forward, for instance, to the events that will allow us to fully comprehend "The South," the curious tale of a traveler who gets in a knife fight, the tale that Borges thought might be his best story. "It is possible to read it both as a forthright narration of novelistic events and in quite another way, as well," he introduced it, practically shouting for it to receive an interpretation that can only be revealed as the Web evolves. Through Borges' technique of anachronism, we can see the real meanings of other authors' work as well. Anne Rice's "Interview With the Vampire" is a darkly wry, knowing discourse on AIDS, a disease unknown at the time of its publication. Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita" is far more convincing as a commentary on post-Soviet Russia than as a fantasia of the Soviet era in which it was composed. I am reliably informed that the hidden purpose of one of Rex Stout's sturdy detective novels (the title escapes me), concerning orchid-sniffing detective Nero Wolfe, unfolded (orchid-like itself) only recently when it was revealed to be a commentary on certain private machinations at a large software company. It is possible that every book contains within itself a second, secret book, whose true meaning is invisible to its contemporary readers and even (perhaps) its author. Postscript: After several weeks of considering Borges' commentary on the Web, I am obsessed by it, like the Zahir; its hold on me is stronger than the hold Microsoft has on my hard drive. I am filled with trembling at the thought of his revelations -- not waiting for them to "come true," but waiting to understand their truth. As Borges' greatest and most invisible labyrinth expands around me, I can console myself only with his words, fittingly also from "Pierre Menard": "There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless." salon.com | Dec. 6, 1999

Let me try a probe, just to make a little tsimmes. Take the last twenty years of computer games -- the whole kit and kaboodle. Put them on a shelf. (Yeah, it's a big shelf) Now look over the shelf, and tell me everything we learn about, say, sexuality. (House rules: no arguments from silence, no metaphors, cigars are just cigars unless it's apparent to players who aren't Professors that they aren't. Chatroom romances don't count; I'm looking for what's in the game, not what the audience brings to the table, and yes, I see the theoretical shortcomings of the previous clause. You understand what I'm getting at. Play along at home; it's that kind of movie )