Whether or not you are interested in using Storyspace or writing literary hypertext, the book is worth reading, not least because it offers terminology and insights from a body of work IF authors seldom study.
#Storyspace alternative to story nexus software
Recently Eastgate released Storyspace 3, a new version of software used to produce many canonical works of literary hypertext and, to accompany it, their chief scientist Mark Bernstein wrote a book, Getting Started with Hypertext Narrative, in which he discusses the challenges and the craft of writing in this form. Literary hypertext has a long history that isn’t always well understood or well acknowledged by interactive fiction authors, even though with the growing popularity of Twine and other hypertext tools, the techniques are more than ever relevant to us. There are a few formatting challenges familiar from Twine and not exactly solved here. Some blue links expand in place, while others lead through to a new passage of text - a frequent complaint about Twine works as well - and in Storyspace (or at least in this implementation) one can’t predict which is which without either clicking through or referring to the map, which appears in the lefthand side of the screen and moves as you read:Ĭontinue reading “Those Trojan Girls (Mark Bernstein)” Author Emily Short Posted on DecemJCategories academic, interactive fiction, literary hypertext, plot and narrative structure, Reviews Tags mapped plot, Mark Bernstein, sculptural hypertext, Storyspace, stretchtext, Those Trojan Girls 6 Comments on Those Trojan Girls (Mark Bernstein) Mark Bernstein on Hypertext Narrative It’s hard, for instance, to decide on a theme, character, plot point or other element you want to pursue and track that train through the narrative (in contrast with Arcadia, which is designed for exactly that type of reading, or if, which thematically encourages completionist rigor). I’m not sure I’d say there’s much of what I typically think of as “readerly” agency either.
Those Trojan Girls is definitely unlike game-like hypertexts, and avoids the kinds of agency found therein. So “little known outside the research community” might be a slight exaggeration.īut the point, I think, is that the piece is attempting to introduce some of these features and methods to a community of practice - academic/literary hypertext - that has historically not paid terribly much attention to the IF community of practice, despite very significant overlap in many of the technological affordances of their tools. Stretchtext refers to replacing a section of text with a longer, more detailed section, which is one of several things Twine texts do fairly routinely with text replacement macros.
As discussed in an interview with Bernstein here, “sculptural hypertext” refers to having pieces of text that appear based not on links but on other variable conditions, similar to quality-based narrative. In practice, stretchtext and sculptural hypertext refer to ideas that already exist in interactive fiction. Those Trojan Girls is also the first published hypertext to use the new Storyspace 3 facilities for stretchtext and sculptural hypertext – ideas explored in the research literature for more than a decade but that remain little known outside the research community. Storyspace is Bernstein’s project, and the blurb for Those Trojan Girls describes how the tool might add to the possibilities of the medium: Those Trojan Girls is a hypertext novel by Mark Bernstein, written in Storyspace.
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