Hacker News Reader

Comment by roymurdock | Hacker News Reader

it's hard to add visualizations to a text-driven story without it being gimmicky or distracting.

i can't really think of an example of hyperliterature that has stuck with me outside of the annoying bloomberg article animations they tried for 6 months and dropped sometime last year

i think that's why plot-rich video games are so popular as an alternative means of storytelling - they're based around really good writing, but also involve some core interactive mechanics that keep the audience engaged, challenged, and empathetic rather than distracted or frustrated

interesting concept, can it be extended outside of a few webpages and apps?

View on HN

What about wiki-based storytelling, like the SCP Foundation database? It would fit the "hyperliterature" label in the sense that you discover the world and setting through a non-traditional hyperlink-based medium, and although the visual elements are limited, they are present (images, redactions, presentation of the content as a document...).

TVTropes is the embodiment of this, if you consider it a story about human entertainment culture.

I think visual novels are an interesting example of this. The non-textual elements are very limited, yet that tiny bit of interaction totally changes the experience.

And they're usually weird anime porn, which makes them completely unpalatable to almost everyone. It's a shame, since I think the medium is cool.

"Unflattening"[1] is hands-down the best example of this kind of juxtaposition and interleaving of text and image I've ever seen. The fact that it uses these paired media simultaneously to demonstrate and explore the topic of how they relate, is uniquely satisfying to my mind. Highest possible recommendation.

>"The primacy of words over images has deep roots in Western culture. But what if the two are inextricably linked, equal partners in meaning-making? Written and drawn entirely as comics, Unflattening is an experiment in visual thinking. Nick Sousanis defies conventional forms of scholarly discourse to offer readers both a stunning work of graphic art and a serious inquiry into the ways humans construct knowledge."

1. http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674744431

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Leaves is an amazing piece of ergodic literature, in printed form.

Agreed. Really great book. That and Cloud Atlas are my favourite non-linear books (pls forget the movie) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Atlas_(novel)

Loved Cloud Atlas's structure. Hyperion and Infinite Jest also come to mind.

Meh. I found HoL to be extremely over-rated, and more gimmickry than meaningful content. I got the impression that Danielewski was trying way harder to write "a post-modern novel" or "an ergodic novel" than he was trying to write "a good novel". That is, the focus was too much on the gimmicks: the multiple narrators, the typography/layout stuff, etc., as opposed to being a genuinely compelling story.

> i think that's why plot-rich video games are so popular as an alternative means of storytelling - they're based around really good writing, but also involve some core interactive mechanics that keep the audience engaged, challenged, and empathetic rather than distracted or frustrated

I'm not sure I agree here. The power of a medium is not in its ability to tell a well-written story, because such a story can easily be made good in any medium. Instead, it is in the ability to make what is a mediocre or fairly cookie-cutter story into an engaging one.

For video games, that feature is essentially interactivity, or the ability of the player to feel that they are actually causing the story to move forward. Ōkami is a game whose story boils down to an anthology of Japanese mythology and folktales with a loose framing device, but is widely praised for the fact that its core mechanic (the use of calligraphy to attack) is tightly intertwined with its graphical display and underpins the framing portion of the sory it tells. Return of the Obra Dinn tells a story reminiscent of any urban legend of a ship's disappearance, but what makes it interesting is that you experience the story backwards and only short snippets of it as people die.

The Harmonia format would be pretty awesome applied to nonfiction, I think (e.g., crowd-sourced marginalia). Closest application I can think of is Fermat's Library [1].

I was initially skeptical but found Wattpad's tap stories pretty awesome in practice [2].

Generally though, you're right, the "killer app" hasn't been discovered yet. But I certainly find the innovation exciting!

[1] https://fermatslibrary.com/s/bitcoin

[2] https://taptaptap.co

I agree: with any new format, it's super hard for the story to stand out because the format itself becomes the story. So you get this sort of chicken and egg problem, because if there's not enough stories to drive a particular format, then that format dies.

Game narratives are great, but I'm personally more interested in non-agency type formats, because I think there will be relatively much more demand for that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com