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In a thread in an usenet-discussion group on the question of interactivity and whether
readers really want it, a contribution by Kathryn Cramer provided a poignant comparison
to illustrate why readers might not want too much influence on the narrative and prefer to
have narrative suspense created for them by authors:
The audience/creator roles have something to do with territoriality. If I were invited
over to your house for dinner, I would be somewhat annoyed ifI arrived to find, rather
than meal preparation in progress, boxes of dishes, a pile of furniture waiting to be
arranged, and a few bags of groceries. Ifyou invite me over, you are supposed to have
taken care ofa number ofthings before I arrive {...}. Yes, I can cook, unpack dishes,
arrange furniture, etc. but while I wouldn't have minded chopping up a few
vegetables or making a salad, most ofthis is the responsibility ofthe host" .
Similarly, confronted with the hypertext system HyperCard, Lewis Shiner, an author of
far from conventional, complex, multi-layered science fiction books, tries to explain why
its possibilities make him feel uneasy and gives these revealing comments:
Listening to your discussion about HyperCard and the potential it offers for future
narrative, I discovered something I never consciously articulated before - not even to
myself. I found that I strongly believe that there's a perfect and final form for every
piece offiction I do. I'm not interested in having alternative versions or expansions or
contradictions available. If I make a change in my fiction, I'm changing it for a
reason."
Both these quotations reveal a lot about the mental barriers to interactivity that exist both
on the side ofreader (the desire to be entertained) and on the side ofauthors (the desire
to keep controlover "their" story). But, apart from the question whether greater audience
intervention is desirable or not, there are also technical problems which need to be
considered.
The Illusion ofInteractive Conversations
There are grounds for arguing that no truly interactive system ofany sorts exists {'..J - since
true interaction implies that the user responds to the system at least as often as the system
responds to the user and, more important, that initiatives taken by either user orsystem alter
thebehaviour oftheother. I9 (MichaelJoyce)
One ofthe earliest studies in artificial intelligence with the aim to simulate a conversation
17 Kathryn Cramer in a posting ("Re: Practitioners of non-electronic hypertexts") to the hr.Iit
mailing list on Tue, II April 1995.
18 quoted by Stuart Moulthrop in: "Electronic Fictions and 'The Lost Game of Self.III, New York
ReoieurofScience Fiction, no.66 (February 1994), 1,8-14 (P.IO).
19 Michael Joyce, Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics (Ann Arbor: The University of
Michigan Press, 1995), P.I35, [though already quoted in Stuart Moulthrop ""Hypertext and 'the
Hyperreal''', ACM Hypertext "89Proceedings (New York: The Association for Computer Machinery, 1989),
259-266}.
Chapter 3 -page 97