Has anyone ever heard of/interacted with hyperfiction?

[red-night]

Hyperfiction is a medium of literature that is like if a point-and-click adventure game had a baby with a choose-your-own-adventure book. Instead of going from page to page and having the narrative build upon itself with every page turn, a "lexia" (basically a page) will have multiple hyperlinks you can click on, which will bring you to a new lexia with its own hyperlinks and so on and so forth.
Hyperfiction had a boom at the beginning of the internet era as this sort of new approach to traditional literature, but thanks to over-exaggerated fervor by post-structural authors and academics, it never really got the mainstream success that I think it deserved.
Personally, I was just wondering if anyone had any experiences with hyperfiction or knew what it was. I kinda fell down a rabbit hole via some research into digital gardens/federated wikis and seeing that they were built off of this kind of concept so idk lol.

Some links if you want to explore further!
Hypertext Gardens, by Mark Bernstein (goes over more of the core philosophy behind hypertext/hyperfiction)
Eastgate's Reading Room, Eastgate Inc. (a collection of retro hyperfictions)
Kokura, by Mary-Kim Arnold and Andrew Darby (a hyperfiction that I really enjoyed!)
The Unknown, by William Gillespie et al. (one of the more popular hyperfictions)

[ThunderPerfectWitchcraft]

I've coded a little hypertext fiction engine myself, and reviewed a number of Twine Games on my blog back then :). I'd also disagree that it didn't get much attention - most people who read hypertext fiction just don't realize that they do so (Twine had quite a few very popular titles). The Wikipedia article on ergodic literature is also a good read, if you are interested in this stuff. Do you know the Interactive Fiction Database?

[theinvertedform]

i am very interested in hyperfiction. i read House of Leaves when i was a teenager and loved it a lot. it's a classic work of "ergodic literature," it's quite a good book imo (scary), very well-realized and even though it's a book, it does have some relevance for hyperfiction.

a few years ago i signed up for the Dracula Newsletter. the novel is in the public domain, so someone just started sending it out every year as a newsletter. it's an epistolary novel, and every letter/telegram/diary entry/voice memo recorded onto a wax cylinder has a date, so reading it "in real time" was a kind of revelation to me. the book, in my humble opinion, is not that great---it really drags quite a bit in parts---but the opening is incredible. jonathan is locked in dracula's castle, he doesn't know what's going on, he's seeing scary things---and then you don't get another letter for weeks. that experience of being invested in his narrative, but then actually having to wait for a period of clocktime to elapse before you learn what happens next was really amazing and i've been thinking about how to work with that ever since.

as you said, hyperfiction has some significant crossover with games. i'm not a gamer, that's not my domain and without getting into it, i am resistant to working in games. i'm a writer, i'm invested in literature and literary culture and, especially, literary history. Dracula can easily be printed as a normal book. it can go on the library shelf, it can live within institutional archives and be easily accessed. Dracula will live pretty much as long as civilization lives.

hyperfictions won't live that long. many of them are already inaccessible: *afternoon, a story* by michael joyce, a canonical early hyperfiction, can at best be read as a "translation" into browser media. bpNichol's computer poems "First Screening" were originally distributed as 5.25" floppy disks. one of the poems, you need to go into the source code and actually modify the program in order to get the "full text." that kind of work is not the same kind of work as literature. it's more like a painting or a sculpture: you can look at a photograph of it, but it's not the same. literature is not like that: you could take a book down from the shelf, write the entire thing by hand on crimson paper, and so long as you faithfully transcribed it, the essence of the work would not be changed at all.

those are a bit of my concerns about hyperfiction. i am skeptical of it for some many reasons. i am essentially skeptical of it: i will always want institutional validation, i will always want to be a book in a library, catalogued, part of history. and yet, i put a tonne of work into my website, into writing for it and designing it. i consider my website to be hyperfiction, even if it's crappily executed at this stage. i have been working on another hyperfiction work that i hope to be able to present "in the wild," online, but to also be able to translate into a standard book.

i don't want to go on too long, but another area of research that i think intersects quite importantly with hyperfiction is the idea of outsider art. everything on the internet is essentially outsider art. there are all kinds of groups, like the Electronic Literature Organization and some of the ones that you mentioned, that try to "institutionalize" it. there are academic departments, too---the ELO is at Brown, which is an ivy (?). there are plenty of academics working in the area. but i think that the "true" aesthetic of hyperfiction is adjacent to or the same as outsider art. the internet is, essentially and by its nature, an anarchic, unchartable territory. you simply cannot ever know everything about what's happening online.

an overlooked part of the narrative of House of Leaves comes on the jacket flap. there's a blurb here that says the book, which, for those who haven't read, contains multiple texts, multiple narratives, compiled and edited together---a film script by one character, an essay commenting on the script by another character, footnotes commenting on the essay by another character. these documents, the jacket says, were originally passed around as a bundle of xeroxed sheets among bartenders, tattoo artists, punks and ravers in LA for years before it became a book published by Pantheon Books. this important piece of hypertext presents itself as an "outsider" work.

okay i've gone on long enough, but i do want to mention a few more works that i see as relevant to this topic. again, i am highly skeptical of hypertext, i don't really like the experience of reading online, i find it inherently inferior. but i love websites, i love web design...anyway, because i don't like hypertext, most of my works are not hypertext, but i think that they are still important for the form.

The Blair Witch Project
House of Leaves
Dracula
concrete poetry / dirty concrete poetry
Sad Satan (video game)
The Sluts, a novel by Dennis Cooper
Slenderman
Robinson Crusoe