Hypercompendia

Discovered Chris’ site, Gimcrack’d, via if:book’s post on hypertext and Chris’ comments here.  Finally got a chance to hang out a bit there and need to spend more time, but he appears to have another form of hypertext narrative going on that looks interesting.  Here’s what he says by way of introduction:

Preface

Gimcrack’d is an ongoing anthology of stories that react to your touch — you might call them hypertext. Some let you go exploring inside them, revealing themselves bit by bit. Some let you change the story as it’s told to you. There are also more unusual ways they can react to your presence — but you’ll have to see for yourself.

There are a few guideposts as you read:

    * A ∴ signals a stopping-point in a story. There might be many of these, just one, or even none. (That symbol, by the way, should appear as three dots arranged in a triangle — your Web browser needs to support Unicode to see it properly.)

    * Links set off by » change the course of the story permanently. If you’d like to revisit a choice you made earlier, you may do so by clicking the rewind to here link in the upper-right corner of a passage.

The three most recent stories are bolded in the table of contents above. You can also keep up with recent changes to this site with this page’s RSS feed, or through our blog.

I for one certainly appreciate all the interest by writers in the hypertext environment.  It’s not just a method that people are encouraging, but they are looking to use the new technology available to find a better way of saying what they want to say.