STORYSPACE: Strategy
Got the thought of checking out other hypertext fiction written in the Storyspace program and was surprised to find that Shelly Jackson’s Patchwork Girl is linked Text to Text, with little Writing Space to Writing Space connections. Another unusual thing is that for each link, the guard field is filled in with "Textlink." This is not mentioned in the manual, and I’m not sure what purpose is serves though I suspect that it may have been an option in an earlier version of Storyspace perhaps.
I’m going to see if I can get some information on Michael Joyce’s Afternoon, A Story as well as reread Mark Bernstein’s essay that I’ve previously mentioned here since it had many examples of the link and map styles used.
While no one is going to follow someone else’s strategy–nor could they–it’s helpful to realize the planning behind the narrative.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
December 20th, 2007 at 2:45 pm
Early Storyspace did not permit text links to have guard fields, and so wrote “textlink” in the guard field column to indicate, “there is no guard fields because this is a text link”.
Text links with guard fields remain fairly exotic, in part because text links are so close in spirit to Web links that many writers expect that their audience will assume they behave like Web links — that is, that they don’t have any dynamic behavior.