STORYSPACE: Link Theory
In continuing on Mark Bernstein’s essay, I’m getting a different feeling about linking. In jumping in blindly, I naturally understood the plot linkage, managed to get creative with some side trails, but ran into unrecognized trouble with the interlinking of the stories. Then and there, I came to depend heavily on guard fields to avoid the stories running into each other without reason or purpose.
This, from Mark:
It is therefore interesting to note that Storyspace writers use them sparingly. In the 28 hypertexts examined, 7 used guard field ubiquitously (in more than 20% of all links). In eight hypertexts, guard fields are used occasionalaly, while in 13, the guard fields are completely absent. Guard fields rarely require more than one clause: the mean guard field in "Afternoon" has 1.63, but few other hypertexts approach this number. "Lust," a notoriously complex network, averages only 1.04 guard fields.
What this tells me is that I need to set up the original structure as the main device for the hypertext flow and foregoe the dependence upon guard fields to make the connections.
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