David Millard

This month I gave an invited talk at The Future Of Text event held at Southampton University. FoT has been organised by Frode Hegland (currently a PhD student at the University) for 10 years, and is an interdisciplinary talking shop for anyone who is interested in text in the digital age.

It’s an open topic and I chose to revisit one of Mark Bernstein’s keynotes, his 1999 presentation  (now 20 years old!) that asked the question ‘Where are the Hypertexts?’

Essentially Mark was asking why, if hypertext is so great, do we not see popular million selling hypertexts? It is something that Mark and I have discussed on and off over the years, and I think that broadly we are both coming to the conclusion that in fact we are – just not in the way that it was imagined in the 80s and 90s.

Our million selling hypertexts are the games that we play.

You can see my presentation, in which I outline some of the reasons I think we can see games as hypertextual, embedded below:

To be clear I am not arguing here that games are just hypertexts, if we were being precise we might flip that around and say that hypertexts are basically narrative games with a very restrictive set of mechanics – typically activating links that are either inline, or placed beneath the text. Games can shrug off these restrictions, adding player goals, multiple media channels, and much more complex mechanics, but if they have a non-linear textual aspect then we can look at them hypertextually, and that is useful as it allows us to apply hypertext theory. Do you want to understand the revelations of The Stanley Parable, then look to Aarseth’s notion of hypertext epiphany; do you want to understand how The Walking Dead controls agency, then Bernstein’s Patterns of Hypertext will help; do you want to understand contextual dialog and barks in The Last of Us, then conceptualise it as a sculptural hypertext.

What I would really like is for academics and creative professionals working in these spaces to come together more than they do. We have so much to learn from the work that has been done over the last forty years, and so much benefit to get from extending our horizons.

And those of us in the hypertext world need to embrace it – this is the future of text.

(The short paper version of this blog post will be published as part of the forthcoming book, The Future of Text – edited by Frode Hegland). 

Cover image by Christoph Michels from Wikipedia Commons.