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Usability and writing hypertext
It’s been a long time since I posted last. Part of it was wrestling with what genre I wanted to work in, and part of it was getting Twine out the door. Check it out if you have a moment — I’m very proud although it certainly is a first try, and there is plenty of room to grow.
Let’s get back in the swing of things with a totally random topic: usability in hypertext. Emily Short posted something recently on her blog about this in the context of interactive fiction, where the major concern is: are players being unnecessarily encumbered by the interface? Do they understand how to accomplish what they want to do? I think it related to the two worst states to be in when you’re playing IF: when someone is first exposed to it and looks at the screen all wtf, I’m supposed to be typing commands? Like, what? Navigating that initial shock is hard, and certainly a lot of effort has been put into making it easier (see Andrew Plotkin’s Dreamhold) — though it’s incredibly difficult for experienced players to judge this. Once you’ve made a conceptual leap, it’s really hard to explain it to someone else, let alone guide someone into making it themselves. I think the second worst state is where you want to do something, but the game doesn’t seem to understand what you’re trying to accomplish. You want to turn a weathervane, but the game won’t go for it no matter how you phrase it.
My hunch is that the worst state to be in when you’re reading hypertext is being lost — specifically, losing the narrative context. You aren’t sure who the characters are, or have a nagging feeling you’ve missed an important piece of information or plot by clicking the wrong links. What’s nearly as bad as this is the fear of becoming lost — that is, by clicking a link, you’re going to jump off into space. I was reading Susan Gibb’s The Body Has Its Say and thought to myself at a certain point: I don’t want to digress from here, I want to stay on the same thread. And I wasn’t sure which of the links in the passage I was looking at would keep me on the thread and which wouldn’t.
The idea that suggests itself immediately is to have a preview appear when you hover over a link — perhaps the first paragraph of the text you’d land on. Hypertextopia approaches the problem by color-coding links to indicate their target’s relationship to the text you’re reading… though sadly, I had trouble remembering which color meant what relationship.
The corollary to all of this is that I realize that some authors want to induce a sense of confusion or disorientation in the reader, or more optimistically, a sense of synthesis(?) — that is, that not every part makes sense, but taken as a whole, the piece has unity. And that’s ok by me, I guess. Perhaps it’s just a matter of doing it knowingly, instead of stumbling into it.
2 comments
Well, I hope we do not need to engage in any kidnapping to foster the genre :) I do find your argument a little troubling, though. People don’t need to be forced to gain an appreciation for movies, for example. Books are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, I think — not all kids flock to books, though some do naturally, I think. The obvious answer to why elit is a more difficult sell is that it requires more active involvement from the player/reader — except then video games would be very inaccessible, when they’re clearly not. I’m not sure. I suppose another answer is that books and movies (and now video games) are part of the mainstream culture, and elit isn’t.
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First of all, congratulations on Twine–I’ll be downloading it right after this.
I think that bringing someone into hypertext and IF narrative is always going to be a battle until it becomes familiar at a younger age–like pre-K. I was surprised to find that younger folk than my contemporaries, really, college students, have the same reluctance towards hypertext story as their parents. Perhaps a more aggressive approach to that initial exposition, something akin to enclosing the students within a locked room with a computer that is dedicated to a hypertext or IF program for a 90-minute session.
Thank you for mentioning my piece here, and this is one of the better stories in the daily hypertext story output. My only defense is that I’m still new at this, am trying to explore new areas of story as well as play with new areas of hypertext linking, and the 24-hour deadline prohibits the thoughtful outlay that time might permit. I am getting faster though!