Enantiodromia. Light's tendency to cast shadows even as it erases them. The way ice drinks heat. I give this work my highest possible recommendation. I've enjoyed hypertext fiction for a long time...
Enantiodromia. Light's tendency to cast shadows even as it erases them. The way ice drinks heat. Like a moth drawn to the flame.
I give this work my highest possible recommendation. I've enjoyed hypertext fiction for a long time in various forms. Homestar Runner Dot Com, Homestuck, even things that didn't start with "Homest," like 17776 or Dionaea House or I Love Bees.
When reading about the development of hypertext and early web browsers, I recall that something akin to the core idea here-- fractal expanding levels of detail in response to the user's curiosity-- was very much envisioned as part of how people would use this new technology. It just turns out that it's a huge amount of work to do it well.
I'm going to be thinking about this story for a long time. There are so many themes resonating across so many layers. Tragedy was an excellent choice for this experiment. I would love to read horror in this format too. I've seen Yarn interactive fiction try to go for some of the flavor here but never executed nearly this well.
I'm a big fan of Snuggle Squiggle's work; you might say it's a bit out of the mainstream (there's a big emphasis on xenofiction starring sentient arthropods) but rarely will you find such a trove of determined creativity as its website, and her literary and technical accomplishments speak for themselves.
(Note: Snuggle Squiggle (it/her) does not use any AI in its work. Her website is built with a fully custom rendering pipeline that I'm pretty sure no LLM could ever figure out.)
I loved HomeStarRunner all those years ago and I still do: i just never knew there was a name for that type of art. That this is a similar type of fiction has me intrigued, but I'm warned off by...
I loved HomeStarRunner all those years ago and I still do: i just never knew there was a name for that type of art.
That this is a similar type of fiction has me intrigued, but I'm warned off by the tragedy genre label. There's a video game called Extinction Is Forever, which I have a copy of, which looks gorgeous and is extremely favourably reviewed which I will never play, because basically you're interactively playing as a mother fox, whose only future is various versions of a tragedy due to climate collapse. I want to cry when I think about the premise, like now.
So I humbly ask, is this the premise behind Weave Me Another Cocoon / Enantiodromia one where you play as a young animal meeting an assortment of death due to climate change, or "just" assortment of deaths due to nature being pre-anthropocene nature?
Very good question and valid apprehensions. There are themes about the inevitability of hurting those you love, and themes of self destruction. If you can get behind a story told from the...
Very good question and valid apprehensions. There are themes about the inevitability of hurting those you love, and themes of self destruction. If you can get behind a story told from the perspective of butterflies and spiders, even with a sad ending, I believe you will enjoy and appreciate this story.
The interactive element isn't one that forces you to make terrible choices or puts you in a lose-lose position; rather, the a story is told in a nonlinear way rather similar to this little tech demo from 15 years ago, but realized in a deeply thoughtful way. You can get the broad strokes of the story pretty quickly, then dive down as deep as you want into the specifics in any order.
It was not Fate. It was Fate That was a very poetic experience. Thank you for both the recommendation and for your kindness with regards to my mental health. I'm very glad to have shared this with...
It was not
Fate. It was Fate
That was a very poetic experience. Thank you for both the recommendation and for your kindness with regards to my mental health. I'm very glad to have shared this with you.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read and explore this. It's my favorite sort of thing to read, think about, and discuss, but it's difficult to find many people or communities with the...
Thank you so much for taking the time to read and explore this. It's my favorite sort of thing to read, think about, and discuss, but it's difficult to find many people or communities with the curiosity and thoughtfulness to deeply engage with text like this.
I've been meaning to make a longer post exploring some of the layered themes in this piece but I've gotten caught up at work this week. There's a few things here that you don't really see anywhere else because text by and large doesn't change as you read it, so there aren't really names for some of the effects at play. When you click a word and it cycles through a few variations, each iteration colors the experience in a way that you can't get across in an screenshot or excerpt. Something akin to the Kuleshov effect from film theory happens with the additional context a single word blipping past can give, and then the hard to place feeling when it's gone but you know it was there.
At times that effect heightens the epistolary nature of the work, making it feel like someone is trying to find the right words. Other times one layer of wording is more human-centric, more like one might expect from a generic short story, then another layer reveals the entomologically-correct word for some buggy body part or arachnid behavior. I already love xenofiction, and I especially love this technique for kind of progressively deanthropomorphizing a scene without making it any less compelling.
I've found it very rewarding to reread in different orders. The sense of dramatic irony can get thick when some parts of the narrative are left compressed while later ones are more deeply expanded. I also really love that in a few clicks one can get an almost entirely new and unique rewording of the story in a format that always feels like a well written poem.
Sorry if this went on a bit, I've been meaning to express these thoughts for a bit. Thanks again for reading.
It's a text based, tailor made movie experience. We never step into the same river twice: in a way this sort of interactive text which changes the experience in subtle ways every time you interact...
When you click a word and it cycles through a few variations, each iteration colors the experience in a way that you can't get across in an screenshot or excerpt.
It's a text based, tailor made movie experience.
We never step into the same river twice: in a way this sort of interactive text which changes the experience in subtle ways every time you interact with it. The motivation of the narrator and player both change, especially if you are willing to iterate on that same repeated basic story. I believe human beings live forever: perhaps one day this is how we will interact and tell our stories and learn that of another: over and over with different nuances, different insights, different emphases, and where the different curiosities of another will direct and re-direct the story, Where we will each get infinite time to express ourselves, changing the text, ever getting closer to a version we settle with, but abandoning not an iota of the whole process of how we once used to describe ourselves. And it will not be a tragic story, it will be about how we each found eternal fulfillment.
How small interactions change small things along a journey or give different context to character motivations, and how decisions change (1) NPC perception of the player, (2) how the player perceives themselves, and therefore, the (3) ending: reminds me of Prey (2017) - if you have not already played it I won't spoil it for you. It may or may not be related, don't worry about it.
What a great way of putting it! Exactly! Wow, what a lovely way to see the world! Thank you so much for sharing it with me :) I actually have only played the first hour or two of the game, I don't...
It's a text based, tailor made movie experience
What a great way of putting it!
Changes in subtle ways every time you interact with it
Exactly!
And it will not be a tragic story, it will be about how we each found eternal fulfillment.
Wow, what a lovely way to see the world! Thank you so much for sharing it with me :)
Prey (2017)
I actually have only played the first hour or two of the game, I don't remember why I never finished it (pre-pandemic memories 😅). Thanks for the reminder and recommendation, I definitely have to go back to it now!
I haven't come across experimental hypertext fiction before, I'll be looking up the other ones you mentioned. I've thought about writing something similar with links leading to different texts and...
I haven't come across experimental hypertext fiction before, I'll be looking up the other ones you mentioned. I've thought about writing something similar with links leading to different texts and try a non-linear format, especially with the theme of memory. This was a great experience, thank you for sharing this.
Enantiodromia. Light's tendency to cast shadows even as it erases them. The way ice drinks heat.
Like a moth drawn to the flame.I give this work my highest possible recommendation. I've enjoyed hypertext fiction for a long time in various forms. Homestar Runner Dot Com, Homestuck, even things that didn't start with "Homest," like 17776 or Dionaea House or I Love Bees.
When reading about the development of hypertext and early web browsers, I recall that something akin to the core idea here-- fractal expanding levels of detail in response to the user's curiosity-- was very much envisioned as part of how people would use this new technology. It just turns out that it's a huge amount of work to do it well.
I'm going to be thinking about this story for a long time. There are so many themes resonating across so many layers. Tragedy was an excellent choice for this experiment. I would love to read horror in this format too. I've seen Yarn interactive fiction try to go for some of the flavor here but never executed nearly this well.
I'm a big fan of Snuggle Squiggle's work; you might say it's a bit out of the mainstream (there's a big emphasis on xenofiction starring sentient arthropods) but rarely will you find such a trove of determined creativity as its website, and her literary and technical accomplishments speak for themselves.
(Note: Snuggle Squiggle (it/her) does not use any AI in its work. Her website is built with a fully custom rendering pipeline that I'm pretty sure no LLM could ever figure out.)
I loved HomeStarRunner all those years ago and I still do: i just never knew there was a name for that type of art.
That this is a similar type of fiction has me intrigued, but I'm warned off by the tragedy genre label. There's a video game called Extinction Is Forever, which I have a copy of, which looks gorgeous and is extremely favourably reviewed which I will never play, because basically you're interactively playing as a mother fox, whose only future is various versions of a tragedy due to climate collapse. I want to cry when I think about the premise, like now.
So I humbly ask, is this the premise behind Weave Me Another Cocoon / Enantiodromia one where you play as a young animal meeting an assortment of death due to climate change, or "just" assortment of deaths due to nature being pre-anthropocene nature?
Very good question and valid apprehensions. There are themes about the inevitability of hurting those you love, and themes of self destruction. If you can get behind a story told from the perspective of butterflies and spiders, even with a sad ending, I believe you will enjoy and appreciate this story.
The interactive element isn't one that forces you to make terrible choices or puts you in a lose-lose position; rather, the a story is told in a nonlinear way rather similar to this little tech demo from 15 years ago, but realized in a deeply thoughtful way. You can get the broad strokes of the story pretty quickly, then dive down as deep as you want into the specifics in any order.
It was not
Fate. It was Fate
That was a very poetic experience. Thank you for both the recommendation and for your kindness with regards to my mental health. I'm very glad to have shared this with you.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read and explore this. It's my favorite sort of thing to read, think about, and discuss, but it's difficult to find many people or communities with the curiosity and thoughtfulness to deeply engage with text like this.
I've been meaning to make a longer post exploring some of the layered themes in this piece but I've gotten caught up at work this week. There's a few things here that you don't really see anywhere else because text by and large doesn't change as you read it, so there aren't really names for some of the effects at play. When you click a word and it cycles through a few variations, each iteration colors the experience in a way that you can't get across in an screenshot or excerpt. Something akin to the Kuleshov effect from film theory happens with the additional context a single word blipping past can give, and then the hard to place feeling when it's gone but you know it was there.
At times that effect heightens the epistolary nature of the work, making it feel like someone is trying to find the right words. Other times one layer of wording is more human-centric, more like one might expect from a generic short story, then another layer reveals the entomologically-correct word for some buggy body part or arachnid behavior. I already love xenofiction, and I especially love this technique for kind of progressively deanthropomorphizing a scene without making it any less compelling.
I've found it very rewarding to reread in different orders. The sense of dramatic irony can get thick when some parts of the narrative are left compressed while later ones are more deeply expanded. I also really love that in a few clicks one can get an almost entirely new and unique rewording of the story in a format that always feels like a well written poem.
Sorry if this went on a bit, I've been meaning to express these thoughts for a bit. Thanks again for reading.
It's a text based, tailor made movie experience.
We never step into the same river twice: in a way this sort of interactive text which changes the experience in subtle ways every time you interact with it. The motivation of the narrator and player both change, especially if you are willing to iterate on that same repeated basic story. I believe human beings live forever: perhaps one day this is how we will interact and tell our stories and learn that of another: over and over with different nuances, different insights, different emphases, and where the different curiosities of another will direct and re-direct the story, Where we will each get infinite time to express ourselves, changing the text, ever getting closer to a version we settle with, but abandoning not an iota of the whole process of how we once used to describe ourselves. And it will not be a tragic story, it will be about how we each found eternal fulfillment.
How small interactions change small things along a journey or give different context to character motivations, and how decisions change (1) NPC perception of the player, (2) how the player perceives themselves, and therefore, the (3) ending: reminds me of Prey (2017) - if you have not already played it I won't spoil it for you. It may or may not be related, don't worry about it.
What a great way of putting it!
Exactly!
Wow, what a lovely way to see the world! Thank you so much for sharing it with me :)
I actually have only played the first hour or two of the game, I don't remember why I never finished it (pre-pandemic memories 😅). Thanks for the reminder and recommendation, I definitely have to go back to it now!
I haven't come across experimental hypertext fiction before, I'll be looking up the other ones you mentioned. I've thought about writing something similar with links leading to different texts and try a non-linear format, especially with the theme of memory. This was a great experience, thank you for sharing this.
Thank you for reading! I would be very interested in reading your take on a nonlinear story, hypertext or no. Memory is a great theme :)
Very cool. I'm not sure what to think of it, really, but the one certainty is the sense of admiration at such a labor of love(?).