Let me begin with my conclusion. In hypertextual and some digital media narratives, the ending is postponed. It is a literature of exhaustion.1 This wonderful sound-byte has at least two possible meanings. First, as my students would often claim, hypertext ends through physical (or emotional) exhaustion. The audience stops when they’ve had enough. But the second interpretation is actually more appropriate. Closure is reached in hypertext not through the physical exhaustion of the audience, but through the audience exhausting the possibilities of what, for the purposes of this paper, I will call the storyspace of the narrative. The storyspace is the represented space in which a story is mediated and the visualized sense of space created by the storyworld, which is the world in which the narrative is set and in which readers attempt to immerse themselves. Narratologists term this act of representation mimesis, which differs from diegesis, meaning both to tell or to narrate a story and the fictive world in which a story takes place. So that I might distinguish between the two meanings of diegesis in this paper, when referring to the fictitious world of the story I will use the term storyworld.

Explanations and categorizations of storyspaces in digital and interactive narratives abound. Michael Joyce distinguishes between two types based on the range of interactivity they allow. Exploratory space occurs in those works that only allow the audience to choose paths, links or lexia. Some hypertexts and video games fall in this category. Constructive space empowers the audience to create content as well as navigate the object. Examples of this type of space include the game Second Life and hypertext that allow the creation of content, links, and lexia.2 The storyspaces represented by games are divided into eleven categories in Mark J. Wolf’s The Medium of the Video Game. Of these types, I’m primarily interested in his tenth category, interactive three dimensional environments,3 although this rhetoric can apply to other video game spatial categories and hypertextual forms.

In digitally mediated interactive narratives, most of the negotiations and narrative elements (but not all) come together in the storyspace of the narrative.4 Storyspace is similar to what Janet Murray calls the “navigable space” represented in a digital environment.5 As noted earlier, the storyspace operates on two levels: as both the representation or writing space through which the storyworld is mediated and the audience’s mental map of this space—their understanding of the storyspace in which a story takes place. The audience attempts to understand a storyworld through exhausting the possibilities of its storyspace. To do so requires that the audience understand the storyspace in their explorations and mental mapping of many, most or all of the conceptual blank spaces in the work. This interpretation’s distinguishing between the spatial representation of a story, the audience’s mapping and understanding of the space in which a story takes place and the audience’s achieving narrative closure underscores the narrative possibilities of digital, interactive forms and poses several problems for designers and audiences. In order to understand how digital spaces allow for and influence audience interactivity to further narratives, we must understand the many different spaces—the loci6—in which digital narratives attempt to afford or constrain interaction.

In hypertextual and digital, interactive narratives, space and gaps create meaning.7 Whether it’s the gap created by a hypertextual link or the metaphoric “architectural” space in a first person shooter game/narrative, audiences of digital narratives create meaning where they encounter gaps. Architectural space is not about walls, but about the space the walls create. Our experience of architectural space requires placing ourselves in that space and moving through it. Design is (partly) about the space between visual elements. In film, the gaps between frames lend the images motion.8 The meanings of objects on the page— in the text or in the measure—are important, but their order, the syntax of the elements, also creates meaning in that the author leaves the audience to fill in this gap. And this spatial void has its counterpart in time; it’s something that playwrights, musicians, and filmmakers have known and adapted to their ends. Think of the “Pinter pause”; the pause used by the playwright Harold Pinter to convey emotion and to allow the unease of the play to soak into the audience. Think of the pause of the comedian waiting for an effect or the rest between notes in music. We fill in the gap. This paper proposes to explore how the idea of the gap and space inform our understanding of how narrative works in digital interactive texts (through analyzing the digital space within which readers interact and create meaning) and categorize those loci that hold those digital rhetorical forms that prompt and constrain user interactivity in the expanded “gaps” and spaces afforded by interactive, digital narratives.

It’s important to note that this essay is not a poetics of interactivity or digital space. I’m concerned primarily with categorizing the loci in which digital storypaces create satisfying, dramatic narratives through the molding of audience behaviors, rather than setting down the aesthetics of digital narratives. While much has been written on the rhetoric of hypertext fiction and links,9 little has been written on the rhetoric of digital space. If rhetoric is doing things to people with words, what is a rhetoric of interactivity in digital narratives? I’d define it as prompting and constraining audience interactivity in a variety of loci in the work. Interactive narratives require constraining and prompting the audience. The design of the interface, setting, the characters, interactions, events and rules along with the story (both mimetically and diegetically mediated) must operate in a number of loci towards the goal of facilitating the audiences’ interactions with the digital narrative. As Jenkins states, “The organization of the plot becomes a matter of designing the geography of imaginary worlds, so that obstacles thwart and affordances facilitate the protagonist’s forward movement towards resolution.”10

The idea of a narrative, as it is mediated through traditional means such as the codex, has a long history. Narratives in this instance have usually involved characters/agents who experience a conflict—an agon—through a series of events. These events, causally related and chronologically oriented, are organized to reveal to the audience the perspective of the author, and take its form as a unified text with a coherent organization.11 Traditionally, narrative “is a fundamentally temporal and consequently linear form of meaning.”12 The words follow one after the other. Order, causality, and complex relationships become possible, but these ideas are expressed linearly, like a ray in geometry. Any events that take place outside of the linearity of the plot-line, or narrative arc that exist within the storyworld but are not experienced by the audience, form the extradiegetic space of the storyworld. Those elements of the narrative arc that seem incongruous or don’t contribute to the unity of the work are purposeful digressions or discordance— noise.

Marie Laure Ryan chooses to define narrative as mediumfree and taking place in the mind’s of the audience.13 My paper’s understanding of narrative stems from hers and rests on four key assumptions: 1) narratives require mediation, 2) narratives are unified, 3) narratives require an implied author, and 4) narrative ultimately takes place in the mind of the audience.

1. Narratives Require Mediation

Now, for a person interested in artistic expression—the “how” rather than the “what” of a story—the really interesting point is how the narrative is conveyed or mediated. Also known as the sjuzet, this act of mediation is where the magic takes place, for it’s in how the author mediates this text that we find the richness of detail, the compelling lines, images or sounds that convey the force and grandeur of the stories we tell. Narratives are mediated through symbolic forms of one shape, type, or another and this mediation has an effect on the narrative, yet narrative is not solely depending on one form of media. The storyspace is the expression of this mediation.

This definition of narrative that allows for the effects of mediation differs from theories of narratives such as Gerald Prince’s that uses media to separate narrative from performative or dramatic situations.14 The importance of this distinction is seen in Markku Eskelinen’s article, “The Gaming Situation,” which uses the media litmus test to effectively sever narrative from video games through the article’s emphasis on “recounting” as a primary indicator of narrative, claiming that:

“a dramatic performance representing (many fascinating) events does not constitute a narrative either, since these events, rather than being recounted, occur directly on stage.”…. So a mere story is not sufficient to make something a narrative, as there must also be a narrative situation implying the presence of narrators and narrates.15

This emphasis on recounting as a form of mediation and the requirement of the presence of a narrator and narrattee would then seem to ignore emergent narratives, or those narratives that take place spontaneously, and to overlook the role of multiple author/participants creating a narrative. Recounting seems to rely on a limited view of “acceptable” forms of mediation and focuses solely on diegetic forms of narratives, which is somewhat problematic and limiting. What differentiates a story told to an audience and a story acted out for an audience, other than the degree to which the “author” uses mimetic and diegetic elements in the mediation of the narrative? Such a narrow definition of “recounting” limits needlessly the medium through which stories take place, effectively eliminates some forms of mediation as narrative, and denies the existence of some forms of narrative, such as drama or computer games, that rely more on mimesis than on diegesis. For the purposes of this paper, my argument allows that narratives can take place both mimetically and diegetically regardless of medium in which it is delivered.

2. Unified/Closure

Narratives are unified—to a degree. Consider Chekhov’s advice, “If in the first chapter you say that a gun hung on the wall, in the second, or third chapter it must without fail be discharged.”16 If Chekov’s view of narrative holds true regardless of the medium used to tell the story, what does this quote mean to our understanding of narrative? First, it implies a certain level of cohesion within the text (no extraneous materials). Second, it establishes an understanding of audience expectations. As Frank Kermode queries, “Why… does it require a more strenuous effort to believe that a narrative lacks coherence than to believe that somehow, if we could only find out, it doesn’t?”17. Third, it maintains that the work should honor/fulfill these audience expectations.18

In a narrative, the audience strives to associate those mediated events into some narrative form or order, stemming from the deep-seated belief that narrative represents a whole and that there is a point to the text. Take for instance the oft cited E.M. Forster statement, “‘the king died and then the queen died’ is just a series of unfortunate events where as ‘the king died and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot.”19 The first statement already links the two statements chronologically through the word “then.” However, the series of unfortunate events is taken out of context. What transpired before these two events in the first sentence? Exploring the storyspace more might provide the audience with clues to fill in the gap by attributing causality to the second sentence, which illustrates both chronology (then) and causality (of grief at the death of the king).

Granted, this expectation of unity is an artifice of literary traditions and historical conventions. Also, the degree of unity attributed to a narrative is measured along a continuum. While historically or culturally rooted expectations of narrative unity can change (and have), narrative today still seems to rest on the expectation that the audience will fill in this gap, thereby providing closure. That being said, audiences weaned on traditional, successive narratives expect unity, disregard digression, and have within them a strong associative urge. J. Yellowlees Douglas claims that our reading—and this associative urge—takes the form of audience based prediction, in which audience members read and attempt to predict how the parts fit together to bring about a sense of closure.20 We tend to expect unity in our narratives and attempt to associate a chronological order or causal relationship between those parts of a narrative that don’t seem to fit as somehow contributing to a unified whole. This associative manner of thinking forms one instance of how the human mind works in general, described in Vannevar Bush’s Atlantic article, “As We May Think.”21 Where hypertext and poststructuralist narratives often purposefully disrupt this narrative unity and hypermediation seems to call unity and immersion into question,22 all rely on the audience’s expectation of unity and closure in narrative.

In interactive texts, Lev Manovich touches on this notion when he discusses digital media. “[I]f a complete work is the sum of all possible paths through its elements, then the user following a particular path accesses only a part of this whole. In other words, the user is activating only a part of the total works that already exists.”23 Manovich attributes to the author of the text the power in creating the narrative as a whole, an object in its entirety created by the author to be discovered by the audience in their explorations. This particular description is limited in that it ascribes to the audience solely the ability to explore, not create, but the work exists as a whole.

3. Implied Author

This idea of unity and closure stems in part from what narratologists call the implied author. The implied author gives the work coherence and form and is the central controlling “fictive” force behind the narrative—”a sensibility behind the narrative that accounts for how it is constructed” and that “’accounts for’ the narrative.”24 Is there in fact an implied author? Does this fundamental message exist in a single, unified state? Without an implied author—singular or plural—a narrative would in fact be a trick of chance. In it would be no order and no point. For narratives to work, the audience must believe that hidden in the work, in its entirety, is a whole.

4. Narrative takes place in the mind of the audience

The nature of narrative requires an audience, for narrative ultimately takes place in the audience’s mind. If a narrative was in a forest, would it be a story? Note the problem with that statement. Narratives aren’t in forests. They’re told or read or seen. They’re mediated in forests. Mediation requires an author, a medium, and an audience. The author authors, the audience audiences, and the medium connects the two. The author facilitates the interaction, however it is the user who creates meaning. While the definition of the role of the reader had traditionally been seen as somewhat “passive,”25 audiences of interactive narratives require “more active participation,” resulting in narratives depending on the audience in at least two ways. First, the audience must fill in the gap in order to create the series of causal and chronological connections required for all narratives to take place. Second, the audience in interactive texts must actually do some of the heavy lifting in order to bring the narrative into being.

What does “more active participation” mean? As an audience, we’re given the opportunity to make decisions that alter the narrative on a local and global scale through the nontrivial efforts that Aarseth described in Cybertext.26 In interactive drama, for instance, the audience is often offered a first person role as a character in the story. The narrative immerses the audience in the setting and events of the storyworld. In a first person game or interactive fiction, a “reader” operates as a character within the storyspace of the narrative—as the audience; “readers” play a part in the story and for their efforts are offered a first person perspective of the emerging narrative. In interactive narratives, the role of the audience and their participation in the shared authorship of the text brings the text into existence, resulting in an “interactive media work [that] is not only potentially open-ended, it does not exist unless there is interaction.”27

On a fundamental level, all acts of reading/interpretation are an act of authorship. The audience creates their own narrative based on the mediated narrative of the author (or on the degree of narrativity in a work). When we read a text, we can never really get at the message of the implied author without filtering it through our own subjectivities. Barthes makes this point:

We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the message of the Author- God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture (…) but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader (…). The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.28

Here, Barthes privileges the role of the audience in inscribing meaning and unity on the story. The distinction to make here is that interactive digital narratives require that the audience understand how successfully to navigate the storyspace of the narrative in order to internalize the storyworld. Narratives take place in audiences’ minds through the stimulus of a storyspace29 or through some mediated stimuli that has “narrativity” enough to inspire a narrative in the mind of the audience.30 The elements used to mediate the narrative exist upon a continuum from the purely diegetic to the purely mimetic. Authors can tell a story, purely through mimetic elements—through visuals. If the narrative is visually mimetic—i.e. it is mediated through visual rather than textual means so that it represents rather than tells a story, something like a play or movie—the audience must recreate in their heads the storyspace of the narrative. Though uncommon, purely visual, mimetic mediations of narratives rely to varying degrees upon mimetic and diegetic elements to create stories that the audience internalizes. Were an audience member afterwards to describe their experience, they would create a new version of the storyspace based on this narrative. The audience recreates—or creates—this storyspace. Ryan’s characterizing these texts as containing a degree of “narrativity” helps to distinguish between the mediated narrative or sjuzet, the degree to which a narrative is narrative-like, and the actual narrative (that which takes place in the head of the audience). As a result, objects that have a degree of narrativity can provide the stimulus for a narrative to take place in the minds of the audience,31 effectively blurring the audience with author and downplaying the importance of media in the act of storytelling. Narrative is not dependent on a specific medium, just the act of mediation.

Storyspace, the Gap, and narrative

Space also helps to define a narrative, be it the space between letters, words, and sentences, or the gap between author and audience.32 There are more gaps in a narrative than words. This notion of storyspace is a subset of “writing space,” to which Bolter refers as the “physical and visual field defined by a particular technology of writing.”33 Writing spaces are “hard structures” associated with the tangible materials of writing such as the material page of a codex. Taking a cue from Marshall McLuhan, Bolter’s idea of “writing space” allows for those soft structures that emerge from the hard structures and govern our expectations of how elements on a page work together or relate to one another. For instance, the paragraph on the written page is a hard structure, yet it also is a soft structure in how it represents an organizational principle.34

On this writing space exist spaces between symbols (be they words, signs, or icons) and their meaning. Language operates through associating the signifier—the word—to the signified—the object. The order of words on a page, their relationship to one another in a line, creates meaning as well. Dog. The. Ate. Cat. The. The words, or signifiers, point toward objects, the signified, yet there is no order or meaning. Even after placing the words in a specific order, the audience still must make sense of them. They have to fill in the gaps between the words “The cat ate the dog” and lend this series of signifiers meaning.

How these words or objects on the writing space relate to one another (and hypertext through analogy) is defined as either a hypotactic or paratactic relationship. Hypotaxis is the “temporal, logical and syntactic relations between members and sentences are expressed by words (such as ‘when,’ ‘then,’ ’because,’ ’therefore’) and by phrases (such as ‘in order to,’ ‘as a result’) or by the use of subordinate phrases and clauses.”35 Changing or omitting elements makes the sequence as a whole incomprehensible or changes the effect of the sequence.36

Parataxis is when “members within a sentence, or else a sequence of complete sentences, are put one after the other without any expression of their connection or relations except (at most) the noncommittal connective ‘and.’” An excellent example of parataxis in literary prose is Hemingway’s style. In The Sun Also Rises Hemingway writes, “It was dim and dark and the pillars went high up, and there were people praying, and it smelt of incense, and there were some wonderful big buildings.”37 Notice the use of the conjunction “and,” as well as the lack of causality or chronology in the sentence. What is portrayed could essentially be seen as simultaneous. The only sense of chronology or causality given to the sentence is the linear sense of reading it (almost as though it were a camera panning), lending it a sense of chronology as though it were happening as we read it. No elements necessarily follow another. Either the reader makes the connection between elements or there is none. As opposed to the manner in which hypotaxis clarifies the chronological or causal relationship between elements, Parataxis relies upon “repetition rather than sequence” to make associations between elements.

In parataxis, ‘thematic units can be added, omitted, or exchanged without destroying the coherence or effect of the [work’s] thematic structure.”38 However, parataxis in narratives does affect the coherence of the narrative, due to what Emma Kafalenos terms as the “primacy effect.” The primacy effect is when the events that occur at the start of a text often shade how we read the following narrative.39 For instance, our perception of a couple passionately kissing would change if this event took place after, rather than before, the funeral of their only child, killed in a fire. The audience must fill these gaps, bring some chronological order to the objects, and that order has an effect on the perception of that narrative.

Scott McCloud taxonomizes other forms of meaning created by the space between elements in a narrative—in this case the gutter in comic book frames.40 McCloud’s taxonomy of the gutter illustrates how in order for meaning to take place, the audience has to project meaning into the gutter or link—to explain spatial relationships in essentially a linear, successive form, and fill the gap with meaning. However, when we examine a simultaneous rather than linear work, such as a painting or the layout of a page or a hypertext, we find that objects on this space or series of spaces take place in relationship to one another in a simultaneous, spatial (rather than linear and successive) manner. These spatial relationships in a narrative require an audience to lend them meaning as well—to fill in the gap and connect the different elements mediated by the author.

In negotiating a narrative, Wolfgang Iser astutely observed that narratives contain gaps that readers must fill in, in order to understand them, let alone create dynamic vivid narratives, and that “the reader’s activity must also be controlled in some way by the text.”41 To come to terms with and understand the storyworld, the audience must negotiate and understand the storyspace—and the storyspace must in turn control the manner in which the audience interacts with it. In a traditional print narrative, understanding the storyspace is quite simple. When applied to textual narratives, elements come to follow a linear model, in which the narrative unfolds successively. The author and audience abide by the long-standing conventions of print in creating and reading the “writing space” that is the material text of the narrative. Because of these print narrative conventions, the audience often arrives at the elements that comprise the narrative linearly, easily comes to terms with and understands the relationship of these elements, and forms an idea of how these elements relate to one another. This conception is the audience’s internalization of the storyspace. In so doing, the audience comes to understand how these elements comprise the storyworld, and in so doing, negotiate the narrative.

How audiences create meaning in hypertextual narratives mirrors the audience coming to terms with a gap and adds an additional step to the process in which they come to negotiate a narrative. The lexia are the collection of words (and images, sounds, motions) that comprises the building blocks of the hypertext story. Then the links provide the means of navigating between lexia and hold together the hypertext narrative through their absence. Look at a map of a hypertext and all of its possible paths. View the hypertext spatially and you see the space that it holds. The emptiness. While meaning comes from the objects on the lexia, just as much can come from navigating the links.

Fabula, Digi-fabula, and Sjuzet

In traditional textual, unicursive narratives, narratologists name what is actually written down or mediated–the textual artifact of the narrative—as the the sjuzet (I instead use the term storyspace). The potential of the story (not necessarily what the audience experiences nor what is actually mediated) is the fabula. The narrative is what is actually experience by the audience. The three ideas are different and point to the role that mediation plays, but this notion of mediation is very much rooted in the assumptions of a specific medium—print technology. Hypertexts and any computer-mediated, interactive narratives don’t necessarily follow the same structure. Margarete Jahrman notes:

Any piece of computer software exists on two levels. On the one hand, it exists as an executing programme [sic] supporting some sort of activity or generating some sort of experience. On the other, it exists as a text in its own right, a subject expression of the writer’s ideas and an example of one person’s struggle to give form and function to an idea in the particular medium/language of executable code. The human reader has an immediate and direct relationship to the ‘source text’ of a poem or novel, rendering it into an imagined experience using their comprehension of language, their memories, and their life experiences. On the other hand, a computer programme’s text is generally hidden, interpreted by the processor, operating system, and hardware before being presented to the audience. But the inaccessibility of the programme’s source code does not make the code text itself culturally irrelevant. In the case of executable computer code, some of the interpretative activity is shifted away from the human into the machine/code system.42

To interpret and discuss the narrative, we can look at the code, requiring in critics the aptly phrased procedural literacy detailed by Mateas.43 Mateas argues that to understand how a digital work—a work rooted in code— critics should understand code. Doing so, however, could emphasize only one part of a work the written code, which is seldom experienced or seen by the audience. They usually only experience what appears on the screen or through the speakers. Focusing solely on the code ignores the interactivity, the inventiveness, and the authority of the audience in bringing about the interactive text.44

In interactive narratives, what is written or fixed—the code—is not really the sjuzet or the narrative script because it is not really the end-point in the narrating process. The narrative is mediated through symbolic forms of one shape, type, or another and requires the reader’s interaction with the narrative to play out the story on the computer screen. It’s the pixels played out on the screen, the sounds heard through the speaker and the interface that mark the act of mediation, not the code.45 The code represents what I term the digi-fabula that forms the interactive possibility of the text and allows for the mediation of the narrative, but the actual mediating of the story, the sjuzet, is what is actually experienced by the audience— the pixels on the screen—and not the code. The gap that exists requires the audience’s interaction to create some form of narrative meaning.

In hypertext and other interactive digital media, the narrative elements experienced by the audience might create “discordance” and “disorientation.” By discordance, I mean visual, textual, or other modal elements on the storyspace that appear to be at odds with the unity of the storyworld. The visual and textual elements might appear to be odds due to an act of under-reading, when in fact they are furthering the narrative. The audience must take these elements and associate them to the work in ways that create a chronological or causal relationship. Noise or digressions exist as well, in that errors or elements that are not part of the storyworld are introduced into the work. The audience is guilty of over-reading if they view as integral to the storyworld these elements which actually don’t belong. The audience might also understand that noise or digressions actually fall outside of the narrative arc. Given most audiences’ propensity for desiring closure, they are more likely to be guilty of over-reading.

Disorientation occurs when the audience can’t fit the elements encountered in the storyspace into their understanding of its structure. These elements or spaces appear to fall outside the narrative path or cause them to veer outside of the narrative path. The audience either can’t understand how these elements in the storyspace further their understanding of the storyworld or they are inability to navigate the storyspace causes a failure in their narrative experience. They can’t proceed in the narrative. Usability and web design professionals refer to the audience’s overall understanding of the site (and where they are in it) as the mental map of the site. The audience assumes that the work forms a unified whole and attempts to place themselves within this space. Veen’s three questions of web design, “where am I?, what’s here?, where can I go?,”46 recognize this spatialized understanding of hypertextual forms like websites. The navigational design feature of many sites, the Breadcrumb trail, helps illustrate this idea, mapping out where the user currently is in a site. Tabbed navigation functions similarly. The disorientation of hypertextual forms demonstrates a movement away from the clearly recognized writing space of codex mediated narratives towards relatively uncharted digital storyspaces.

This brings me to the metaphor of architectural space. In a book, the traditional linear, successive navigation scheme has been a convention almost since before the invention of the codex. Hypertextual or visually mimetic, interactive digital narratives/games evoke an experience that is somehow unique from traditional narratives. While the purpose of any narrative is to communicate perspective, visually mimetic video games (that actually mediate a story) create a sense of space and form that is quite unique in the degree to which the audience can wander along the much broader path of the narrative arc.47 The movement through space in a building, such as the Parthenon or a cathedral, creates a storyspace similar to that of an interactive text such as a hypertext or video game.

This storyspace forms the basis in which the audience moves about the work. Their movement through this space, the path that they take and the actions the commit, is the story path that forms the narrative arc of the storyworld experienced by the audience48 and allows the audience to better understand the storyspace, learn the rules of this space, and enact with the storyworld. The audience bases their mental map of the storyspace both on their explorations and on “information drawn from textual cues and clues.”49 The interactivity of the site and the process of exploration require that the audience member form hypotheses about the space, the rules, and the storyline, and then test their validity:

As they move through the film, spectators test and reformulate their mental maps of the narrative action and the story space. In games, players are forced to act upon those mental maps, to literally test them against the game world itself. If you are wrong about whether the bad guys lurk behind the next door, you will find out soon enough—perhaps by being blown away and having to start the game over.50

Those storypaces that facilitate the audience’s ready navigation and adequately convey the rules of the storyworld provide for a greater possibility of a satisfactory narrative arc through the storyspace.51 These new interactive, digital narrative forms also allow a storyspace broader than textual narrative storyspaces and through which individuals can map out their own personal narrative arcs, mediating their own narrative through their own actions, choices, or navigation.

This broader potential narrative arc allows for the exploration of what were once considered extradiegetic spaces— material in the storyworld that falls outside of the narrative arc of traditionally mediated stories. For instance, the war in Vietnam figures into the extradiegetic space of Easy Rider.52 The film does not overtly touch on it, but the war is part of the historical context of the story. Traditional narratives constrain the audience’s path along a narrative arc and as a result the storyspace in which they negotiate the narrative is far more constrained; whereas digital media (narratives mediated through hypertext and video games) allow the audience to explore more of the storyspace-and hence the storyworld. In moving about these formerly extradiegetic spaces of the storyspace, the audience transforms this time and space into part of the narrative arc they realize. They can discover more about the back-story of the narrative or get a better sense of the storyworld’s setting and the storyspace’s layout.

This exploration of the digital storyspaces—which encompasses both the diegetic and formerly extradiegetic storyspaces of traditionally mediated narratives—provides closure for the narrative and links back to the joke in the introduction. Closure, as Janet Murray defines it, occurs when the audience understands the structure of the storyspace:

Electronic closure occurs when a work’s structure, though not its plot, is understood. This closure involves a cognitive activity at one remove from the usual pleasures of hearing a story. The story itself has not resolved. It is not judged as consistent or satisfying. Instead, the map of the story inside the head of the reader has become clear.53

Murray’s differentiating between electronic and narrative closure establishes a needed delineation between the narrative and the artifact of mediating that narrative between the storyworld and storyspace, recognizing the unique and essentially unruly media that is digital, interactive works. If predominantly visually mimetic narratives have indeed become spatialized, wouldn’t narrative closure depend on electronic closure? If so, how do the two relate?

First, with architectural space it is not enough to consider just the three dimensional space defined by the edifice. Time is as an integral part of experiencing architectural space as it is of narrative. Narratives are events that unfold over time; they are chronologically linked. So too is movement through space. Any experience of a space is four dimensional, unfolding over time. Any consideration of digital storyspace should extend this notion of four dimensions as well. The path through the narrative landscape that is the storyspace of a digital, interactive work is still the linear path of the traditional, post-Gutenberg narrative, but it takes place in the architecturally ordered space mapped out over time in the mind of the audience.

Second, it is often not enough for the audience to map out this storyspace to achieve narrative or electronic closure. The audience must also come to discover, understand and follow the rules under which this world operates. In this way, the rules of navigating the storyspace (glowing objects are usable) or that govern the storyworld (objects fall down not up, antagonists will always attempt to attack your character) are types of soft structures linked to the design decisions of the hard structure of the narrative (the storyspace as a physical artifact that mediates the narrative). Whether the rules are the rhetoric of the links that the audiences must follow or the physics model of the world, the audience must follow these rules to achieve a degree of closure in any narrative sense.54 Most audiences do this every time they read a novel, for one of the rules for navigating the codex requires readers to start at the beginning and read their way through the middle to the end. But digital media, with its raw, unformed, convention breaking forms, doesn’t allow most of what we take to be convention to apply, although it too is developing its own media-specific soft-structures.

For an interactive hypertext or video game narrative to create a successful narrative structure represented by Freytag’s pyramid, the interactive space must direct the audience in their explorations through what I call the rhetoric of digital space. For the narrative act to take place, the audience must move through the digital space in such a way to construct a series of events that can be placed in chronological order and establish a causal relationship between the events in the text (what Miller calls the “critical story path”).55 The work must usually facilitate electronic closure—allowing the audience to understand the storyspace of the work—in order to achieve narrative closure (through filling the causal and chronological gaps of the narrative). To do so requires that the audience understand and follow this storyspace’s geography and rules.

The plot in a digitally mediated narrative—be it hypertext or video game—unfolds as a function of the perceptual and conceptual space.56 “Hypertextual ways of working, of course, invite us both as authors and users to experience information as a spatial arrangement. We are called upon to navigate the database in order to make sense of what is stored within.”57 As Dovey maintains, rather than taken on a journey, we are invited to explore a space.58 But the information itself is not spatial—it’s only the illusion of space that we navigate—there is no space to the data. It is this conceptual or perceived space that we need to understand—the audience’s interaction with database elements played out across the screen creating the portrayed space—and the perceived or cognitive space within the mind of the audience.

Spatial Storytelling—Creating Storyspaces in which Narratives Unfold

Creating compelling narrative arcs in interactive media requires a novel combination of skills and devices, many of which predate the invention of digital media. With precursors found in fields as diverse as architecture, wayfinding, interior decorating and theme-park construction, spatial storytelling provides a varied means of creating a satisfying narrative experience. Henry Jenkins’ article “Game Design as Narrative Architecture” frames his idea of what he calls environmental storytelling through the experience and theories of the theme park designer Don Carson:

Environmental storytelling creates the preconditions for an immersive narrative experience in at least one of four ways: spatial stories can evoke pre-existing narrative associations; they can provide a staging ground where narrative events are enacted; they may embed narrative information within their mise-en-scene; or they provide resources for emergent narratives.59

Valve, the producer of the Half-Life videogame series, follows these same precepts in their design process, designing their games in spatial rather than temporal terms. As Ken Birdwell, a game designer for Valve describes:

Since we couldn’t really bring all these experiences to the player (a relentless series of them would just get tedious), all content is distanced based, not time based, and no activities are started outside the player’s control. If the players are in the mood for more action, all they need to do is move forward and within a few seconds something will happen.60

Because spatial storytelling allows for the exploration of what had formerly been the extradiegetic storyspace of traditionally mediated narratives. digital, interactive, mimetic storyspace has the potential of allowing for a greater degree of interactivity or movement outside of the storypath, which essentially conflates the two; transforming potentially marginal extradiegetic storyspaces into spaces central to the narrative as it is mediated to (and experienced by) the audience and creating an opportunity to discover more about the setting and the backstory of the storyworld. Spatial storytelling can result in the plot structure of spatial narratives not being as tight or focused as linear narratives (although, for that matter, not all linear narratives are tightly focused). As a result, spatial narratives often emphasize the experience—the setting and mood and the interaction with objects and characters (in First Person Shooters usually through killing them). As Jenkins notes, “Spatial stories are not badly constructed stories; rather, they are stories which respond to alternative aesthetic principles, privileging spatial exploration over plot development.”61 Think of the contemplative and eerily vacant landscape of the video game Myst. This is the archetypal model of the spatialized narrative, in that nearly all of the narrative is represented as a space to be explored, it downplays the development of round characters, doesn’t actually emphasize action as much as it does exploration, and requires that the audience come to discover and understand the rules of both the storyspace and storyworld in order to unlock all of the storyspace— thereby achieving a degree of closure to the narrative and, if the rules are in fact understood, a satisfactory denouement for the story arc. Time is present both in the movement through the different settings and in the cut-scenes in which the audience hears the brothers (and the father) speak from the books.62

The Rhetoric of Digital Space

In spatial storytelling, where authors attempt to prompt or constrain the audience in their movement through the storyspace and to bring about a degree of electronic and narrative closure for these audiences, authors attempt fold this rhetoric of digital space into the storyspace and storyworld of the narrative in six general loci: Mimetic, Diegetic, Deep, Hard, Disruptive, and Paramediated loci. Of course, these loci easily overlap, particularly since the very nature of digital media allows for the blurring of lines.

This rhetoric is particularly important in understanding how audiences navigate primarily mimetic, interactive digital narratives. 63 In such a work, the author must set the rules for interactivity, design the storyspace and establish the storyworld for the audience, and in cases in which the game is attempting to repurpose the story of a film or novel, the audience must place the game within the storyworld of the other work. As Jesper Juul points out, this is the purpose of “the titles, intro sequences and cut scenes work….Their purpose is to explain to the player, why this platform game is at all related to the movie The Lion King, why this 3D flying game is related to Top Gun. Because it is not clear from the game itself.”64

First, mimetic rhetorical loci are those spaces represented by the storyspace and that further the storyworld. In this category is all that is represented as part of the storyworld— the characters, dialog, setting, and the audience’s interactions with the world as they are represented, as opposed to narrated, on the screen or heard through the speakers. Here, the space (and characters that populate this space) prompt or limit actions. For instance, the design of the space might constrain movement or choice, forcing the audience to choose specific paths, behaviors, or items (such as occurs in many first person shooters). Mimetic rhetorical forms also rely upon cut-scenes to remove the control from the audience and to convey dramatic tension, characters, and events to the audience:

The heavy-handed exposition that opens many games serves a useful function in orienting spectators to the core premises so that they are less likely to make stupid and costly errors as they first enter into the game world. Some games create a space for rehearsal, as well, so that we can make sure we understand our character’s potential moves before we come up against the challenges of navigating narrational space.65

We see this also in the design of a First Person Shooters such as Half-Life 2,66 in which the designers weave clues regarding paths and behaviors into the setting or character interactions. The burnt corpse by the blackened door might be a cautionary tale for the audience—open at your own risk.

Second, diegetic rhetorical loci are outside the mimetic storyspace but are still part of the storyworld and attempt to control or afford behavior through narration or the background of the storyworld. The rhetoric that takes place in these loci of the storyspace still attempts to create the illusion of a coherent storyworld, but is not necessarily represented. Narration that explains events or contextualizes the story, such as the narration that opens the Star Wars films, is one example. This narration forms the idea of the storyworld, but is not a representation of that storyworld. Most galaxies don’t have a series of sentences that scroll off toward a vanishing point in space, yet the narration helps explain the world. Similar narration exists in video games. Each storyworld also has its own set of rules by which its universe operates, as well as a degree of history and geography outside of the represented space, yet still informing that space yet in the storyworld. These rules help the audience understand the possibilities of the storyspace and help contextualize the storyworld. For instance, in the game Call of Duty 2,67 World War II forms part of the narrative and this back-story helps shape the audience’s behaviors. As a character who is a member of the Allies, the back-story helps shape audience behaviors (attempt to kill Axis soldiers) while subtitles might inform the audience that the scene takes place in Moscow or that the temperature is minus 20 Celsius.

Third, deep rhetorical loci incorporate rhetorical forms into the code. The constraints or opportunities placed on audience interaction through coding exist in the digi-fabula and outside of the represented diegetic storyspace mediated to the audience. It is that which is not represented, yet still constrains or affords actions. For a rule bound system in which interactivity is an integral part, code is central to the unfolding of the narrative, yet is never actually represented on screen.

Fourth, hard rhetorical loci recognize the effect hardware and input devices have in allowing for audience interactivity/ behaviors with the storyspace and how the storyworld is represented. For instance, there are only so many buttons on a joystick or mouse. All interaction with (and within) the narrative must be funneled through the input device and mediated through the output device(s). The possible behaviors mapped onto these devices by the author both afford and constrain interaction within the narrative. Beyond mapping specific behaviors onto the device, the physical structure of the input device and the monitor (as well as operating system and hardware) are usually outside of the scope of the author to change, yet these items play a part in audience interaction with the storyspace.

Fifth, disruptive rhetorical loci are those spaces in which occur visual or auditory cues that break the verisimilitude of the storyworld in attempting to control or enable audience behavior. The pop-up message box that asks whether a user wants to quit or that requests that the user download the newest application to view the document are examples. Probably the most readily apparent disruptive rhetorical form is the interface. While hypermediacy is becoming more accepted68 and sometimes the designers attempt to blend the interface into the storyspace in some manner (for example the heads up display interface that ostensibly forms the perspective of the character), in most cases the audience has to accept (and incorporate into the storyworld) the disruptive effects of these rhetorical forms.

Sixth, paramediated rhetorical loci are those objects that inform us how to play the game or read the hypertext and that normally occur outside of the medium used to convey the storyspace (i.e. all are usually mediated separately from the storyspace, such as the printed manual, the HTML the cheat files, etc.). These are forms such as help files, cheats, manuals, and instructions. Sometimes these are folded in the storyspace. Other times they’re not. All usually facilitate audience navigation through the storyspace, advise the audience of rules, and/or provide needed back-story for the storyworld.

Forced and Enabling

These loci allow for rhetorical forms that either enable choices in actions or narrative paths or force choices or paths69. Enabling interactivity that furthers a mimetic narrative would include the highlighting of those interactive or actionable items in a space or the blue underscore of a hypertext link. These examples of enabling rhetorical forms are interaction markers and choice markers both of which communicate to the audience the presence of an actionable item or indicate a choice or path. The best and most widely cited example of narratives forcing interactivity is the cut scene—often used in the string of pearls design. In this instance, the user is given opportunities to interact until the cut-scene comes into play, at which time the user has no control over the outcome of this narrative. Both forced and enabling allow, and at the same time inhibit, actions; being enabled to make two choices (or one hundred, or one thousand) inhibits other choices not enabled in the narrative. Of course, these uses are often either folded into the storyspace of the storyworld and are experienced as part of representation of the narrative (mimetic), or they are told to the audience (diegetic), or they are disruptive to the flow of the story.

Conclusion: On Narrative and the Rhetoric of Digital Space

Perhaps because of the influence of the interactor on the text, these ideas of an implied author and a unified text are changing. The idea of a unified whole is no longer necessarily the norm. Consider the way that television now tells stories—the mélange of cuts and clips that compose shows such as Talk Soup—a compilation of small pieces. There is no coherent whole to the show—and it is not really a unified narrative but rather a series of glimpses of what goes on on television.70 We read in snippets and view in glimpses and our storytelling is beginning to show it—particularly in postmodern literature or in the more visual media like television. Lost71 is a good example. The show traces its story-arc through the multiple perspectives and scenes. Film as well. Think of the snippets of scenes that compose the movie Syriana.72 Obviously, Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden, Michael Joyce’s Afternoon: A Story, and Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl73 aptly exemplify hypertextual commentaries on this trend. In each of these media, storytelling is taking place in little snippets or glimpses, which taken as a whole, amount to an idea of a unified whole, like a collage. Yet the audience attempts to assemble these snippets and glimpses into a coherent whole. This manner of storytelling is not new. Consider episodic narratives. More particularly, consider the multi-vocality of James Joyce’s Dubliners.74 Both attempt to get beyond the veil of linear storytelling and to mediate a sense of place through multiple perspectives and multiple narratives. Yet the narrative urge of which Kermode spoke still exists and still operates in our consciousness, bringing a degree of closure to such works. We view a series of events, text, images, or lexia and we attempt to connect them causally and chronologically. We are offered a gap, and we attempt to fill it. In order to better create a more satisfactory narrative, well-constructed interactive works require a rhetoric of digital space that allows the audience to navigate better the storyspaces of interactive digital narratives.

Footnotes:

1. Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Cambridge MA:, MIT Press, 1997), 174.
2. Michael Joyce, “Siren Shapes: Exploratory and Constructive Hypertexts,” in Academic Computing 3.4 (1988): 10-14, 37- 42.
3. Mark J. Wolf, “Space in the Video Game,” in The Medium of the Video Game, edited by Mark J. Wolf, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 67.
4. While Eastgate named their proprietary hypertext writing software Storyspace, I chose the term because it best evokes the notion of spatial storytelling. “Storyspace,” Eastgate publishing. http://www.eastgate.com/storyspace/index.html (accessed July 23, 2008).
5. Janet H. Murray, 79.
6. For the purposes of this article, I use the term loci not in the sense of “commonplaces” as it is used in rhetoric, but in the sense of spaces in which events or actions take place.
7. I first encountered the idea of the gap in Gregory Ulmer, “The Miranda Warnings: An Experiment in Hyperrhetoric” in Hypertext 2.0, edited by George Landow (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 344-77.
8. It is only through the continuity of vision that we lend motion to the series of images in film.
9. Jay David Bolter, “The Rhetoric of Interactive Fiction,” in Texts and Textuality: Textual Instability, Theory, and Interpretation, edited by Philip Cohen (New York, NY: Garland, 1997), 269-90; Mark Bernstein,”Patterns of Hypertext,” (Eastgate Systems Inc., 1998) http://www.eastgate.com/patterns/Print. html (accessed July 23, 2008); John M. Slatin, “Reading Hypertext: Order and Coherence in a New Medium,” in Hypermedia and Literary Studies, edited by G. P. Landow and P. Delany (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 153-169; George P. Landow, “The Rhetoric of Hypermedia: Some Rules for Authors,” in Hypermedia and Literary Studies, edited by G. P. Landow and P. Delany (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990); George P. Landow, “Relationally Encoded Links and the Rhetoric of Hypertext,” in Hypertext ‘87 Proceedings, (Baltimore: Association for Computing Machinery, 1987), 331-344; Terry Harpold, Links and Their Vicissitudes: Essays on Hypertext. Dissertation Abstracts International 56, no. 3 (1995 Sept): p. 916A. Dissertation: U of Pennsylvania; 1994.
10. Henry Jenkins, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” in First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 126.
11. H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 12-24.
12. Marie-Laure Ryan, “Multivariant Narratives” in A Companion to Digital Humanities, editd by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 428.
13. Ryan, “Multivariant,” 417-19.
14. Gerald Prince, Dictionary of Narratology. (Lincoln: Univ of Nebraska Press, 2003) 58.
15. Markku Eskilinen, “The Gaming Situation,” in Game Studies, 1 (1) http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen/. (accessed July 23, 2008).
16. Chekhov 23, as qtd in Abbott 56.
17. Abbott 93.
18. Abbott 93.
19. E. M. Forster, “Aspects of the Novel.,” (as quoted in Janet Murray Hamlet on the Holodeck, 185).
20. Douglas, J. Yellowlees, “’How Do I Stop This Thing?’: Closure and Indeterminacy in Interactive Narratives,” in Hyper/Text/ Theory, edited by George P. Landow. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994), 161-164.
21. Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” in. The Atlantic Monthly 176 (1) 1945, 101-108.
22. Jay David Bolter, and Richard Gruisin, Remediation: Understanding New Media. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 31.
23. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media, (Cambridge, MIT press, 2001), 128.
24. Abbott 77.
25. I add scare quotes purposefully, for the critical trend in literary theory of the last thirty to forty years has been to invest a great deal of power in the audience. See, for instance, readerresponse and postmodern theory.
26. Espen Aarseth, Cybertext. Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 1.
27. Söke Dinkla, “The Art of Narrative—Towards the Floating Work of Art,” in New Screen Media: Cinema/Art/Narrative, edited by Martin Rieser and Andrea Zapp (London, England— Karlsruhe, Germany: British Film Institute—ZKM Center for Art and Media, 2002), 33.
28. Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 142-143.
29. Ryan uses the term “narrative script” to describe an artifact designed to mediate a story of some type. I prefer the term storyspace, if only because the term script connotes a linear artifact that is textual in nature. Storyspace evokes better the spatial nature of games such as first person shooters.
30. Marie-Laure Ryan, “Multivariant Narratives,” in A Companion to Digital Humanities, Edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. ( Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 417.
31. Ryan “Multivariant” 417.
32. See Lev Manovich’s discussion of spatial narratives in The Language of New Media, 244-253.
33. Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print, 2nd edition (Mahwah: Lawrence EarlBaum Associated Publishing, 2001), 12-13.
34. Jay Bolter, “Virtual Reality and the Redefinition of the Self,” in Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment. 2nd ed. Edited byLance Strate, Ronald L. Jacobson and Stephanie B. Gibson (Creskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2003), 105-119.
35. M. H. Abrams, Geoffrey Galt Harpham, A Glossary of Literary Terms. 8th edition. (Boston: Thomson Wadsworth publishing, 2005), 313.
36. An interesting question is whether these theories hold true as well for the relationship between visual objects. I assume in this paper that textual and visual objects in narratives are analogous enough for these theories to apply similarly.
37. M. H. Abrams, 313.
38. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure, pp. 99-100, as quoted in in Landow’s Hypertext 2.0. The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press,186-7.
39. Abbott 81-2.
40. Meadows refers to Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, p. 90. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics (The Invisible Art). Kitchen Sink Press, 1999.
41. Wolfgang Iser, “Interaction between Text and Reader,” in The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation, edited by Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crossman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 106-119.
42. Jahrmann, Margarete. “Mediapoiesis, autopoietic compiling, and code critique in the technological narrative: narratives of the code.” Networked Narrative Environments as Imaginary Spaces of Being. Edited by Andrea Zapp. Manchester: Manchester Metropolitan University Press, 2004, p. 132.
43. Michael Mateas, “Procedural Literacy: Educating the New Media Practitioner,” http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~mateas/publications/ MateasOTH2005.pdf (accessed July 23, 2008)
44. While Aarseth claims that “When the relationship between surface sign and user is all that matters, the unique dual materiality of the cybernetic sign process is disregarded” (Aarseth 40, italics his).
45. Aarseth, 40.
46. Jeffrey Veen, The Art and Science of Web Design (Indianapolis: New Ryders, 1997), 48-51.
47. This conceptual space creates for the audience a space for acting- or handlungsfelder. Jahrman, 36.
48. Critics such as Henry Jenkins have created a smaller narrative- the micronarrative- to explain the narrative process in video games (125). I don’t think that micro-narratives are a profitable categorization, however, in that doing so denigrates the narrative structure of the work as a whole. Instead, we could say, as other have, that the narrative is more episodic in nature.
49. Henry Jenkins, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” in First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004).
50. Jenkins, 126.
51. Works such as Crawford’s and Glassner’s discuss how to create interactive storytelling. Chris Crawford. On Interactive Storytelling. (Berkeley, CA: New Riders Games, 2005) and Glassner, Andrew. Interactive Storytelling: Techniques for 21st Century Fiction. (Wellesley, MA: AK Peters, Ltd, 2004).
52. Easy Rider, directed by Dennis Hopper, 1969.
53. Murray Hamlet on the Holodeck, 174.
54. Espen Aarseth defines three areas common to all gamesgame- play, game-world, and game-structure in his paper, “Playing research” Methodological approaches to game analysis,” presented at the Melbourne DAC 2003, p. 2.
55. Carolyn Handler Miller, Digital Storytelling: A Creator’s Guide to Interactive Entertainment (Burlington, MA: Focal Press, 2004), 125.
56. Bolter categorizes space into three groups: physical, perceptual, and conceptual. “Physical space is that which exists independent of humans. Perceptual space is what the audience perceives and is usually multi-modal, whereas conceptual space is our understanding of this space–sometimes not even seen. Jay Bolter, “Virtual Reality and the Redefinition of the Self,” in Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment. 2nd ed. edited by Lance Strate, Ronald L. Jacobson and Stephanie B. Gibson. (Creskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2003).
57. Jon Dovey, “Notes Toward a Hypertextual Theory of Narrative,” in New Screen Media: Cinema/Art/Narrative, edited by Martin Rieser, Andrea Zapp, —and Timothy Duckrey (London, England-Karlsruhe, Germany: British Film Institute-ZKM Center for Art and Media, 2002), 140.
58. Dovey 142.
59. Jenkins, 123.
60. Ken Birdwell, “The Cabal”: Valve’s Design Process for Creating Half-Life,” in Gamasutra. December 10, 1999. http:// www.gamasutra.com/features/19991210/birdwell_01.htm (accessed July 23, 2008)
61. Jenkins, 124.
62. Myst. Broderbund. 1995.
63. Although it could also possibly serve to understand the operation of interactivity in informative and exhortative digital spaces (such as webpages), I would be particularly interested to see how well or in what forms the rhetoric of digital space might apply to experiential design in real spaces.
64. Jesper Juul, “A Theory of the Computer Game.” http://www. jesperjuul.net/thesis/4-theoryofthecomputergame.html (accessed July 23, 2008).
65. Jenkins, 126.
66. Half-Life 2. Valve, 2006.
67. Call of Duty 2, Activision Publishing, Inc, 2005.
68. An important side-note is that many works have conflated disruptive, mimetic and diegetic loci. As Bolter and Gruisin’s discuss in Remediation, those instances of immediacy (which would usually fall into the diegetic or mimetic loci) are increasingly open to disruption as hypermediacy is becoming more an accepted part of the communication process. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 30-31.
69. Greg M. Smith, in his “Introduction: A few words about interactivity” assigns to interactivity solely the role of “restrict[ing] and set[ting] boundaries on the sequence of actions” (24) I have chosen to widen his definition to include enabling as well as inhibiting. While I recognize the validity of the claim that to inhibit is essentially the same as to enable, I choose to steer away from the Old-Testament tones implicit in this view of interactivity. Rather than see the author’s role in interactivity as the sage stating “thou shalt not,” philosophically I see the authors’ role as both affording choices and implicit in those choices offered, inhibiting. Greg M. Smith, “Introduction: A Few Words About Interactivity,” in On a Silver Platter: CDROMS and the Promises of a New Technology, edited by Greg M. Smith (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 1-34.
70. James Gleick, “Prest-o! Change-o!” in Living in the Information Age: A New Media Reader, 2nd edition, edited by Erik P. Bucy (Belmont, CA: Thomas Wadsworth, 2005), 148.
71. Lost, ABC, 2005-.
72. Syriana, directed by Stephen Gaghan, 2005.
73. Stuart Moulthrop, Victory Garden (Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1999); MichaelJoyce, Afternoon, a Story. 5th ed. (Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1995); Shelley Jackson, Patchwork Girl (Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1995).
74. James Joyce, Dubliners (New York: Penguin Books Ltd, 2000)

References:

Aarseth, Espen. “Quest Games as Post-Narrative Discourse.” In Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan, 361-76. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska Press, 2004.
Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1997.
Abbott, H. Porter, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Abrams, M. H., Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 8th edition. Boston: Thomson Wadsworth Publishing, 2005.
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” In Image, Music, Text, 142-148. New York: Hill and Wang, 1988.
Bernstein, Mark. „Patterns of Hypertext.“ Eastgate Systems Inc. 1998 http://www.eastgate.com/patterns/Print.html (accessed July 23, 2008). (reprinted from Proceedings of Hypertext ‘98, Frank Shipman, Elli Mylonas, and Kaj Groenback, eds, ACM, New York.)
Birdwell, Ken. “ The Cabal: Valve’s Design Process For Creating Half-Life.” In Gamasutra. December 10, 1999. http://www. gamasutra.com/features/19991210/birdwell_01.htm. (accessed 10/31/06). (originally published in Game Developer.)
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Gruisin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.
Bolter, Jay David. “The Rhetoric of Interactive Fiction.” In Texts and Textuality: Textual Instability, Theory, and Interpretation, edited by Philip Cohen, 269-90. New York, NY: Garland, 1997.
Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print. - 2nd Ed. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001.
Bolter, Jay. “Virtual Reality and the Redefinition of the Self.” Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment. 2nd, edited by Lance Strate, Ronald L. Jacobson and Stephanie B. Gibson. Creskill, 105-119. NJ: Hampton Press, 2009.
Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” In The Atlantic Monthly. 176, (1) (1945): 101-108.
Call of Duty 2. Activision Publishing, Inc. 2005.
Crawford, Chris. On Interactive Storytelling. Berkeley, CA: New Riders Games, 2005 .
Douglas, J. Yellowlees. “’How Do I Stop This Thing?’: Closure and Indeterminacy in Interactive Narratives.” In Hyper/Text/Theory,. edited by. George P. Landow, 159-188. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994.
Dovey, Jon. “Notes Toward a Hypertextual Theory of Narrative.” In xxxii, 335 pp.; New Screen Media: Cinema/Art/Narrative. edited by : Rieser, Martin Rieser, (ed. and foreword)-Zapp, AndreaZapp, (ed. and foreword)-Duckrey, Timothy Duckrey. London, England- -Karlsruhe, Germany: (preface); British Film Institute-ZKM Center for Art and Media, London, England-Karlsruhe, Germany, 2002: 135-45.
Easy Rider. Directed by Dennis Hopper, 1969.
Eskilinen, Markku. “The Gaming Situation.” In Game Studies. Vol. 1, no. (1). http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen/ (accessed July 23, 2008).
Glassner, Andrew. Interactive Storytelling: Techniques for 21st Century Fiction. Wellesley, MA: AK Peters, Ltd., 2004.
Gleick, James. “Prest-o! Change-o!” In Living in the Informatioon Age: A New Media Reader. Second edition. edited by Erik P Bucy, 146-150. Belmont, CA: Thomas Wadsworth, 2005.
Half-Life 2. Valve. 2006.
Harpold, Terry. Links and Their Vicissitudes: Essays on Hypertext. Dissertation Abstracts International 56, no. 3 (1995 Sept): p. 916A. Dissertation: U of Pennsylvania,1994.
Iser, Wolfgang. “Interaction between Text and Reader.” In The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation, 106- 119.Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.
Jackson, Shelley. Patchwork Girl. Watertown, MA.: Eastgate Systems, 1995.
Jahrmann, Margarete. “Mediapoiesis, Autopoietic Compiling, and Code Critique in the Technological Narrative: Narratives of The Code.” In Networked Narrative Environments as Imaginary Spaces of Being, edited by Zapp, Andrea Zapped. Manchester: Manchester Metropolitan University Press, 2004.
Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” (and other texts). In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2004.
Joyce, Michael. “Siren Shapes: Exploratory and Constructive Hypertext.” In Academic Computing (November, 1988).
Joyce, Michael. Afternoon, A Story. 5th ed. Watertown, Mass.: Eastgate Systems, 1995.
Juul, Jesper. “A Theory of the Computer Game.” http://www. jesperjuul.net/thesis/4-theoryofthecomputergame.html (Accessed July 23, 2008).
Landow, George P. “Relationally Encoded Links and the Rhetoric of Hypertext,” In Hypertext ‘87 Proceedings, 331-344. Baltimore: Association for Computing Machinery, 1987.
Landow, George P. “The Rhetoric of Hypermedia: Some Rules for Authors,” .” In., Hypermedia and Literary Studies, edited by G. P. Landow and P. Delany. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990.
Landow, George P. Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, 2nd edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1997. Lost. ABC. 2005-.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2002.,
Mateas, Michael. “Procedural Literacy: Educating the New Media Practitioner.” http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~mateas/publications/ MateasOTH2005.pdf. (Accessed July 23, 2008).
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics (The Invisible Art). Amherst, MA: Kitchen Sink Press, 1999.
Meadows, Mark Stephen. Pause and Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative. Indianapolis: New Riders Press, 2003.
Miller, Carolyn Handler. Digital Storytelling: A Creator’s Guide to Interactive Entertainment. Burlington, MA: Focal Press, 2004.
Moulthrop, Stuart. Victory Garden. Watertown, MA.: Eastgate Systems, 1999.
Murray, Janet. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1997.
Myst. Broderbund. 1995.
Prince, Gerald. Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln: Univ of Nebraska Press, 2003.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Beyond Myth and Metaphor: Narrative in Digital Media.” In Poetics Today - Volume 23, Number (4), Winter 2002. 581-609.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Cyberspace, Virtuality, and the Text.” In Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan, 78-107. Bloomington: U of Indiana Press, 1999.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Introduction.” In Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan, 1-28. Bloomington: U of Indiana University Press, 1999.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Introduction.” In Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan, 1-40. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Multivariant Narratives.” In A Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth, 415-30. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Will New Media Produce New Narratives?” In Narrative Across Media: The Langauges of Storytelling, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan, 337-360. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.
Slatin, John M. “Reading Hypertext: Order and coherence in a new medium.” In Hypermedia and Literary Studies, edited by G. P. Landow and P. Delany, 153-169. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.
Smith, Greg M. “Introduction: A few words about interactivity.” In On a Silver Platter: CD-ROMS and the Promises of a New Technology, edited by Greg M. Smith, 1-34. New York: New York University Press, 1999.
Söke, Dinkla. “The Art of Narrative—Towards the Floating Work of Art.” In New Screen Media: Cinema/Art/Narrative; , edited by Martin Rieser and Andrea Zapp, 27-41. London, England—Karlsruhe, Germany: British Film Institute—ZKM Center for Art and Media, London, England—Karlsruhe, Germany, 2002.
Syriana. Directed by Stephen Gaghan. 2005.
Ulmer, Gregory. “The Miranda Warnings: An Experiment in Hyper Rhetoric” In Hypertext 2.0, edited by George Landow, 344-377. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Veen, Jeffrey. The Art and Science of Web Design. Indianapolis: New Ryders, 1997.
Wolf, Mark J. “Space in the Video Game.” In The Medium of the Video Game, edited by Mark J. Wolf. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001.