One of the oldest known human activities is that of telling stories. It's an important part of how we educate ourselves, pass down culture across generations, and entertain each other. Throughout the ages, storytellers have adapted their art to take advantage of changes in technology — moving from cave walls to stone tablets to papyrus to sheaves of paper to the printing press. It should be no surprise, then, that some storytellers are looking at computers and the Internet with interest. This is not simply
What follows is a detailed look at one experiment in this evolution of storytelling. My partners and I wrote and released a story on the Internet not as narrative text, but as a set of Web sites whose content evolved over five weeks. The story was conveyed by the changes that occurred in these Web sites and in the events that those changes implied in the minds of the readers. As a result, the experience of watching this story unfold was perhaps more like playing a game than reading a book. To me, what is si
The first experiments with computers and storytelling took two forms. In the mid-1980s, some adventurous authors created stories as hypertext or hypermedia structures. They broke a story into a collection of passages, and used a hypertext system to connect the passages into a web that readers could explore however they chose [1]. These stories were first built with experimental software or commercial packages such as HyperCard, but the future transition of these experiments to the Web was inevitable. From a