Article in a print journal

Although many issues about how we can construct and analyze electronic narrative remain to be settled, it is clear, then, that a central concern will be the ability of these game narratives to create the emotional impact inherent in our involvement in a story. Emotional involvement is especially important for the interactive text because the user must be prompted to act and move through the text to a degree not required by more traditional reading. In this essay, I would like to consider how electronic narratives balance interactivity and emotional force. Doing so means thinking about emotional involvement and its relation to narrative teleology, as well as its tolerance for interruption by everything from writerly asides to interactive play. To investigate this, I will draw not only on hypertext and computer games but also on American metafiction, which I will show confronts the same problems of emotional force within interactive or game-like patterns. (Source: Introduction to the essay)

Essay discussing the motif of the car crash in early hypertext fiction, concluding that the breakdown (in many senses) is in fact a key feature of hypertext.

Brief piece arguing that hypertext is not really new.

Beginning by discussing his experience of reading the hypertexts in WOE (the Words on the Edge collection), Harpold uses bodily and fleshy comparisons to analyse hypertext: "My goal in this essay is to draw upon the entanglements of hypertext anatomy to outline a stylistics of hypertext informed by its contours. The practice of hypertext as a way of writing and reading is determined by its formal traits as a way of conversation. Medium as meat, reading as peristalsis."

Discusses what characterises digital artists' books, and looks at a few works in detail.