Exposing potential narrative structure through user choice

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Description/Abstract

The reading of a hypertext fiction could simply be veiwed as the reordering of events, reviewing and accessing fragments of a story that has already taken place. A dierent reader experience would come from dierent orderings and the eects that these might produce. This doesn’t have to be the case however. The fragments of a fiction also can represent possibilities that have yet to occur. This is independent of the over-arching narrative of the piece. At points in the fiction the reader is presented with choices. Do I follow this link or do I choose a dierent path? Here, the narrative structure of the piece is leaking through the text and not just the read structure but potential future structures. These choices must be presented to the reader by the author. This paper will examine some of the consequences of exposing the visibilities of these narrative structures, using the presentation of choices in hypertext fiction as an exemplar.