Segue: Tiny patterns in hypertext prose: the looping link

There’s a lot of writing out there about the macro-level [structure] of hypertext (or cybertext) stories. But, at least from the practical IF author community (as opposed to academia), there is relatively little about the micro-scale details of writing hypertext prose.

I’ve been collecting these lately, hoping to put together some kind of practical, writer-facing catalog of them; it’s particularly targeted at fiction writers from outside the fiction world. These are meant to be analogous to figures of speech or rhetorical devices such as synecdoche and anaphora, in that they sit somewhere between structure and semantics; with the caveat that they’re only possible in hyperlink prose.

I am not, however, going to make up Greek words for them. Promise. I’m going to give them vaguely meaningful, kenning-like English names.

To start out, a thing I stumbled upon writing my IFComp entry – no, this post doesn’t contain spoilers for that or discussion of it – which is a particular way to write a cycling link:

The joke here is that the cycling link works both ways. Each step in the cycle fits the sentence it’s in, of course, but together they also form a progression:

inaccessible / dark / preternaturally dark / dark, and you were likely to be eaten by a grue/ too dark to enter / inaccessible…

Such that the first/last entry, “inaccessible”, gets re-contextualised by the previous iterations. So the cycling link isn’t just a matter of affect; the reader isn’t just using it to select the version of the story she wants. The cycling link is itself delivering context that is only visible through interaction with it. By the time the reader has cycled all the way back around to “inaccessible,” she knows why the cave is inaccessible.

Usually, the effect of this is to suggest that the protagonist (or the viewpoint, whatever it is) is rethinking or approaching towards some conclusion. In the example, the suggestion is of the protagonist’s fear of grues creeping up on him as he stares into the black maw of the cave. It can suggest the interior state of the protagonist in a lateral way. Repetitive, intrusive thoughts are particularly natural to convey using a looping link.

The word loop here is meant as in rollercoasters or aircraft, not programming languages. You go back to where you started, but in the process you moved away from your original plane of movement, and got to see some things. The looping link is like an orthogonal vein of meaning embedded in the middle of the sentence.

Not all cycling links are looping links; for example this line from Prospero:

Here stood the musicians, playing through an interminable medley, the bassist’s arm drooping slightly under the weight of the instrument. […] As she moved unseen through the crowd, she [listened with distant interest / swayed along to the rhythm / did not harken to the sound].

Here, the cycling link doesn’t convey a specific meaning by itself; they really are just different possibilities for the player to pick from. For a looping link to exist, the possibilities have to agree on some level.

I hope this made sense. As usual, my comment section is actually [Twitter]. I’d especially love to hear about prior art on this general subject (of figures of speech and patterns in hypertext prose) as well as examples that fit the description of what I’m trying to get at here.

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