This has been making the rounds lately, and it’s skillfully done: a small hypertext(-ish) fiction that expands as you click on words in the text. What I found interesting is the shift in the narrator’s voice as the text becomes more elaborate: at first almost off-putting in its terseness, then friendly in a boring way (try expanding everything except “made” from a fresh page load). By the time you’ve expanded everything, though, the narrator seems obsessive and neurotic—maybe mimicking the reader’s own obsessive action of clicking to fully expand the story.
Andrew Plotkin’s The Space Under the Window (1997) is another experimental narrative that uses a similar form, although you must type in words that occur in the text to expand it, instead of just clicking on them. Plotkin’s program has a temporal element as well—”expanding” the text can add new events, not just elaborate on what’s already been related. There are multiple endings in Space, as well: depending on how you choose to elaborate the text, different final texts emerge.
(more analysis and comparison after the cut)
