Adaptive Hypertext Narrative As City Planning

Proceedings of the 24th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media

This essay explores an analogy that might offer new ideas for the construction of adaptive hypertext narrative systems. The analogy is not with the production of a literary work but with city planning, in particular Christopher Alexander’s iterative model for gradual change. In this model, there is no overall plan for the city; instead, there are multiple local interventions guided by local insufficiencies and a library of spatial patterns. Applied to narrative hypertext this model would stress multiple local additions to a growing landscape of nodes and links. The results should provide more kinds of novelty and surprise than with conventional authoring software, but would have to deal with problems of narrative unity and closure.

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