Hypercard and Hypertext Fiction

Today we're going to be looking at the hypercard and hypertext fiction, neither of which really exist anymore.

If you want to read more about Hypercard you can do it here. Because of the nature of the medium most of the games were either strategy (especially kingdom sims) or adventure games; the most famous adventure to come from the early Hypercard scene was Myst.

We're going to be looking at Alter Ego. Warning: depending on the choices you make there are some upsetting scenes.

Hypertext is still with us, it's what allows me to link to the web but is less used for games or fiction. We're going to be exploring Luminous Airplanes.

We're going to use the bookmarking and hyperlink features of MS Word to create our own hypertext fiction. See this short example: Hypertext fiction in Word (internal link).

You can see our group's first attempts at hypertext fiction here:

You will need to open these up in Word (not the preview) and enable editing. Press CTRL to click on the links.

This was my example, A Late Night

And this is what the group came up with:

"You Die!" by Adam

"Village Boy" by Jack

"The Problem with Groups" by Pippa

"You Quest" by Sam

Let us know what you think.

We are planning to create some more complex stories using the same techniques in the coming weeks, watch this space.