The first thing to say here is that I didn’t just speak to students – I spoke with amateur writers, avid readers of fiction of all kinds, literature teachers, and school students. Also, I know that 36 readers aren’t speaking for everyone, but there is a good tradition of working with small groups of readers to glean rich data about the experience of reading (eg Holland’s ’5 Reader Reading’, and Nell”s work in ‘Lost in a Book’). Remember also that my readers didn’t only read the obviously ‘literary’ material – I selected a range of hyper-fiction, in order to get some sense of the range of responses that hyper-narrative might provoke.

I don’t think either that someone who enjoys ‘Ulysses’ would necessarily enjoy a hyper-novel: there’s no inevitable correlation between the non-linearity of Modernist novels, for example, and the non-linearity of hyper-literature. Hyper-literature can be anything it wants to be, but at the moment almost all hyper-fiction is ‘difficult’ for readers. I absolutely wouldn’t want that ‘difficult’ stuff to disappear -obviously we need and want the experimental, the challenging, and the awkward, or nothing new would ever emerge in the arts (or the sciences). But it isn’t a situation that enhances the form’s chances of continuing or developing, if it stays only ‘difficult’, and elitist. It may well satisfy some academics that it is THE thing, but it will become a museum piece. I’d like to have avant garde hyper-fiction, difficult hyper-fiction, hyper-fiction for kids, hyper-fiction for lazy reading. Why not have whatever the form can bring?

Also, of course, I’m not using enjoyment as a measure of quality or longevity – what I’m interested in is finding out what might be done to open hyper-fiction out to a wider community of writers and readers than currently. For example, through my reading and empirical studies, I’ve been able to better understand some of the issues writers need to consider when designing hyper-narratives, so that readers can access the story that the writer had in mind – that might not be a project you would consider important, but I suspect that Megan Heyward had something to say when she created ‘Of Day, of Night’ and I expect she hoped her readers would ‘get’ it.

I think the value of my work is shown in a writing project I ran in Dorset recently: when I took my ideas to a local secondary school, and offered a group of 14-year-olds the chance to make their own interactive narratives (using Flash on laptops), I saw the lovely, creative results of making the form ‘easier’ to grasp. I hope that is not too far away from what you and Michael were thinking of when you developed Storyspace (for which, thank you, because without Storyspace I might never have read ‘afternoon’ or ‘Patchwork Girl’).

let’s talk further!
Jim Pope
PS apologies for spelling mistakes- I can’t see them on this screen.

A difficulty with studying 36 readers, without knowing more about those 36 people, is that different readers like and expect so many different things. It’s not only true in literature; I expect that 36 college students, for example, might well prefer Alma-Tadema to Turner, or might like Andrew Wyeth better than Mark Rothko, or think they enjoyed a performance of The Man Of La Mancha more than they enjoyed No Exit.

We’re also assuming, implicitly, that “enjoyment” is the right thing to measure here. I’m not sure it is, either in terms of the author’s intentions or in terms of the work’s lasting influence.