TechnoText

I am not exactly sure what makes a GOOD technotext, but I think some of what I viewed should not be categorized as good ones. For instance, Red Spider/Razor Burn has two different stories that can be read. One has two options to choose from. However, after that, there are no more options. It is a linear path until the end, just like a regular book. I am not sure how this is very interactive, to be honest. The same goes for some of the other poems at the BeeHive Archive. David Hunter Sutherland and Janet Buck's technotexts are just... small poem books on the internet. There is nothing special about them that is obvious to me. It is not that the stories were not interesting, because they were, but there was just no difference between reading them online and reading them in a physical copy of a book.

I think my favorite one, out of the ones that I viewed, is The Girl and the Wolf by Nick Montfort. Basically, there is a very short introduction to the poem that sounds a lot like the introduction of Little Red Riding Hood. However, depending on which square you choose on the grid, with each square representing a different amount of sex and violence, the rest of the story will be completely different. This is very good at interacting with the reader while at the same time, it is not really the reader who wrote the story.

So now that I think about it, a good technotext is one that interacts with the reader on more than the level of "oh, I need to click here to read the rest and have no other options..." There is a lot of freedom with technotexts and anything an author does to one, I am sure I would find interesting. At the same time, because there is a lot of freedom with technotexts, I expect more out of one than the previously mentioned Red Spider/Razor Burn and the like.