The Interactive Onion: Layers of User Participation in Digital Narrative Texts

If we regard communiation between intelligent agents as the prototypical form of interactivity, then neither ergodism nor agency will express its fundamentally dialogical nature.

There is a tendency in digital culture to evaluate a work as a feat of programming virtuosity. I call this the anti-WYSIWYG aesthetics, because you have to imagine the code that lies behind the screen to appreciate the text... If we applied this aesthetics of difficulty to print literature, a palindrome story or a novel written without the letter 'e' (such as George Perec's La disparition) would automatically represent a greater artwork than a novel like Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu...