Interactive Fiction: What Does it Want to Be, What Can it Be?

Scientific Essay from the year 1997 in the subject German Studies - Genres, Kyoto Sangyo University (Japanese Society for Germanistics), course: Yearly Congress of the japanese german organization, Tokio, 11.5.1996, language: English, abstract: We see that in interactive literature, the danger lies less in interactivity as such, but rather in the simultaneity of heterogeneous input it allows. As “strata-poetics” has taught us our reading experience is always an intensely interactive one. We contribute more to it than we aware of. More precisely: the characteristic experience of literature (especially of poesy) is not possible without intense interactivity between author and reader. It is the simultaneity of various heterogeneous and often contradictory reader-contributions, not inspired by the work itself but by the willfulness of the “readers”, which cast the “Internet Story” in doubt as a valid literary genre.