Excerpts from Victory Garden

 

 

Stuart Moulthrop Hypertext is a text that was studied in universities throgout the world and discussed, thats why its so important.

 

This is an excerpt from the interactive fiction called Victory Garden. It should show you how the text works -- how you can play out the story by moving through its writing spaces. It should also give you some sense of who and what Victory Garden is about. However, the places gathered here represent only a small subset of the total (about ten percent), and the arrangement of links and paths doesn't necessarily reflect the architecture of the work as a whole.

The complete Victory Garden was written with the Storyspace hypertext authoring system (both definitions are in one page...if you wanna see them,please click here).

. This Sampler was ported to the World Wide Web with the HTML converter included in Storyspace 1.3. HTML does not currently support all the hypertext features that Storyspace does (conditional links, for instance), so this Sampler differs in some ways from the complete text. I have tried to stay as close as possible to the look and feel of the original.

[this extract is taken from http://www.uv.es/% 7Efores/mainframeuvp.html]

 (both definitions are in one page...if you wanna see them,please click here).

 

I investigate a bit, to know more about this text and I read that this hypertext first was an adaptacion of another text “The Garden of Forking Paths” (Luis Borges).

 

"The Garden of Forking Paths" (original Spanish title: "El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan") is a 1941 short story by Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. It was his first work to be translated into English, appearing in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in August 1948.

It was the title story in the collection El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths) in 1941; that collection was republished in its entirety in the 1944 collection Ficciones ("Fictions"). “

[copyright wikiped ia]

 

 

About the text

 

 

As I said on the abstract I’ve never read an hypertext before, so I didn’t know what to do when first I click on the link that would open that “magic” window.

 

 I found an image > and a white background. Under the image there were 5 links. The first one its for me the interesting one.

Before clicking on the link tha would permit me start reading, I saw that in the end of the page there were four icons:

 

More- tells that hypertext isn’t complete.

Go home- link that takes you to eastgate home page.

Start again-links you to the beginning.

Help- this was the first click that I did. It explains how hypertext works.

 

Then I click on one of those five links. The first one was “The War in Dorothea Agnew’s Living Room”.

            Its not a very large story, to arrive to the “end” of the I’ve just clicked four times. I read it in 30 minuts.

            The background was the same (white) and the title black, the links had the comun color, blue and then violet-when you click on it.

 

This story starts in Dorothea’s living room, where she and Veronica received by the television thet the Gulf wars had started. And it ends with a men celebrating the war ending.

The words that I clicked were: Veronica, nose, history

 

 

 

After read that little story I clicked on START AGAIN, and the title was “Boris gets the news”.

I just have made four clicks to end the story. And the hipertext didn’t changed, the same colours without images, but it was very short. It toke me thirty munuts to read it.

 

And again I clicked to start a new link, “No peace now (Veronica and Harley)”.    

This text was the long one, more than nine clicks to end the story, but the truth is that I didn’t understand it very well.

I clicked on the words: Tv from the thirties, big show, new world order. New world order, a deadly game- when I clicked here appeard a map (something new for me in this hypertext), then I clicked on Desert and it took me to another page where one word that compound the title was a link. I did click on “If the fool Persist”, and there was’nt any text just an image, a men reading a book “ The Holy text”

Then, the icons that I’ve mentioned before – more, go home, start again, help- they weren’t there, it just disappeard. And there were a kind of list called “Pillows of folly”, and I clicked on star again, because I didn’t knew what to do!

 

So the last link was “Where were you”.

Two clicks, and the story was over. And it ends exactly with the same ending than the first one (“The war in Dorothea Living Room”).

The story ends with a date 7/3/91,the war end and a men tells that have 45 years old and want to live his life.