Playing the Text, Performing the Future: Future Narratives in Print and Digiture

Abstract

This volume examines the structure of text-based Future Narratives in the widest sense, including choose-your-own-adventure books, forking-path novels, combinatorial literature, hypertexts, interactive fiction, and alternate reality games. How ´radical` can printed Future Narratives really be, given the constraints of their media? When exactly do they not only play with the mere idea of multiple continuations, but actually stage genuine openness and potentiality? Process-rather than product-oriented, text-based Future Narratives are seen as performative and contingent systems, simulating their own emergence.