Seeing into the Worlds of Digital Fiction

Although critics have long recognized that digital fiction challenges many of our assumptions about fictional worlds, usually those challenges are thought to arise from the multiplicity of the text’s events. This is especially the case in what Ryan (2006) refers to as “ontological” digital texts, which include most computer games, where users can change the outcome of the story. ¹ But even in exploratory hypertext fiction like Michael Joyce’s afternoon (1987), where users are merely uncovering events that have already happened, digital fiction’s primary innovation has been assumed to be the variability with which we encounter those events. ²