VR and Empathy Machine's

  Chapter three focused on the rise of hypertext “during the late 1980s and early 1990s,” (Rettberg, 147) and how it became so substantial in the electronic literature community. As availability to the internet was becoming more widespread, the possibility for hypertext to be created and seen became possible and much more accessible for a larger audience of readers. Due to this, hypertext became a large and very influential part of digital literature itself, and laid out basic methods for other genres to build off of and develop ideas from. It became such an entertaining and while enjoying a storyline that you get to choose. This for of digital literature is also beneficial in gathering a lot of information, which turned hypertext into something more formal over time. Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths,” was one of the first stories that were used as a basic idea for hypertext. Borges’ short story allowed for alternative endings, depending on the route the reader wanted to take while reading. “…I though of a  labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars,” (Borges 23). 

While describing the book, Rettberg wrote “…that was itself a labyrinth in that it described a world where all possible outcomes of a given event would occur simultaneously, thus forking out to other chains of event, which would themselves fork in an infinite tree of possibilities,” (Rettberg 155) describing the hypertext qualities of Borges’ story. Another example of this is Olia Lialina’s hypertext story “My Boyfriend Came Back from the War,” created in 1996. The story is about a failing relationship, and its fate is in the readers hands while deciding which answers to choose for the couple. This story is also very short, but hard to look away from. The images make this hypertext so memorable, as the white text and images jump out at you from the screen, having been placed on a black background. The images and text also align with each other, making it equally visual despite there being text to read through. While clicking through, the  flaws of the relationship also makes the audience interested in the short dialog between the couple. Both short stories were enjoyable to read through and really thought-provoking in completely different ways despite using the same method of storytelling. 

http://www.teleportacia.org/war/