You were eaten by the horrors of human nature retry? y/n?

One thing that's interested me within recent years is the idea of a dynamic narrative. While
reading about the exploits of a character and their own development is a reliable standby, the idea of the story becoming a process of co-development between the reader and the author has become a more viable as technology advances and the media of print continues to alternate between dry heaves and dying gasps.

In their most primitive form, we've got those choose-your-own-adventure books every child of the seventies and eighties are undoubtedly familiar with. These simple "if-then" books serve as a good starting off point for what I'm talking about but are the exact connotations of "dynamic narrative" we want to do away with. Adequate for most children's reactions to a given situation, most adult readers would both want more options in how to handle a given situation and narratives more complex that either "you must slay the dragon' or "you must escape an alien planet".

Another past example, and very early example, of the interaction in reading came from text based games made by a company called Infocom- based right out of Cambridge, MA no less! These games, with the their most noteworthy titles being the Zork series, were also incredibly primitive. Usually, a text description would write up what the scene currently is, then players would be forced to punchin phrases to interact with the scene. Though straightforward, they would become incredibly frustrating after a short time as the amount of recognized words available to players would require you to spend more time guessing exactly how to say "walk forward" than actually interacting with the story. Today, Infocom's titles have evolved into a whole sub-genre entitle "interactive fiction". Admittedly, not much has changed in the meantime between Zork, released in the early eighties, and now.

The problem inherent currently is that folks who are skilled writers and folks who are skilled programmers are mutually exclusive for the most part. The genre abounds with drivel that attempts to desperately to ape Vonnegut (urgh), Lovecraft (double urgh), or other games (argh), that good stories are lost amid a sea of sophomoric psudeo-philosophical drivel and stories written by men about women with daddy issues.

That being said, there is a sea of potential at work here with the proliferation of electronic
devices capable of displaying and typing text beyond the beige monolith that was a personal
computer in the 80s.

Of course, the greatest challenge and frustration will land squarely at the feet of writers. Let's take Conway's classic work "Heart of Darkness". Now let's assume that Conway could travel time and wanted to make his piece into an interactive narrative. While the story itself barely totals 200 pages, he'd be looking at over five hundred pages of content he'd need to generate to create a work of similar length and depth. Moreover, he'd have to be aware of the way readers could be
interacting with his story lest they simply walk out of the room before the climatic line of "the
horror, the horror." Will the reader speak to the slaves on the island? Will the reader gaze at the
map of Africa when he's in the overseers office? Who knows, but it'd be up to the writer to provide detail where necessary in the world to fill in the blanks. Suffice to say, that's a whole lot of text you'd need to generate.

At the same time, however, this overabundance of detail and depth could be a writer's greatest
asset. Every reader wouldn't have to have the story unfold in a similar manner as the person next to them. The idea of extracting "personal meaning" from a story would take on a whole new life in every sense of the world.

Of course this isn't to say that interactive narration is good for everything, far from it. There's
a time and place for every medium, but at the moment this form of electronic storytelling seems to be very fertile ground for new ideas to develop. It'll also be interesting to see if currently published authors would be willing to give up that much authorial control over their work.

To put my money where my mouth is, what do you readers say? Would you consider writing a story in this fashion? Do you think interactive stories could even become a sort of "exhibit art"? Could you see any creative pieces you've made rewritten for constant and active reader input? Do you think this is a load of malarkey? Your call.