In the garden of forking paths: contingency, interactivity and play in hypertext

The difference between interactivity as it is performed across the page and the screen, maintains Sandy Stone, is that virtual texts and virtual communities can embody a play ethic. Inserted like a mutation into the corporate genome, play ruptures the encyclopaedic desire to follow seamless links to a buried 'meaning' and draws us back to the surface, back into real-time conversation with the machine. Hypertext theorists see this as a tactic of resistance to homogenisation. As we move across a hypertextual reading space, we produce the text in this unfolding now, choosing pathways which form a map in the space of our own memories: where we have been, where we are, where we might yet be.