Storytelling has always been shaped – although theorists would disagree as to what extent – by the medium it inhabits. The internet gave rise to great experimentation with the creative possibilities that it permitted for storytelling.
Some of these experiments were great successes, growing into popular genres of their own, such as the evolution of multi-user dungeons to today’s MMORGs (massively multiplayer online roleplaying games). Some were thought-provoking, transgressive, but never caught on outside a certain community, like Dennis Cooper’s ‘GIF’ novels. Some retained centralised authorship, while others were collective and anarchic in their creation, such as the universe of the ‘SCP Foundation’, created by a community writing wiki entries for the fictional secret organisation.
Significantly, many of these narratives aim to place the reader within them: “Some of the earliest examples of electronic literature used hypertext as a means to engage the...