Early Contests

Looking to lists of contest and prize winners as a measure of quality in any artistic field is risky business, especially if you use such lists as your sole guide to deciding what to read, listen to, or view. Even at the level of the Nobel Prize, this can lead one to spend too much time with the works of William Golding--not an inherently bad thing, but not the best use of one's time when it could come at the expense of missing Conrad, Joyce, Proust, Woolf, and the legion of 20th century literary giants that the good gentlemen in Sweden have somehow ... overlooked.

Yet contests matter, especially to a new field. The most obvious reason is not the most important--that the work of artists who have been recognized by at least some of their peers is a legitimate place to begin reading. More important is the aspect of contests that tends to get overlooked. Media and audience attention tends to be paid to contests as the acknowledgement of excellence, and to hell with the runners-up. But their more important function, in a field so young that the question of how to make a living at it has not yet been answered for most artists, is their encouragement of excellence.

From this point of view, the winners are almost an afterthought, a byproduct of the larger goal of spurring the creation of new, quality work in the field. So, although the bulk of this essay will look at some of the winners of the early contests for hypertext fiction, the larger subject behind it is to draw attention to the contests themselves and to ask for others like them that must exist for the maturation of this nascent art world. While prizes alone won't allow artists to make a living in new media genres, their establishment will be one part of the equation.

The first contest I am aware of never quite got off the ground. In 1996, John December, editor of Computer-Mediated Communication Magazine, decided to sponsor a hypertext fiction contest as part of an issue of his magazine focused on new media arts. I was among one of the writers invited to contribute an essay to this issue, about new pieces of interest at the time. Unfortunately, December received only a handful of entries to the contest, none of which he deemed of quality to receive the prize. He went ahead with his issue, but only with the essays, not with new work (see the December, 1996 issue).

A second attempt at a contest, by Salt Hill at Syracuse in 1998, was more successful. Three prizes were eventually awarded, two in fiction and one in poetry. The two fiction winners, 1st and 3rd prize overall, are the first two pieces I examine in the current essay.

*water always writes in *plural, a joint project by Josephine Wilson and Linda Carroli, is categorized by Salt Hill as fiction. While it is certainly about fiction and teases us with elements of fiction such as plot and suspense, to read it with the hope of finding a developed story is to ask to be annoyed. As a rumination on fictive possibility, however, it is something else again. Beginning the text one comes first to a page with the sentence: "a woman stands on a street corner waiting for a stranger." From these linked words we can choose various places to begin; on each path we find considerations of the component words and phrases: woman, place, waiting, stranger: one sentence's rich potential. It is somewhat of a disappointment for a fiction reader that this sentence's narrative possibilities are not developed further. Yet it is an interesting piece for all that. I add in closing that while I find the title intriguing, I have absolutely no idea what it means or refers to. Curiously, though, the word that comes to mind to describe the navigational structure is "fluid"--I came to few deadends and had to do little backtracking. In most cases when I appeared to have come to the end of a section of nodes the text would double back on itself to the opening sentence, from which I could then wander another byway.

"Projection," noted by Salt Hill as William Powhida's first venture into hypertext, is presented in three vertical frames navigable via linked text and Powhida's paintings of the characters. This sort of structure seems to me to have a number of interesting narrative possibilities, and I am a little surprised at how little of it has been done to date. I like the way frames cross-reference each other and how characters move from frame to frame (although I discerned no pattern to it). "Projection" also has a number of other interesting aspects, not least of all the melancholy paintings. Powhida provides a separate interface of the paintings alone that, when clicked, changes the content of the frames. I especially like the fact that he has not coded them to a particular size, thus causing an odd zooming effect whenever you resize your window. In the end, though, the story, or stories, rather, are neither as strong as the visual effects nor as interesting as the frameset. The author introduces fifteen or so characters in no more than fifty or sixty brief nodes, but the introduction is about all we get--most of these people seem to be about the same age and have about the same generic concerns about their Manhattan social life. There is simply not enough text (or picture) to develop these characters or the action the author sets in motion.

Like the Salt Hill contest, the contest for the New York University Press Prize in Hypertext Fiction was originally announced in 1997. After some deadline extensions, prizes were eventually awarded in early 1999.

Pratik Kanjilal's The Buddha Smiled is a short hypertext of 18 nodes and a couple of dozen links. Roughly, it is a response to the nuclear tests Pakistan and India conducted in 1998. Kanjilal begins several story lines set at various locales around the world, mainly in India but also in Greece, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. A handful of characters variously react to or ignore the tests. Some of these characters are potentially engaging, but not much is done with them. As with the piece by William Powhida above, part of the reason is that there is simply not enough text to develop so many characters with so little text. But the bigger reason is that we find that we are not here to read a story but to learn a lesson.

At the end--"end" not in the sense of closure, but only in the sense that there's nothing more to read--in "Waiting for the future," the narrator teases us about wanting to know the outcome of the stories begun in the text, but then informs us: "Unfortunately, these are pretty irrelevant questions, as irrelevant as asking whether a hypertext sequence should be read front to back." This is hardly a piece of news, and certainly not one that merits its delivery as a profound insight. Yes, of course all such aesthetic questions--and most other questions--are "pretty irrelevant" in the face of nuclear annihilation, but that statement merely sidesteps the point that on some level the reader is here to pretend, for the moment, as if they did matter, as if this piece of writing mattered. Refusing to fully develop one's artistic material and then trying to claim it as a philosophical coup is merely a copout, a failure of imagination or nerve or energy on the writer's part. Every writer knows it's easier to begin a story than to finish one, and avoidance of that challenge is all that we have here. Is there any more reason to let a writer get away with that stunt than there is to let an engineer build a bridge that reaches only halfway across the river?

The other co-winner of the NYU Press Prize for Hypertext is The Straight Path, by Adnan Ashraaf

[unfinished ---mshumate]