Hyperlink Blog Post

I believe that all three of these works can be considered stories. You could get lost in the weeds defining the borders of narrative, but as far as delivering a world with coherent characters and themes I think these hyperlink works are as much a story as a traditional novel would be. 

My Boyfriend Came Back from the War is the most ambiguous of the works. Even so, there is still a clear central relationship it explores. Its sequence is subject to player agency, but piecing together its contents is an intentional aspect of the story. 

With Those We Love Alive presents the most convincing and transportive world of the bunch, embracing a medieval fantasy aesthetic. All of the works maintain engagement partly through convenience of the medium- navigating links requires constant interaction with your device and, by extension, the world of the narrative. 

I detect plot and character development in all of the stories. Obviously How to Rob a Bank is comedic in tone but there is still a trajectory to the central character. The navigation structures, even with the stories that are not sequenced in a chronologically linear fashion, still imply a single unfolding timeline that the reader can sensibly derive. 

This assortment of hyperlink stories exist on a spectrum of linearity and temporal legibility, but nonetheless are equal in their validity as stories and works of art.

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