Slide 89 of 127
Notes:
Interactive mysteries abound. Yet none are convincing, either to mystery fans or as hypertexts. Hollywood keeps trying, because it seems natural. Hollywood keeps failing.
The mystery is poorly suited to hypertext. Mysteries are NOT about solving the crime, about putting clues together and beating the detective to the conclusion.
Mysteries are ritual enactments. The world is damaged, torn apart, and the hero must somehow restore it to wholeness. She must walk down these mean streets and struggle to restore a world gone bad. Deduction has nothing to do with it, my dear Watson, and
This is not an ingenious new theory of mine; people who write and edit mysteries have known this for about 50 years. But ritual enactment is, of necessity, about sequence, just as Haiku is about brevity; it might be possible to write a hypertext Haiku or
