How Interactive Can Fiction Be?

[T]here are two main shifts to which fiction (literary or otherwise) must adjust when it is communicated in a medium in which the recipient helps to assemble the system of inscriptions in topologically significant ways. First, it needs to recognize that the role of the reader familiar to us from print changes in the degree to which the links between textual elements remain semantically underdetermined. Second, fiction somehow needs to manage the fact that the user’s navigational decisions can be driven by motives wholly divorced from the fictional world, provoking a crisis of fictionality. The fictionalization of reception is one way of addressing both shifts, for a fictionalized “interaction” would be severely limited by the boundaries of the fiction, thus rendering the fictional world a larger, more complex, and more interesting space to inhabit.