[Prestidigitweeze]

Algiedi:

The innovations you're describing are actually old tech. They were tried during the past six decades with varying degrees of popularity.

This isn't to say it would be impossible to do something new with them, but only to show that they've previously come and gone.

Multiple-choice interactivity: First done in the 60s in the first hypertext novel, which was by Julio Cortazar. The title of the book, appropriately, is Hopscotch.

The original software for hypertext writers preceded the web's popularity and was called Storyspace. "Afternoon, a story," by Michael Joyce is the most famous example and was written in Storyspace in 1987.

Animations, music and interactive graphics: You're describing the CD-ROM books of the mid-80s as popularized by the Voyager Corporation (or as they called them, "expanded books"). Obviously, this is an interesting approach for encyclopedias and has been used that way many times. It was all originally based on Hypercard for the Mac and eventually written in a program called Director.

It's possible that someone will find a way to standardize and popularize some of these ideas all over again, as people return to books and the page (or "page").

But I would argue that part of the book's new charm is its particularity as a book. Our e-readers' popularity is due to convenience and economy of space, not flashy new narrative techniques. Everyone assumed the demographic was senior citizens, but look how that has changed.

Reading is the equivalent of a straight shot of whiskey: An undiluted experience. It's pure content, and once you acquire a taste for it, you won't be able to slake your thirst elsewhere.

The true interactive quality of fiction is its collaboration with the imagination of the reader: Reading is a workout for the imagination and builds associative muscle. Adding extra graphics and music would only dilute that effect.

In my view, the richest medium for interactive multimedia narrative is not literature at all but rather gaming. In the 90s, we began to see full-blown narratives and stories in games that were far quirkier than those in standard movies: Fatal Frame, even the first two Silent Hill installments. Later, we have odd games like Rule of Rose, which uses dissonant chamber music scored for strings as its soundtrack, features graphics that look like a surrealist painting by Dorothea Tanning, and takes place in a 1930s orphanage that is modeled on Lord of the Flies and occasionally becomes a steampunk submarine floating improbably in the sky.

Additionally, you have the hypertext story as film/novel in games like Indigo Prophecy (a/k/a Fahrenheit) and Hotel Dusk, all of which proceed by way of multiple-choice questions, puzzle-solving and other such activities on the part of the player, who can also change the ending.

Sandbox games offer a level of freedom of choice that can't really exist in books; it isn't about multiple choice cutscenes but rather the player moving through free environments.

In the future, when graphics and game engines reach something like their peak, I expect sandbox vacations to be marketed to those who are too broke or too lonely to vacation for real (senior citizens, people who are bedridden, the person who needs a bit of time to escape after a grueling work week but can't physically go anywhere, etc., etc.).

Of course, the content will get far more interesting when the sorts of people who make independent and academic films will have access to realistic gaming engines as new filmmakers are now able to do advanced editing and cgi on a budget.