MENO Workshop on Narrative and Hypermedia, April 1997.

Writers of stories for both print and screen have a deeply ingrained tendency to construct their stories in ways geared toward experiencing the finished work in a linear fashion. With the exception of some videodisc experiments and a few recent video game applications, storeis for the screen are usually writeen, produced, assembled and viewed in and for the linear form. Although viewing a story must always be linear, as a linear sequence of pictures and sounds conveying some meaning, it should be possible to structure and produce a story in a non-linear way for the purpose of providing many different linear play outs.

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