I found both Hejirascope and Pax interesting, but in different ways. Jarrod mentioned how limiting print/book literature is in comparison, and I agree. These hypertexts sort of made me think of Choose Your Own Adventure books on speed or something! I initially found the effort to untangle Hejirascope frustrating – I couldn’t figure out what all of the different pieces meant (individually or together), and I couldn’t find a tangible “beginning” to try to create “sense” out of the confusion. Then, I had a desperate need to follow a specific track, so I could have some semblance of cohesive images because I found the attempt to hold five or six pieces of different stories separate and in tact, waiting for a continuation of one of the five or six, to be mind-boggling. As I followed the different tracks, I ended up trying to link to the next page in the sequence or waiting for the page to automatically advance to the (hopefully) next page in the sequence. The difficult part for me was accepting that there was not a necessary sequence and that there was not necessarily a beginning or an end to a piece. I found myself sometimes searching through every link possible to find the next piece of the whole, sometimes to no avail! One aspect of Hejirascope that I appreciated, though, was my ability to go back to a page if the time lapsed or if the link I selected did not take me to one of the tracks I was trying to pursue.
Pax seemed to do the opposite, however, leaving me with a feeling of loss – like I missed out on something irrecoverable if I passed up one of the characters. One aspect of print material in which I find tremendous value is its tangibility – the fact that I can hold it and keep it and remember it the way it was. I was distressed by the fact that once the session had used the full cycle of allotted hours and phases and once I left the screen, what I (and the characters) had created would be lost forever in the great void. What if I found the perfect combination of words, thoughts, and views? (I will add, though, that after discovering that I could copy and paste the sequence into Word, I felt a little better about the “permanence” of the words I had put together – and that, in and of itself, probably goes against the design and purpose of the text!) I also didn’t like that if what the character added didn’t seem to fit with the poetic quality of how the other characters’ thoughts had been unfolding or if I just didn’t like what they said, I couldn’t erase it from the pattern. Once the character contributed, it was there for good.
One last thought…I liked the description in the “About” section that described the ideas that prompted the creation of Pax. In it, the author quotes John Cayley’s idea of creating “textual instruments.” That description gives me a poetic and peaceful image of all of the things technology has to offer. Often it seems that the feeling and emotion in people decreases with all of the technological advancements we go through (the writing of an email or IM is so much less personal and more anonymous, it seems to me, than a handwritten letter, or an e-text less tangible and malleable than an actual book, etc.), but the idea of technology making an instrument of the text seems to bring back some of the human touch. When I think of instruments, I think of how any given sequence of notes can be played by an infinite number of people and can express different sounds, tones, or moods with each one. The same idea then transfers to the idea of the text through the Pax hypertext medium – the same characters with the same thoughts to share convey different sounds, tones, and moods depending on the author/clicker.