> News archive		> Neural Magazine				> Neural Station
> emusic		> new media art				> hacktivism
Italian version . book Nick Montfort Twisty Little Passages, an approach to interactive fiction <book> The MIT Press ISBN 0262134365 One of the cornerstones of hypertextual literature are text 'adventures', which lured in front of the monitor many users of the first personal computers. The value of computer programs as tools for literary creation has been well debated but, when they are tightly interlaced with literature in the traditional meaning, their possibilities give an important contribution to the evocative power of the written word. This book carefully tells the story of text adventures, together with their mechanisms involving an active and pondered interaction by the user, with problem-solving techniques. This work of meta-literature has precise ideas with regard to literary theory, but there are also important technical and historical annotations, such as the implementation of some adventures using the macro language of some text editors or the many incarnations of the adventure 'Zork' on the many platforms it was implemented on. Other limitations have led to a greater understanding of the link between code and text. For this reason, the big boom of these adventures coincided with the publication of some of them in source code form, revealing some relations between code and literature, Monfort, who also supervised the 'New Media Reader' anthology, moves both the cursors of time and abstraction in the timeless game of narration.