Interactive storytelling: an oxymoron

Craig Mod is psyched about the future of literary storytelling. "With digital media," he writes in "The Digital Death of the Author," an article that's part of New Scientist's "Storytelling 2.0" series, "the once sacred nature of text is sacred no longer. Instead, we can change it continuously and in real time." E-storytelling is to storytelling, he says, as Wikipedia is to a printed encyclopedia. And that's a good thing: The biggest change is not in the form stories take but in the writing process. Digital media changes books by changing the nature of authorship. Stories no longer have to...