In the spring of 1986, Stuart Moulthrop wrote the story “Forking Paths” as a demonstration of hypertext technique for an advanced undergraduate course in narrative theory, “Plot and Its Alternatives.” As you might have guessed by the title, “Forking Paths” riffs on Jorge Luis Borges’ story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” appropriating bits of it while also introducing new characters, motivations, and themes. Moulthrop composed the original version of “Forking Paths” using what he describes as “a rudimentary text-linking program of my own design,” and subsequently ported it into Eastgate System’s hypertext authoring program Storyspace, which he was beta testing at the time.[i]
Moulthrop has described “Forking Paths” as a “probe or provocation, confronting a group of very bright students with the problem of hypertextual practice.”[ii] It was never intended to escape the confines of his own classroom, but as fate would have it, fellow Storyspace beta tester J. Yellowlees Douglas showed it to a group of her own undergraduates in the fall of 1987, partly due to the fact that, as she points out, “it was one of only three hypertext narratives in circulation back in 1987.”[iii] “Forking Paths” ultimately served as a major case study in Douglas’ monograph The End of Books—Or Books without End?, where her students’ struggles with it become an opportunity to conceptualize closure and satisfaction in hypertext fiction. Moulthrop himself also wrote about the whole experience in his essay “Reading from the Map: Metonymy and Metaphor in the Fiction of Forking Paths.”
I’ve assigned both Douglas’ book and Moulthrop’s essay to students in my own “Digital Storytelling” class, since I think they both have valuable things to say about progression and closure in electronic literature. This has led to an unfortunate lacuna, because the object of Douglas’ and Moulthrop’s analysis no longer exists. Moulthrop never really intended “Forking Paths” to circulate back in 1986–87, and it’s impossible to find today. In 2003, Moulthrop published documentation for the project, entitled “An Anatomy of ‘Forking Paths,’” included on the CD-ROM that accompanied Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort’s The New Media Reader. That’s the only version of the project that survived into the 21st Century in any form.
In the spring of 2025, when I was leaning quite heavily on Doulas’ book for my class “Closure and Infinity in Digital Media,” I decided to fill this enduring lacuna, and make “Forking Paths” readable once again. With Moulthrop’s documentation occupying one half of my screen and Twine occupying the other half, I set out to re-create “Forking Paths” in Twine, lexia by lexia.
This new version of “Forking Paths” is now hosted here. I hesitate to call it a “port” of Moulthrop’s original into Twine. The 1987 version of Storyspace was a program with many idiosyncrasies—the ability to navigate nodes with “right,” “left,” “up,” and “down” buttons, the ability to hit “yes” or “no” or type a response into a dedicated input field at all times—that, while not impossible to implement in Twine, would have taken more time than I had available to complete this project. I also discovered three nodes—1664727941BOLT 108, 1664276914BOLT 127, and 1664276555BOLT 128—that cannot be accessed during normal reading because no links lead to them. Perhaps this is a quirk of the documentation; perhaps it was my own error while reading the documentation. In any case, all of these are reasons to consider this project more of a “re-imagining” or “reinterpretation” than a “port.”
For anyone who uses Twine, I not only give permission for you to download the linked HTML page and open it up in the Twine editor, but actively encourage you to do so! In comments in the individual passages, I document the ways in which I wrestled with Moulthrop’s own documentation, trying to implement this project to my best ability. Also, if you open up the Stylesheet, I’ve included some additional Harlowe style options that can make this Twine implementation resemble the original Storyspace a teeny bit little more, by not visually differentiating links from their surrounding text. (Ultimately, I felt like that version was a bit too sadistic to assign to my students, so didn’t want to unleash it on the public. But you can easily activate it by deleting a comment.)
[i] Stuart Moulthrop, “Reading from the Map: Metonymy and Metaphor in the Fiction of Forking Paths,” in Hypermedia and Literary Studies, ed. Paul Delany and George P. Landow (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), pg 125
[ii] Stuart Moulthrop, “An Anatomy of ‘Forking Paths,’” in the CD-ROM supplement to The New Media Reader, ed. Noah Wardip-Fuin and Nick Montfort (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003)
[iii] J. Yellowlees Douglas, The End of Books—Or Books Without End? Reading Interactive Narratives (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), pg 73
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