The multimodality of digital art works challenges writers, users, and critics to bring together diverse expertise and interpretive traditions to understand fully the aesthetic strategies and possibilities of electronic literature.
Katherine Hayles considers an electronic literary text as something independent, possessing its own materiality, rather than a new interpretation of a printed book. And this materiality is primarily created by the code that is used to create it. Such literature is a hybrid phenomenon that exists at the intersection of literature, game mechanics, visual art, and programming. And it is precisely this feature that requires the creation of fundamentally new approaches and tools for criticism.