In fact, it reminds me of a particular game my son William invented at about age five. At his own initiative he one day drew a large game board, assembled dice and playing pieces, and invited his father to join him in an inventively improvised game with ever-changing and ever more elaborate rules. After two hours of this surreal activity, my husband became restless and began asking every five minutes or so if the game was almost over. William responded by calmly walking into the kitchen, where I was sitting, and asking me to write his father the following note:DEAR DAD—THIS GAME WILL NEVER END. WILLIAMThe rhizome has the same message.

Moulthrop’s own Victory Garden, which is perhaps the most coherently structured literary hypertext, contains a clever overview map of the major story clusters, which are arranged like a Borgesian garden labyrinth. But readers cannot easily return to the overview in order to get a sense of where they are or how much is left to read. In trying to create texts that do not “privilege” any one order of reading or interpretive framework, the postmodernists are privileging confusion itself.

adventure maze is simple or complex, it is particularly suited to the digital environment because the story is tied to the navigation of space.