Delving into the world of Hypertext/Patchwork Girl

            Hypertext, by definition, is “a method of storing data through a computer program that allows a user to create and link fields of information at will and to retrieve the data nonsequentially.”  Patchwork Girl is an early form of hypertext, its release being in 1995.  Essentially, it is hypertext at its rawest form.  Simple windows serve as the frames of the program and story; there is nothing exceedingly fancy about it.  The most intricate thing of Patchwork Girl is the embedded, hidden links that are necessary to the user’s progression of the overall story.  These links are the only challenges presented, because without them all, every user experiences a slightly different story, forced to piece the puzzle together on their own.

            In my own short time spent with Patchwork Girl, I feel as if I’ve only gotten a small sample of two sections: ‘Graveyard’ and ‘Journal’, two separate paths you’re able to take at the opening Title Page.  I’ve gotten fully through five links in the ‘Graveyard’ section and thirty-three in the ‘Journal’ section.  Are these links embedded in other main sections?  I wouldn’t be surprised if they are.  I also wouldn’t be surprised to know if I missed any links.  Despite intently reading each new window, the real focus of working with Patchwork Girl lies more in attempting to establish some sort of order with the links, some way to make sense of the story being told (and shown).  When I was working my way through the program, I started randomly clicking on every possible space in each window in hope of finding a new link.  That was when I discovered that even sub-sections had a level of their own sub-sections.  The sub-sub-sections revealed more specific details of the story.

            Another interesting aspect of Patchwork Girl is the way the story appears to progress backwards.  In my experience, I started with the death of the monster and worked my way to its resurrection (which happened to just be a figurative way of showing the start of the story).  By working backwards, the story reveals itself in a way that entices me to continue my search for the missing pieces.  After reading about the death of the monster, I learn about its relationship with its creator, Mary Shelley; once Shelley enters the picture, I learn about her relationship with her creation.  When both sides are told, I then read about their experiences as one entity: creator and creation become entwined, causing the story to narrow its broadness.  But while the text itself narrows its focus, the program does not.  Multiple windows and links still guide me.  This is when it’s most apparent that the two different mediums (text and media) are literally combined as a program yet are able to stand alone or co-exist within that program.  Katherine Hayles puts it best in her essay, “Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis,” when she says “The effect of Patchwork Girl’s creative juxtapositions is to shake us awake from the dream that electronic fiction is simply “text” that we read on screen instead of on paper. If Patchwork Girl insists through its appropriations that the past can never be left behind, it also shows through its transformations that new media create a new kind of literature and a new sense of cyborg subjectivity.”