A lesson in hypertext communication.
May. 15th, 2011 02:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinSo, in the most recent chapter of Tales of MU, I put some mouseover text and links to help explain some of the references. The use of the term "Universal Temple" has caused confusion before... the reference feels obvious to me, being 1) an adult child of what was a Catholic family and 2) an etymology nerd, but some people have thought it was a reference to something like the Universalist Unitarians, and other people seemed to take it as a sign that the worship of Khersis was absolutely monolithic and unified... if there's a Universal sect, how can there be any others? So I linked the mention of the Universal Temple to the dictionary definition of "catholic", just to clear it up.
Then near the end when I got to the geography lesson... something I put in specifically due to multiple readers' requests... I was feeling particularly pleased with the double-layered reference in the name of the Ardan Sea (Mediterranean Sea ~= Sea of Middle Earth ~= Sea of Arda), and so instead of linking to or explaining the reference I added mouseover text challenging someone to do so in comments.
What followed was... baffling, and kind of frustrating. Most of the readers who responded to the challenge seemed to miss that it was a sea at all, acting like the nature of this geographical feature was completely unspecified and they had nothing to go on but the name. I had to go back and check to make sure the word "sea" didn't get dropped out of the story somehow. It didn't. It wasn't right next to the word "Ardan", but the sentence was pretty clearly specifying that the thing Hart had just named and was drawing was a sea. I could see someone skimming the story missing that, but these were people who accepted the challenge and were trying to solve it. It didn't make sense to me that they'd overlook that clue.
Also, some of the people who were trying to solve the riddle seemed to miss other details of that paragraph. Again, I wouldn't expect everyone to pick up all the details, but I would have expected someone who was engaged with the riddle to do so.
It was almost like the people most interested in the riddle where paying the least attention...
And that's where I think I made the mistake: by attaching the riddle to that one word, I ended up taking them out of the flow of the story, or at least the immediate paragraph. The indentification of the Ardan as a sea happens on the same line of text where it's named, but by that point they already have a goal besides simply taking the story in.
My other uses of hypertext were intended to further the understanding of the story; this one had a different purpose, and it ended up lessening that understanding.
So the lesson here isn't so much "Don't issue riddles or challenges," because I think the fact that so many people were so distracted by it shows that it's something that can be enjoyable. The lesson is to not interrupt the story to do so, even in such an unobtrusive way. Better to put the challenge at the end of the story, as I have occasionally done in the past.
That little stumbling block aside, I'm pretty happy with how the chapter came out. As I explained in comments, it's a happy accident that this chapter came about... I wasn't able to fit some essential information into the preceding chapter due to my heat exhaustion, and so I decided to spend another chapter on the class and fill it with reader-suggested questions to make it worth another chapter. I don't believe there's anything I can do that will make everyone happy, but if I want to do something as a treat for the most readers at once then some extended class time is a pretty good bet. Adding the audience participation just sweetens the pot.
Then near the end when I got to the geography lesson... something I put in specifically due to multiple readers' requests... I was feeling particularly pleased with the double-layered reference in the name of the Ardan Sea (Mediterranean Sea ~= Sea of Middle Earth ~= Sea of Arda), and so instead of linking to or explaining the reference I added mouseover text challenging someone to do so in comments.
What followed was... baffling, and kind of frustrating. Most of the readers who responded to the challenge seemed to miss that it was a sea at all, acting like the nature of this geographical feature was completely unspecified and they had nothing to go on but the name. I had to go back and check to make sure the word "sea" didn't get dropped out of the story somehow. It didn't. It wasn't right next to the word "Ardan", but the sentence was pretty clearly specifying that the thing Hart had just named and was drawing was a sea. I could see someone skimming the story missing that, but these were people who accepted the challenge and were trying to solve it. It didn't make sense to me that they'd overlook that clue.
Also, some of the people who were trying to solve the riddle seemed to miss other details of that paragraph. Again, I wouldn't expect everyone to pick up all the details, but I would have expected someone who was engaged with the riddle to do so.
It was almost like the people most interested in the riddle where paying the least attention...
And that's where I think I made the mistake: by attaching the riddle to that one word, I ended up taking them out of the flow of the story, or at least the immediate paragraph. The indentification of the Ardan as a sea happens on the same line of text where it's named, but by that point they already have a goal besides simply taking the story in.
My other uses of hypertext were intended to further the understanding of the story; this one had a different purpose, and it ended up lessening that understanding.
So the lesson here isn't so much "Don't issue riddles or challenges," because I think the fact that so many people were so distracted by it shows that it's something that can be enjoyable. The lesson is to not interrupt the story to do so, even in such an unobtrusive way. Better to put the challenge at the end of the story, as I have occasionally done in the past.
That little stumbling block aside, I'm pretty happy with how the chapter came out. As I explained in comments, it's a happy accident that this chapter came about... I wasn't able to fit some essential information into the preceding chapter due to my heat exhaustion, and so I decided to spend another chapter on the class and fill it with reader-suggested questions to make it worth another chapter. I don't believe there's anything I can do that will make everyone happy, but if I want to do something as a treat for the most readers at once then some extended class time is a pretty good bet. Adding the audience participation just sweetens the pot.