The boundaries between these three elements [material medium, collection of words, and human operator] are not clear but fluid and transgressive, and each part can be defined only in terms of the other two. (Aarseth 21)

Any text directs its user, by convention, mechanism, or social interaction. The reader is (and always has been) a necessary [...]

Reading is always an act of dismemberment, of tearing open in search of hidden meanings. (Van Looy and Baetens 9)

“…there is a sense of hostility between the reader and the text.” (Van Looy and Baetens 10)
The text is never trusted at face value, but is torn to pieces and reconstituted by a reader who is [...]

“something is there, manifest and stubborn…beyond (or before) the meaning of the words, their form…and even the style of execution: something which is directly the cantor’s body, brought to your ears in one and the same movement from deep down in the cavities, the muscles, the cartilages…as though a single skin lined the flesh of [...]

Add to this list [video, sound, and still image] the notions of interactivity and user complicity in the creation of the art work and we increase exponentially the relativity of the meaning of any single element, even as the context in which these elements exist - the virtual world - remains as novel and inscrutable [...]

…how might it be illuminating to conceptualize fiction’s structures and discourses as spaces one lives in and moves through as one might, for instance, a Bauhaus building, a tenement, a cathedral imagined by Gaudi?
Entering a building or a book feels to me like entering a possibility space, a networked field of impulses, influences, conversations, warrens [...]

Espen Aarseth / Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation.
In stories, meaning can be controlled. (Aarseth, “Genre” 45)
And games are interspecies communication: you can’t tell your dog a story, but the two of you can play together. (Aarseth, “Genre” 46)
Any game consists of three aspects: (1) rules, (2) a material/semiotic system (a gameworld), and [...]

The Rules of the Game
In his 1992 novel Leviathan, Paul Auster thanks me for having authorized him to mingle fact with fiction. And indeed, on pages 60 to 67 of his book, he uses a number of episodes from my life to create a fictive character named Maria, who then leaves me to live out [...]

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/27/specials/coover-end.html
Much of the novel’s alleged power is embedded in the line, that compulsory author-directed movement from the beginning of a sentence to its period, from the top of the page to the bottom, from the first page to the last.
…unlike print text, hypertext provides multiple paths between text segments… With its webs of [...]