The ‘Garden of forking path’ is a short story, but it feels like ‘text on the text’, I mean it can be extended like forever. Honestly it was very complicated so that difficult to understand, but I thought the setting is good for some game background. There is Dr. Yu Tsun’s story inside a world war story, and there is conversation of Albert with Yu Tsun, and there is story of novel of Tsui Pen, the grand father of Yu Tsun. After the conversation, Yu Tsun killed Albert, and it is going to be the meaningful event of war history. It is like “labyrinth of labyrinth, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars”, as Dr. Yu Tsun said in the text.
In the conversation between Albert and Yu Tsun, there is story of labyrinth which would be strictly infinite. Like a book which has same first page and the last page so can be circular infinitely. I don’t know, I just feel this can be related the World Wide Web or computer game stories. We can see one part of the WEB at a time but we can vaguely imagine the infinite structure of huge map of the Internet. The games also, I mean, when we play a game, we can see various endings of it. It can be a fixed ending from the developer’s plan but it can be several different endings that no one expected. I think it can be the ‘infinite book’ which is user can select a story and meets multiple endings through interactive structure. We are experiencing linear time in life but we can make, like ‘branched time’ on the Web or game environment. There would be text on the text, story in the story, like this short story ‘The garden of forking paths’.
