From Hopscotch to Digital Games: The Pleasure and Dilemma of Interactivity

Huajing Pan's paper uses Julio Cortázar's gamified novel Hopscotch as a lens for examining the tension between author and reader in interactive narratives, reading the work through a post-structuralist framework and extending its insights to digital games. The central thesis is that interactivity produces both pleasure and a structural dilemma: the redistribution of authorial power toward readers and players is real but bounded, and it generates lasting anxiety for novelists and game designers about how authorship should be shared. Rather than treating this tension as a failure to be resolved, the paper argues that it is a productive condition that refines interactive design over time.

The analysis of Hopscotch centers on its structure of three parts totaling 155 chapters, which offers multiple reading paths and entrances. Pan frames the shift from reader-as-audience to reader-as-player as the novel's defining innovation, while questioning whether this amounts to genuine co-authorship or a strategic illusion of it. Cortázar's "infinite labyrinth" is interpreted not as quantitative infinity but as a freedom of reading, and the paper suggests its success depends on the reader's belief in that freedom rather than on authorial intent.

The argument extends to contemporary digital works, including There's just something about u, Word Game, and Chants of Sennaar, which the paper uses to show how the materiality of text and player agency can reconcile immersion with interactivity. Frameworks such as Millard's Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) model are presented as tools that can formalize these patterns, though the paper stresses that player agency remains bounded by pre-designed code. The scope is primarily literary and game-theoretical, drawing on a single canonical novel and a selection of digital titles rather than broad industry data, and the paper contains no quantitative data points.