In the first chapter of his book, Electronic Literature, Scott Rettberg discusses the genres of electronic literature. Using arguments from both Tzvetan Todorov and Jaques Derrida, he comes to the conclusion that genre, in the case of traditional literature, is a set of guidelines and norms that identify and classify works. He goes on to argue that electronic literature is difficult to place into these categories because it has “cycles of creation that move at the speed of technological change” (Rettberg, 9). One of the reasons that this genre is so hard to define is because technology has a completely separate set of affordances that the traditional book does.
In her article, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, Janet H. Murray elaborates on these affordances. She largely focuses on discussing hypertext games, specifically Zork, which exemplifies many of these affordances. Zork is an interactive game where players move through a dungeon environment slaying trolls and solving puzzles. Zork demonstrates three of the four affordances that she identifies: digital environments are participatory, spatial, and encyclopedic. The final affordance being digital environments are procedural. All of these affordances succeed in making Zork, and other forms of digital literature, both interactive and immersive in a different ways from printed literature.
I agree with Rettberg that it is too difficult to try and confine the hybrid, unwieldy body of electronic literature into formalized genres like traditional literature. Because of their complicated, multi-media features, categorizing these works by only one criterion or set of norms is not sufficient. While traditional literature certainly has affordances that make it ideal for certain things, the technology used to create electronic literature is able to create vastly more varied and multi-faceted forms of literature. Further, at the end of her article, Murray discusses how much of today’s electronic literature is a form of experimentation. Much like the refinement of film that she discusses previously, electronic literature is still in the early stages and only through time and experimentation will “narrative art… come into its own expressive form” (Murray, 93). I believe that only once electronic literature is fully established can we begin to label and define its “genres.”