Examples?
A reader asks for good examples of hyperfiction. Fair question. I've mentioned some of these before, but usually only in passing; this is a good opportunity to collect 'em in one place.
A bit over a year ago, I mentioned Chimerical Comics, a site containing all sorts of information about the publications of a comic book company that doesn't actually exist. Unfortunately, their site seems to be down at the moment; don't know whether that's permanent or temporary.
I also included a pointer to my now-five-years-old discussion of my usual example of hyperfiction, Uncle Buddy's Funhouse, apparently written (in HyperCard) in the early '90s.
Probably the biggest and best example of hyperfiction that I've yet encountered (though I admit to having read very little of it) is the Cloudmakers scenario, the set of web tie-ins to A.I. Large, complex; comprising a remarkable number of complete websites, plus all sorts of other interactive stuff, such as live telephone conversations with the game/story's creators playing the parts of characters. Somewhere in the vast gray area between hyperfiction, puzzle games, and roleplaying games.
I've also pointed in the past to the superb Bill Gates memorial site (link is to my entry about it). I'm disappointed that neither that site nor the Cloudmakers sites came anywhere close to being nominated for a Hugo. Excellent free online sf hyperfiction.
Similarly, Bloggus Caesari is a form of hypertext historical fiction—or something. Fictional blogs in general are often hypertextual in some way or another. Even a fictional blog with no links in it would seem relevant to me, if it were posted an entry at a time over time rather than all at once.
Four years ago, Mary Anne wrote a brief hypertext story called "And Can This Ever End?"; I've occasionally vaguely considered writing her some code that would present the links on each page in a random order, to make it less likely that people will start at the first one and click through them in order.
More generally, there are lots of websites that could be considered hyperfiction. There are catalogs for imaginary companies. There are shared-world sites—not hyperfiction in the strictest sense, but related. And there are a lot of different forms that hypertext takes; real-looking websites for imaginary events and people have a fairly different feel from Mary Anne's read-linear-pieces-in-any-sequence-for-different-effects approach. There are plenty of different forms of nonlinear storytelling that can be presented in plain text-without-links; just imagine how many other forms you get when you add the ability to jump around.
But I have to admit that I haven't actually read all that much commercial hyperfiction. I know that people are publishing it; I even vaguely recall that a few years back Brown University established a department devoted to studying it. Eastgate is apparently still around, and still publishing both hyperfiction and tools for creating same (though they're a bit expensive for anyone who's not doing serious professional hypertext development, I suspect). But most of the little commercial hyperfiction I've seen hasn't engaged me much. (I gather, too, that after a brief period in vogue in the mid-'90s, general interest levels have died down somewhat, perhaps partly because people have realized just how hard it is to do well.)
One of the drawbacks of hyperfiction for the reader is that you have no way of knowing how big the piece is when you embark on it. With linear fiction, you can get a rough sense of how long it is by looking at page numbers (if printed) or scroll bars (if on the web). Or even a word count. But with hyperfiction, you just can't tell. That can be daunting. (But perhaps less so if a piece were published at a venue like SH with known word-count limits.)
Some hyperfiction uses a lot of multimedia, and is thus slow to load unless you have a fast connection. That's a valid form, but I think there's plenty that can be done with just text and links.
Interactive fiction—from Infocom-style text adventures (some of which, I hear, have really good stories these days) to MUDs and MUSHes, to 3D-graphics-based "RPGs" like The Longest Journey, to "Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games" like EverQuest—can also be seen as a kind of hyperfiction, or at least nonlinear fiction (which isn't quite the same thing, and I realize I'm somewhat conflating the two in this discussion; sorry).
Hmm. I think that's enough for now. Hope it's helpful.