Judging from the influence of multilinear film and other verbal/visual-based interactive narratives (like Chroma), hypertext has a strong potential to use more of a balance between words and pictures. With the increased accessibility and ease of multimedia programming tools (like those of Macromedia and Adobe), it is already easier for authors with little background in graphic design or computer programming to create more visually complex fields of text and vision. We can see in more recent Eastgate offerings, like Figurski at Findhorn on Acid (2001), that graphics are becoming more common in Storyspace texts. Michael Joyce even includes a small Quicktime movie clip in his mostly text-based work Twilight, a symphony (1996).

The ways new hypertexts will take advantage of audio-visual technology is not very predictable, but like my set of inherent characteristics limiting hypertext, some rules shape their evolution. Studying other verbal-visual-based media suggests that writing verbal-visual hypertext requires a dramatic change in hypertext language. Comics have long been putting printed words and images together in an attempt to make a more meaningful whole. This is the ideal sort of marriage that audio-visual hypertexts seek. For the marriage to work, though, both media (words and images) need to adjust their techniques. As Scott McCloud explains in Understanding Comics, when visual art and language combine, it calls for a simpler style in both language and art (46-49). Judging from this, graphics and sound will most likely take a backseat (though still be important) to the language in the future hypertexts because most writers are interested (and practiced) in writing linguistically complex literature. There's a place for visual-verbal complexity in hypertext, too. Those hypertexts will be the descendent of Chroma and Donna Leishman's 6amhoover.com instead of Victory Garden and afternoon, rooted much more in film or comics theory than in literary theory.

In either instance, the strong visual component of hypertext is something no author can ignore. George Landow discusses at length the history of the visual/verbal question in print technology and education (1997, 60-64), noting the importance of the issue: "This blindness to the crucial visual components of textuality not only threatens to hinder our attempts to learn how to write in electronic space but has also markedly distorted our understanding of earlier forms of writing" (63). Assuming that visual information has less value than verbal, or worse yet, none at all, is a misconception that has already hurt hypertext writing, and must be discarded in the near-future.