"This emphasis on the meaningfulness of sequence hits however a serious logical obstacle. Textual fragments are like the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle; some fit easily together, and some others do not because of their intrinsic shape, or narrative content. It is simply not possible to construct a coherent story out of every permutation of a set of textual fragments, because fragments are implicitly ordered by relations of logical presupposition, material causality and temporal sequence. What for instance will I do if in the course of my reading I encounter a segment that describes his actions when alive? Should I opt for a supernatural interpretation, according to which the character was resurrected? If it seems utopian to expect of readers to be able to provide missing links to connect segments in a narratively meaningful way for each different order of appearance, the Alephic conception of a new story with each reading becomes untenable. What we have, instead, is something much closer to the narrative equivalent of a jig-saw puzzle…readers of hypertext do not start a new story from scratch every time they open the program, but rather construe a mental representation over many sessions, completing or amending the picture put together so far."

-- Marie-Laure Ryan, "Beyond Myth and Metaphor," GameStudies.org.