Hyperdrama and hyperlink films

Robert Peate brought an article to my attention:

Hyperlink cinema is a term coined by author Alissa Quart, who used the term in her review of the film Happy Endings (2005) for the film journal Film Comment in 2005.[1] Noted film critic Roger Ebert popularized the term when reviewing the film Syriana.[2] These films are not hypermedia and do not have actual hyperlinks, but are multilinear in a more metaphorical sense.

In describing Happy Endings, Quart considers captions acting as footnotes and split screen as elements of hyperlink cinema and notes the influence of the World Wide Web and multitasking.[1] Playing with time and character's personal history, plot twists, interwoven storylines between multiple characters, jumping between the beginning and end (flashback and flashforward) are also elements.[1] Roger Ebert further describes hyperlink cinema as films where the characters or action reside in separate stories, but a connection or influence between those disparate stories is slowly revealed to the audience; illustrated in Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu's films Amores Perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003), and Babel (2006).[2][3]

Quart suggests that director Robert Altman created the structure for the genre and demonstrated its usefulness for combining interlocking stories in his films Nashville (1975) and Short Cuts (1993).[4] She also considers the television series 24 and Alan Rudolph’s film Welcome to L.A. (1976) as early prototypes.[1] Crash (2004) is an example of the genre, as are Altman's The Player (1992), Steven Soderbergh's Traffic (2000), City of God (2002), Syriana (2005), and Nine Lives (2005).[4] Reference

This, is seems to me, is hyperdrama with a passive audience. Lost here, completely lost, is a basic tenet of hyperdrama: the choices of the individual audience member define the dramatic experience. This is hyperdrama filtered through the traditional control of the artist. It's a fascinating genre in its own right, surely, but here one sees the easier application of hyperdrama's dramaturgy to computer games: in a game, the audience member is interactive by definition. When watching stories, audiences apparently still prefer to be passive, spoon fed while sitting in the dark, and artists prefer to be the ones doing the spooning.

Hyperlink film has more in common with traditional dramaturgy than with hyperdrama.

But I admit hyperdrama on film/video is a bit cumbersome. See for yourself by navigating through a short hyperdrama story with your own choices of what to see. This is hyperdrama.