Setting can play an important role in hypertext fiction because it allows the reader-player to intuit boundaries. This is especially important because, as George P. Landow notes in Hypertext 2.0,
Unlike text in manuscript or print, those in hypertext apparently can continue indefinitely, perhaps infinitely, so one wonders if they can provide satisfying closure. Or to direct this inquiry in ways suggested by Smith's analysis of closure, one should ask what techniques might provide something analogous to that desirable "sense of conclusiveness, finality, or 'clinch'" (191)
This is a legitimate concern for the MOO-based fiction as well. In fact, toward the end of his visit to the Loft, beta-tester Collin Brooke asked me "Is this the end? What do I do now?" (*) While I believe some legitimate literary reasons exist for utilizing an indeterminate ending in contemporary literature, I think that more careful consideration is necessary in the case of 12 Steps to Murder. While additional discussion may lead to a decision to leave the Loft as it is, the concept of adequate closure for this project deserves further consideration.
Landow argues that this quest for closure is not nearly as recent as the technology which has brought the question again to the forefront. He explains that
writers of fiction have long encountered problems very similar to those faced by writers of hypertext fiction and have developed an array of formal and thematic solutions to them. In fact, the tendency of may a twentieth-century work to leave its readers with little sense of closure — either because they do not learn of the "final" outcome of a particular narrative or because they leave the story before any outcome occurs — shows us that as readers and writers we have long learned to live (and read) with more open-mindedness than discussions of narrative form might lead us to expect. (191-192)
Landow later concludes that some form of closure and/or crystallization of plot is inevitable; a concept clearly related to his definition of plot .
After reading awhile one begins to construct narrative placements, so that one assigns particular sections to a provisionally suitable place — some lexias obviously have several alternate or rival forms of relation. Then having assigned particular sections to particular sequences or reading paths — many, though not all, of which one can retrace at will — one reaches points at which one's initial cognitive dissonance or puzzlement disappears, and one seems satisfied. One has reached — or created — closure! (193)
In addition to the concern over an adequate conclusion, I believe that a few other issues should be quickly addressed: