"when you read from a cybertext, you are constantly reminded of inaccessible strategies and paths not taken, voices not heard. Each decision will make some parts of the text more, and others less, accessible, and you may never know what the exact results of your choices; that is, exactly what you missed." (3)

"The cybertext puts its would-be reader at risk: the risk of rejection. The effort and energy demanded by the cybertext of its reader raise the stakes of interpretation to those of intervention. Trying to know a cybertext is an investment of personal improvisation that can result in either intimacy or failure." (4)

"Perhaps the best-know example of cybertext in antiquity is the Chinese text of oracular wisdom, the I Ching." (9)

"Life in the MUD is literary, relying on purely textual strategies, and it therefore provides a unique laboratory for the study of textual self-expression and self-creation, themes that are far from marginal in the practice of literary theory." (13)

"Once the parser and database tools have been developed, these can be reused for several games, and game development then becomes much like planning and writing a piece of short fiction, except that multiple outcomes must be conceived and the player's actions (however unreasonable) must be predicted." (100)

"adventure games are not novels at all. The adventure game is an artistic genre of its own, a unique aesthetic field of possibilities, which must be judged on its own terms." (107)

"the bewildered reader of a narrative can safely assume that the events that are already encountered, however mystifying, will make sense in the end (if the plot is to make sense at all); whereas the player of an adventure game (Deadline is a good example) is not guaranteed that the events thus far are at all relevant to the solution of the game. Hence it could be argued that the reader is (or at least produces) the story." (112)

"Instead of a narrated plot, cybertext produces a sequence of oscillating activities effectuated (but certainly not controlled) by the user." (112)

"But whatever its future, and despite the fact that it will never threaten the hegemony of 'literary books,' as some of its eschatological commentators have speculated, the textual adventure game should not be ruled out as an interesting topic of study." (128)

“What, then, should the politics of computer-generated literature be? I suggest that we abandon the ideal of traditional literature with its established ideas of quality and aesthetics: the computer will never become a good traditional author, if only because it cannot criticize or appreciate its own work.” (131)

“What we call computer literature should more accurately be called cyborg literature, and it is therefore in need of criticism and terminology with less clear-cut boundaries between human and machine, creative and automatic, interested and disinterested.” (134)

“To achieve interesting and worthwhile computer-generated literature, it is necessary to dispose of the poetics of narrative literature and to use the computer’s potential for combination and world simulation in order to develop new genres that can be valued and used on their own terms.” (141)