You totter weakly toward the chair by the fire, but you trip on the sleeping dog. You fall toward the fire, hitting your head on the arm of the chair. You lie dazed on the floor, vaaguely realizing that your clothes have caught fire, and the fire has spread to the chair and rug. You try to rise but it is too late, smoke overcomes you and you die in pain.
This is too soon to end a branch of the story tree.
The story is small so it won't get in the way of our meta-story.
But some of the branches don't really develop a plot. A four-node path like this is only an episode or vignette. The problem is that a slimmed down demo story barely qualifies as a narrative.
There is little time for a beginning, middle, and end, which Aristotle says is necessary for a plot. But in branching stories some branches need to be short. A friend who wrote several of the old Choose Your Own Adventure books said:
The problem with the Choose books is there isn't much there there. Each individual story is no more than five or six brief scenes long . . . like a six panel cartoon. That's not enough. But if they tried to make the stories longer, they would quickly get into unwieldiness. It's sort of like the mathmatical example of the guy who starts with a penny income a day but doubles the income every day and becomes a millionaire by the end of the month.
Then why call them stories at all?
Because the real ongoing story is not the set of nodes but is the travail of the reader, who is telling him or herself a story about exploring the nodes and being blocked and beginning again. That story does have a beginning, a puzzling middle, and a triumphant ending.
That is one of the performative stories you mentioned.
It has been mapped out by the author. But what makes it different from a linear prose story is that the author can only design the landscape, not control the reader's choice of paths.
A hypertext story that is freed from the restrictions of tree structure, such as Afternoon or Victory Garden, can provide more complex landscapes and paths, and more intense narrative experience of suspense and connection, and more readerly adventure in exploring.
Yes, but even in our little story tree there are still the implicit meta-stories going on. And the examples you cited don't just keep expanding. Although their link structure is much more complex than a tree they do have something like a convergence and senses of completion to their narrative landscape. There's no endless exfoliation of story paths.
We model the threat of that elsewhere in our little story.