YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES, ALL ALIKE.
You certainly have been here before.
The ghost reappears. It speaks. "You know, you could have dropped pieces of clothing on the floor to mark places. But now, follow me."
It gestures and a door appears in the wall.
You are forcing the plot here; the links are arranged so that once you are in the maze eventually you have to choose to go through the door. Where's the freedom of Choose Your Own?
This story has never been about freedom to choose, it is about the different kind of guiding meta-stories, and the apparent choices help make that point.
So the apparatus of nodes and trees has its own purpose and goal?
Yes, for the meta-story about meta-stories. This clichéd little adventure with the ghost turns out to be about what accompanies stories, even clichéd ones.
What about us, then? What story are we enacting?
We're guided by our own set of decisions and authorial planning that involves its own meta-story. We're claiming (and trying to show) how any story will be accompanied and guided by an unspoken story about decisions the process of writing. Hypertext lets us expose that unspoken story, but our doing so is in turn guided by another unspoken story.
But as Wittgenstein argued, what cannot be spoken can be shown.
That's one thing we're trying to do.
I wonder what our author thinks of all this?
So does he, I imagine.