The conception of digital literature and especially hyperfiction has always been connected to a politics of liberation and empowerment - granting the communicating masses access to the means of communication and publication and freeing the reader from the text-creator's authority. Approaches like Bolter's, Landow's or Murray's are decidedly material and only allow for the three-dimensional projection of the labyrinthine text into a literature of parallel worlds as a contentual manifestation of liberty in and from the text. But the topological web of the digital text is traversed in time as well as space and an aesthetics of temporality might well achieve the subversion of narrative and conceptual closure, while interactivity, multivocality and plurality of meaning have been dismissed as unfit to meet this demand traditionally placed on digital text.

Hyperfiction produces parallel times that can be perceived as liberating much like G.S. Morson's concept of Ñsideshadowing". At first, computer games seem to be more temporally stable and through their basis in causality and logics less temporally multidirectional. However, computer games may encourage an approach of reverse reasoning that creates an effect of breaking with unidirectional time.

While the player's body is rooted in nonreversible time, such games forces her to act and think in an at least bidirectional time-frame or among clashes of game-time, player's time, narrative time and puzzle-time. Some time-travel games utilize puzzles and narrative in a way that if the player accepts the temporal order the game establishes through narrative, then, in order to solve certain puzzles, she has to draw conclusions backward.

This short papers offers examples of adventure games with reverse reasoning that manage to address time in a more contemporary way than paper and digital textforms have hitherto been able to and makes a case for computer games as independent digital textforms of Ñliterary" merit.