Abstract: The design, creation, organization, and playing of multimedia stories is accomplished by first defining a story with episodes scheduled on a temporal layout. The organization of the story episodes is then separated into two parts: (1) a temporal organization of story episodes using temporal cliques, and (2) a spatial organization which spatially organizes the members of each temporal clique independently of the members of other temporal cliques. A complicated multimedia problem that exists in time and space is reduced to a number of smaller problems that exist only in space. Stories that are organized according this way can be related by a directed graph into a hyperstory. Using the directed graph, different stories in the hyperstory can be played by satisfying defined asynchronous conditions. The conditions are used in the graph to define the relationships among the stories in the graph.