Sturgeon's law 2.0

January 9, 2008 1:26 AM

It's round robin, user generated, choose-your-own-adventure style, web 2.0 fiction. My productivity is now permanently crippled. The cbc gives some background, if you care about that sort of thing.
posted by mock (9 comments total)

Part of me likes this idea, even with the social networking 'ick' attached. Part of me is screaming, "I will not take this thing from your hand."

I wish there was a rule stating all stories had to be written in second person, to keep my CYOA nostalgia dressed in proper period wear.
posted by Minus215Cee at 2:57 AM on January 9, 2008

These kinds of collaborative hypertexts do tend to branch quite a lot rather than employing the other kinds of interesting structures. Unless individual authors take care to read all of the other branches, consistency in the story world is lost (not that it's necessary). There were a number of similar projects in the 90s, after Wikis became widespread. Most of the storylines were very short, due to people's tendencies to branch but not merge.

I can't tell; do storylines *only* branch with this technology?
posted by honest knave at 3:26 AM on January 9, 2008 [1 favorite]

I tried to read one of the stories, but the design of the site made my head explode.
posted by SemioticRobotic at 3:41 AM on January 9, 2008

Yeah, I don't think squeezing the story into a tiny little green box on one side of the page, next to the title of some other story in 5,000 POINT BOLD FONT is conducive to good literature. But the idea is fun.
posted by Jimbob at 3:59 AM on January 9, 2008

I likee-likee. It's just cheesey enough to make me smile, though it would be nice if there was some kind of ultimate conclusion/editing done with these stories.

Still, good for a rainy day.
posted by Pecinpah at 4:17 AM on January 9, 2008

I can't tell; do storylines *only* branch with this technology?


I was playing around on this last week (I'm dng over there) and initially that was all you could do. The man behind the site added the ability to link to other branches the other day, but it is not very good, yet - it seems to only allow to link to a branch directly above you in the story tree, which is pretty limiting, as you can't merge seperate story threads, only create a loop
posted by ZippityBuddha at 5:08 AM on January 9, 2008

Thanks for the info, ZippityBuddha.
posted by honest knave at 5:35 AM on January 9, 2008

This is brilliant. I can see I will quickly become addicted.

I may even have to write the branch for "you bite the face of Timmy's attacker"!
posted by misha at 7:12 AM on January 9, 2008

Oh, this is so cool! Wish I had come up with this idea. Looking forward to playing around with it.
posted by rottytooth at 11:30 AM on January 9, 2008