Collaborative Fiction Gets Its Fifteen Minutes
…And hopefully it’ll get more time in the spotlight than that. Because collaborative fiction is cool.
I’m not talking about interactive fiction. “Interactive fiction” generally means Zork-style text adventures. But this, what I’m talking about here, is only “You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike” if a player wants to write about a maze of twisty passages, all alike.
To explain:
Round about 1992, my high school set up a BBS. In pre-World Wide Web terms, that meant “A very local and small version of the interent.” It ran on a single computer. One connected to it directly by dial-up modem. Most of us used it by staring meaningfully at whoever was currently occupying the single library computer until the unfortunate stare-ee had to get up and let the stare-er finally take a turn in the five minutes left before A. P. Spanish class started.
Anyway, most BBSs were used for a small set of things: email, public message boards, file upload/download, and games. The school BBS had games. The game I liked best was an collaborative variable-path fiction game. You wrote a bit of story and gave it two possible continuations; the next person came along, chose a continuation that piqued their interest, and wrote the next piece of fiction.
Sometime after I graduated, I learned how to design web pages and script web applications. One of the first things I did with this new super-power was build that game from memory and add such improvements as occurred to me. I called the result “The Neverending Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Story Engine,” and, several facelifts and user revolts later, it’s still chugging along over here.
It remains fairly small, despite grandiose plans that sit in the back of my head and promise that with just a few hours of work I can turn this into a goldmine. And over the years I’ve found other sites that fill a similar niche: tiny corners of the Web devoted to something like a non-blindfolded version of Exquisite Corpse. Clearly this is a game that tickles a significant amount of fancy. But thus far, attempts to gather interactive-fiction-fanciers into one great place seem to have stopped with the Choose Your Own Adventure books of the 1980s. (Their creators are still around and active, believe it or not–and they’re working on an iPod version of their franchise. Huh.)
Enter Ficlets.
It’s organized. It’s got technorati-style tags. It’s got a blog. It’s got Real Name Authors stopping in to contribute snippets of fiction and to get interviewed by novelist-and-blogger-with-tiara John Scalzi. You can read Mr. Scalzi’s announcements concerning Ficlets here and here. The first announcement is for the benefit of anyone who might want to contribute content to the site. The second–and this is the cool part–is meant to woo published authors, publishing editors, and gawds-honest publishers to join the game.
They’re really promoting this, people! This isn’t just a writing exercise or a passtime for bored kids at school. This bids fair to become a gosh-darn industry showcase.
Why, yes I’m optimistic! Wouldn’t you be?
September 15th, 2009 at 12:21 am
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