Stop, collaborate and listen!
October 1, 2017 12:13 AM Subscribe
I’d like to host a collaborative interactive fiction workshop using a web-based authoring system. Where to start?
What I’m looking for: something like Twine or Quest that will allow a group of 2-10 people to each write different “pages” of an interactive story, creating a sprawling, unwieldy choose-your-own-adventure tale that can evolve as different people join in to write for an hour or two, then pass the torch to whomever shows up next. They should be able to see what others have previously written, write what comes next, and potentially also add branches off others' scenes. Participants will bring and use their own laptops. I’m aiming this at undergrad university students, as a drop-in-friendly “study break” during the calm-before-the-storm of reading week [the week of no classes before exams start].
It looks like there are a few different tools for this, but as a relative newcomer to interactive fiction (I’ve played a bunch, but I haven’t made any of my own) I can’t quite tell where to begin—and I’m afraid part of the problem is that I’m looking for something that doesn’t exist. (Though this one, This Way or That, comes close—but it’s clearly one person’s love-project and doesn’t allow you to download and save or host your stories elsewhere, so I’m hesitant to get a bunch of people to buy into it.)
What I don’t care about: RPG-esque qualities like being able to pick up a key and use it to open a door later on, or images/music/visual effects, or all but the most basic of text formatting. I'm hoping for something that's much more of a long and tumbling story than a game with a "solvable" quest-like outcome. I remember playing some lovely Borgesian text adventure games on Mac back in high school--one may have even been called The Garden of Forking Paths--with in-text links rather than character-driven decisions, so the "gameplay" was much more aesthetic/atmospheric than goal-oriented, and it's these I'm half-dreaming of. Long live Hypercard, huh? (Also, any guesses on what these cool text adventures from 1995 were?)
My skills: minimal. I’m a computer-literate digital native who was great at web design back in the late nineties, but now I just use things other folks have made. All participants will be bringing their own laptops, and won’t be previously invested in this project (so asking them to frontload a learning process more complicated than, say, Twine formatting, may be too much right off the bat…). In a lot of ways I think This Way or That is close to perfect but for my aforementioned complaints (plus there are only five registered users, and their stories are mostly silly and don’t function as a good example of the platform, though the developer seems friendly and probably receptive to “can I have my data somehow” type questions..)
Magic pony request: that the resulting story can somehow be printed and properly paginated! Or imported into InDesign with the pages/links in the right order. Impossible, right?
Is there something I'm missing because I'm thinking of this as an interactive fiction project rather than some other format? (I suppose this would work perfectly using Wikia, for instance, but I'm enough of an aesthete to want an end-result that's prettier than a wiki page.) Are there other platforms I should be investigating? How would y'all approach a project like this?
What I’m looking for: something like Twine or Quest that will allow a group of 2-10 people to each write different “pages” of an interactive story, creating a sprawling, unwieldy choose-your-own-adventure tale that can evolve as different people join in to write for an hour or two, then pass the torch to whomever shows up next. They should be able to see what others have previously written, write what comes next, and potentially also add branches off others' scenes. Participants will bring and use their own laptops. I’m aiming this at undergrad university students, as a drop-in-friendly “study break” during the calm-before-the-storm of reading week [the week of no classes before exams start].
It looks like there are a few different tools for this, but as a relative newcomer to interactive fiction (I’ve played a bunch, but I haven’t made any of my own) I can’t quite tell where to begin—and I’m afraid part of the problem is that I’m looking for something that doesn’t exist. (Though this one, This Way or That, comes close—but it’s clearly one person’s love-project and doesn’t allow you to download and save or host your stories elsewhere, so I’m hesitant to get a bunch of people to buy into it.)
What I don’t care about: RPG-esque qualities like being able to pick up a key and use it to open a door later on, or images/music/visual effects, or all but the most basic of text formatting. I'm hoping for something that's much more of a long and tumbling story than a game with a "solvable" quest-like outcome. I remember playing some lovely Borgesian text adventure games on Mac back in high school--one may have even been called The Garden of Forking Paths--with in-text links rather than character-driven decisions, so the "gameplay" was much more aesthetic/atmospheric than goal-oriented, and it's these I'm half-dreaming of. Long live Hypercard, huh? (Also, any guesses on what these cool text adventures from 1995 were?)
My skills: minimal. I’m a computer-literate digital native who was great at web design back in the late nineties, but now I just use things other folks have made. All participants will be bringing their own laptops, and won’t be previously invested in this project (so asking them to frontload a learning process more complicated than, say, Twine formatting, may be too much right off the bat…). In a lot of ways I think This Way or That is close to perfect but for my aforementioned complaints (plus there are only five registered users, and their stories are mostly silly and don’t function as a good example of the platform, though the developer seems friendly and probably receptive to “can I have my data somehow” type questions..)
Magic pony request: that the resulting story can somehow be printed and properly paginated! Or imported into InDesign with the pages/links in the right order. Impossible, right?
Is there something I'm missing because I'm thinking of this as an interactive fiction project rather than some other format? (I suppose this would work perfectly using Wikia, for instance, but I'm enough of an aesthete to want an end-result that's prettier than a wiki page.) Are there other platforms I should be investigating? How would y'all approach a project like this?
Best answer: Scalar is a platform built for long-form "born digital" works, and I've used it in a context very similar to what you're describing here. Every "piece" that you generate in Scalar, whether that's a page of text, an image, a comment, etc., is treated as an equivalent unit, and those units can be mixed and matched and ordered and arranged by building "paths" between them. There's remarkable flexibility in how you can combine the "units" and no real limit to how many of those paths or branches you can build. As well as building branches using Scalar's own path tool, you can also in-text hyper-link 'til the cows come home. Each student could write a "piece" that would be visible and available for mixing and remixing with all the other "pieces" that have been generated to that point. Bonus: it's free!
Have a look at Pathfinders, a project built on Scalar about early electronic literature. It's more media-heavy and documentary than what you're doing (Scalar was imagined as a platform for academic writing, and that's been its predominant use-case so far), but it gives you a sense of what the branching and hyperlinking possibilities of Scalar are.
Downsides: there's a bit of a learning curve involved in using Scalar and getting used to its organizational logic, and it's not interested in printing. It also takes work to make it pretty. Memail me if you'd like more info about how I've used it. Yours sounds like a very cool project!
posted by puppytree at 6:31 AM on October 1, 2017
Have a look at Pathfinders, a project built on Scalar about early electronic literature. It's more media-heavy and documentary than what you're doing (Scalar was imagined as a platform for academic writing, and that's been its predominant use-case so far), but it gives you a sense of what the branching and hyperlinking possibilities of Scalar are.
Downsides: there's a bit of a learning curve involved in using Scalar and getting used to its organizational logic, and it's not interested in printing. It also takes work to make it pretty. Memail me if you'd like more info about how I've used it. Yours sounds like a very cool project!
posted by puppytree at 6:31 AM on October 1, 2017
Best answer: If you want to see a creative work done in Scalar, take a look at Redshift & Portalmetal.
posted by media_itoku at 6:30 PM on October 4, 2017
posted by media_itoku at 6:30 PM on October 4, 2017
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by minervous at 5:09 AM on October 1, 2017