preview: protagonize.com, community-driven interactive fiction
You might be wondering about the subject of this post. I’m sure you’ve never heard of Protagonize.com, and there’s a perfectly good reason for that: it doesn’t exist yet. Well, at least not in any place you could find it publicly. Fortunately, it’s just about complete and should be on its way to a browser near you within the next few weeks.
Protagonize is a little side project that I’ve been working on during my off-hours (i.e. evenings and weekends, whenever I get a chance), for the last few months. I haven’t had as much time to dedicate to it as I’d have liked, but it’s coming together and should be ready to go live quite soon. I wanted to be done at least a month or two ago, but between work and having a life (!), as well as my own personal form of scope creep, it’s taken a little longer than I had anticipated.
What exactly is this all about? As my oh-so-eloquent post title implies, Protagonize is an online community dedicated to the (nearly) lost art of the addventure (yes, that’s spelled right), a very specific type of collaborative fiction. Early forms of this on the web date back over a decade, when Snoot.com popularized a site called “Choose Your Own Schizophrenia”, an collaborative fiction site popular in the mid-to-late ’90s. Of course, this all dates back to the old Choose Your Own Adventure™ series that started back in 1979 and ran until 1998, published by Bantam Books.
How exactly does an addventure work? Well, to quote the wondrous Wikipedia (and to save myself writing something that’s already been explained better by someone else):
An addventure is a type of online interactive fiction that combines aspects of round-robin stories and Choose Your Own Adventure-style tales. Like a round-robin story, an addventure is a form of collaborative fiction in which many authors contribute to a story, each writing discrete segments. However, like a gamebook, the resulting narrative is non-linear, allowing authors to branch out in different directions after each segment of the story. The result is a continually growing work of hypertext fiction.
As I’m sure a lot of other children of the late ’70s and early ’80s did, I spent countless hours and days secreted away with my nose in the old CYOA books as a kid, and I’ve always wished that I could produce something similar that more people could enjoy. I tried my hand at some very basic functionality years ago (actually, I think it was around 1999) that mimicked what I had seen around the web, and I got a surprising amount of traffic on something that was never really publicized and ended up just being a buried subsection of my pre-blog-era personal site.
The idea to revamp the concept popped up a few months ago when I was looking for things to occupy my free time after work, a hobby site of some kind where I could hone my skills on something a little more public, which I miss, and flex my creative muscle at the same time. The old web-based collaborative fiction implementations were always a lot of fun, but were generally pretty flawed in a variety of ways. The old Snoot.com addventure site was uncontrolled and organic; there was no moderation of any sort and people pretty much ran amok, causing havoc and generally enjoying themselves in a chaotic sort of way. I figured I could help modernize the collaborative creative writing arena a bit and inject a little Web 2.0 love to produce a better interface. So far, so good.
Am I reinventing the wheel here?… no, I don’t think so. So, what’s different about Protagonize? Well, it allows a bit more flexibility all-around than the old implementations did. The ability to read and browse stories and branches (my term for the individual posts that make up the story) is open to everyone, with or without an account. Protagonize members can post a story or a branch wherever they want (registration is free, of course), as well as comment on author profiles or story branches, and keep track of their own posts.
Members also have access to a bookshelf-style interface that allows them to flag favourite authors and stories, or add markers to track specific story branches, so as to not lose their place when reading a story. I think these are probably the handiest features of the bunch, as you can track your favourite authors, see what they’ve posted recently, easily navigate to new content, and the site will provide you with suggested reading the entire time.
Readers can rate stories, which translate into author ratings based on average rating for all of an author’s stories. Each author has their own personal profile page that’s visible to everyone. The profile page aggregates each author’s content and allows readers to see similar authors, related stories, etc. Relationships between user-created content is maintained mostly via a combination of story categories and tags, though I may expand on that in the future.
To top everything off, the homepage (see screenshot) serves as a giant content aggregator for the entire site, listing off both hot and top rated stories, providing random snippets of content extracted from story branches throughout the site, as well as recent activity, newly posted comments, top story tags presented in a cloud format, and other relevant information. Both stories and authors have their own aggregator pages as well, which act as a more focused breakdown of the higher-level topics you’ll find on the homepage.
A variety of RSS feeds are also available, such as hot stories, top rated stories, recent activity, and feeds for each author and story posted. The feed selection may be a bit limited at launch time, but will likely grow as I have more time to work on the site. I’ve got other features in the works, too, but I have to save something for the official Protagonize blog, don’t I? :)
As you can probably tell, I’m pretty excited about the whole thing. The site is getting close to completion and I’m hoping this little taste of things to come will generate a bit of buzz for what’s been a pet project to me for some time now. Protagonize should be live before Christmas — I hope to see you all contributing stories and branches by the New Year.
I’ve added some new screenshots to the protagonize set on my flickr account, in case anyone’s interested.
When is this going to be online? Before Christmas? And you really should let go the link to megapixel. It’ll take them weeks to update it, and even then…
Yup, should be up before christmas. Just finishing up the RSS feeds and some other small stuff then I’ll be putting it up for testing on the live environment.
[...] After several months of part-time toil, my pet project is finally live. Yes, it’s been a long time coming, but Protagonize is now up and running and completely open to the public. Aside from being sleep deprived and having spent the better part of my Christmas holidays so far working on the site, I’ve still got a few tweaks to make, little kinks to work out, and a bunch of changes in the pipe that I’d like to get done before the new year. So far, so good. [...]