Fiction Junkies

I'm sitting here chewing on a Beef Experimental, and pondering what exactly it is that has lead to a recent explosion in my intake of fiction. Well, in fact, both fiction and non-fiction, but that doesn't make for quite such a pleasant-sounding title.

This musing was bought on by the fact that I've more or less gone through all the books on my shelves and my more literary housemate, from whom I might borrow some kind of Jane Austen Methodone, is out.

I have a hearty appetite for webcomics, as The Trawl down there in the sidebar will testify. What you can't see right now is that there's another waiting to be added, as well as at least three more vying for a place. I've gotten to know what days they update. Moreover, I know roughly what time-zone they're in so I can pinpoint the hour of my next fix.

Then of course there is audio-visual narrative, like watching the Star Wars opus in a week, or taking in some animation or mechinima. That, of course, is just the start of all the means of telling a story that were unknown to our ancestors. Some are radically different from traditional storytelling, but open the way for some of the most engrossing narratives I've ever experienced.

The real root of this blogpost is discovering what has been described as "Interactive storytelling"- not to be confused with Interactive Fiction, of course. Interactive Fiction is the strange flower that bloomed between the time that computers could handle keyboards and the time they could handle pictures, where you might type things like "Go north" and "Get ye flask". Interactive Storytelling is different in that you're interacting with other people, rather than the text itself.

With I.F. you can't do anything the author didn't expect you to try, and that's the defining difference between the two styles. I.F. is delivered to you and from then on it's just you discovering the text. I've seen two models of I.S., which I'll explain below. (As for these abbreviations, by the way, I'm just defining terms. I think most people use both terms to describe both styles.)

City of IF (see what I mean?) there is one person, the storyteller. She writes a chapter of the story they want to write, ending it on a decision for the protagonist. Readers can then post their discussion of the story so far and say what they think the protaganist should do next. The storyteller refines a few options, takes a vote, and writes the next chapter based on that. It's like those Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books (which I'd classify as I.F.) except that readers collectively decide what the options should be.

Note the distinction. With IF, any choice that could be made has to be anticipated and written. A truly free-form story written that way would take an exponential amount of time to write, and any mathematicians reading this will know that that's a Bad Thing. With this model you're saving all that time... at the mere cost of having to wait for the author to write a next chapter.

The second model of IS is exemplified by Storycrafter. Here, there are active readers, and each one takes total control of a character. There's still a central storyteller (SC), but now he's just the chorus, and with limited or no control over the characters.

Since etiquette demands that no Literary Actor, as the more high-falutin' players like to call themselves, should include anything in their post that dictates the actions of another Actor- no putting words into anyone else's mouth. I'm not quite sure how that's going to apply to conversations- so far, it's made for a strange reading experience. Can you imagine a film that was always from a first-person perspective, but jumped between all the characters at intervals of a few seconds?

I don't know if the University departments of English Literature are aware of all this, but they really ought to be. It's not often that new forms of narrative appear.

I can feel an odd premonition. Someone's going to email me and say "You think you're so clever, but the ancient Greeks had a form of theatre that sounds a lot like your City of IF". That's just the kind of thing they'd do. The greeks, I mean. Trump my claim to be participating in a cultural novelty, I mean.

the big fish eat the little ones