Protagonize crowd-sourcing chose your own adventure fiction

Fellow BC friend Nick Bouton sent me an e-mail over the holidays to tell me about his new venture/project, etc: Protagonize.  If you’re wondering about what it’s all about read the this from the about page:

"So," you’re asking yourself. "What exactly is Protagonize all about?"

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 us 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.

The idea to revamp the concept popped up a few months ago. The old web-based collaborative fiction implementations were always a lot of fun, but were generally pretty flawed or lacking 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. Protagonize is an attempt to 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. Source: protagonize: about protagonize

Personally, the Choose Your Own Adventure books drove me nuts.  I really like reading and stories and when I picked the wrong choice…well I didn’t really like a quick end to the book.

Now with a crowd-sourced book, I could get to an "end" and have a little deus ex machina action going to bring things back on track.