my field of dreams*

[thedeadparrot]

I was talking about this earlier on Twitter as well, but what I want, what I really need in my life, is an actual pan-fandom community of people building interactive work in fandom. I am not the only one with these impulses, I know. Every so often, I peruse the Interactive Fiction tag on AO3, and there's always new and interesting things that show up there.

But we're all over the place, sequestered off in our own little fannish silos, and I want that to be different. I want us to be able to talk to each other, about Twine, about Javascript, about Ren'Py. I think there's a lot that we could learn from one another, and I think there's a lot that we could develop better together rather than with all of us apart, all of us discovering new tools for ourselves. The podficcers did that years ago, and the vidders even longer before that. I know we could do that, too.

There's a reason why I post the source code for my work publicly. I hope that my work can inspire other people to try it out for themselves and learn from what I've already built. Fandom is all about this, that sort of knowledge sharing, and it would be great to have a place for us to gather and to talk, but I don't know how we'd do that, now that we don't really use LJ/DW communities anymore. In this new Tumblrized, Twitterified age, I feel a bit lost.

On top of that, putting in the effort to build a community like this sounds suspiciously like 'work' and I don't think I have the fannish capital (anymore? ever had?) to actually make this a thing that other people can find and gather around. And I'm not socially aggressive enough to chase down people who have built their own things and beg them to come hang out with me. So it'll probably be one of those super sad outposts where I spend all my time talking to myself along with that lurker person who never says anything and maybe is secretly a spambot.

But if you don't build it, they won't come, right?


*I have never seen Field of Dreams, but I can pretend I know how to quote it correctly.

Comments

[merisunshine36]

one of those super sad outposts where I spend all my time talking to myself along with that lurker person who never says anything and maybe is secretly a spambot.

This was probably not your intention but this made me lol. Also, you can try submitting this to metanews, since they post to dw, lj, and tumblr.

[thedeadparrot]

No, that was intended to be a joke.

Ugh, things that require effort.

[merisunshine36]

...I can do it for you? They have an anon submit post and everything!

[thedeadparrot]

Yay for fobbing work off onto other people!

[zulu]

It is an excellent idea and I would read it!

[thedeadparrot]

That's good to know! I will keep that in mind while I plot and plan.

[metanewsmods]

Hi, can we link this at metanews?

[thedeadparrot]

Yup!

[havocthecat]

One of my most dearly held wishes for fandom is to work on interactive fiction and create worlds with a group of people who care as passionately about them as I do (and who aren't always tabletop roleplaying gamers) and who understand my need to be a meticulous perfectionist. Own your meticulous perfectionism, I say, or at least I say that to and about myself.

Some day, I will be done with school and can actually start poking at a project like this. ("Some day" being June.)

[thedeadparrot]

It's so interesting for you to say that, because I think we're coming at this from slightly different angles.

Right now, I'm coming from a standpoint of crafting authored, single-player experiences, and it sounds like you're more interested in a more collaborative, evolving, world-building sort of thing? I could be entirely wrong about that (sorry!), but it does raise an interesting point and something that I struggle with myself, which is that the category of 'interactive fiction' can be really broad in ways that 'vid' or 'podfic' are not. Can we really create a useful community when that's the case? I don't know.

[jelazakazone]

I'm really curious, from this exchange, how you think podfic is limited. I think the limits of podfic have barely been explored and am very interested in pushing them. At the moment, this means podficcing works I've written and putting them out there as works that can be remixed however someone might like to do that. I am also interested in collaborating with other podficcers and using their voices to make something new.

I feel like this post is just scratching the surface of a much deeper topic (for me, at any rate). To me, the whole point of fandom is the interaction. It's just not interesting for me otherwise. I think what you are talking about is infrastructure, though, and not creative fannish works. Is that right?

[thedeadparrot]

I don't think I ever said that podfic was limited. I just meant that the definition of podfic is pretty well-established. I mean, can podfic be anything other than audio? There's a certain point at which people would agree that something becomes 'not-podfic', no?

My point was that the term 'interactive fiction' can mean all sorts of different things to different people, as my conversation with havocthecat demonstrates. If someone makes a turn-based RPG based on Teen Wolf, is that interactive fiction? What about a visual novel about attending Hogwarts? How about a massive table-top-style game with a core group of players and run by a DM that constantly evolves over time? What about a pure prose story that requires a reader to solve a riddle before they can understand the ending? I don't know if it's useful to exclude things from definitions, but all the same, I'm not sure what glue would hold the community together if we're all venturing out in vastly different directions.

I agree that fandom is the interaction! I think what I'm talking about is what it would take to create the infrastructure such that it could support a community and also a place that is welcoming to newbies such that we can lower the barriers to entry to the tools that we've used. I know that the vidding community as a whole helped immensely when I took my first tentative steps into being a vidder myself, and I'd like to create a space like that for people who want to build interactive stories. I'm not sure how to go about doing that, though.

[jelazakazone]

LOL. Ok, yeah. I think that's right.

Oooooh. I want one of those! Maybe a Tumblr would be the right place to start? I hate how broken interaction possibilities are on Tumblr though.

I tried making a "Merlin dictionary" on LJ, but it never took off. I wanted people to come up with their own definitions for things and to collaborate in any way they wanted. I am a terrible mod though, so it never gained critical mass. Also, people couldn't edit entries other than their own. Maybe a wiki is a place to start?

[alias_sqbr]

DID SOMEBODY SAY INTERACTIVE FANWORKS??? :D :D :D

I'm going through an original interactive Stuff phase at the moment, but I am bound to make more interactive fanworks in the future and am TOTALLY interested in hanging with similarly inclined folks. And yeah, we do seem to be a disconnected lot, which is a pity! There was some discussion about an exchange or something a while back which eventually fell through, and there was lots of interest. We're definitely out there.

And I see that the AO3 hasn't connected Interactive to interactive fiction in any way, which really doesn't help!

[thedeadparrot]

Yeah! I think people all end up landing in it in their own separate ways, and I think it would be cool if we could change that. There's a lot of cool stuff that I think we could learn from each other (HOW DO U PUZZLE DESIGN?) and I want a place for that sort of discussion to happen.

I like the idea of an exchange or something else what would produce a lot of work all at once, but an exchange seems like a lot of pressure for any new people just starting out. Maybe something more like a Game Jam/Big Bang hybrid that's all about bringing people of different disciplines together (writers to write, artists to art, programmers to program) to make something that's expected to be rough and unpolished in a short amount of time?

[sqbr]

Actually on further thought it was a game jam! Because as you say, exchanges don't really suit this type of thing.

[thedeadparrot]

Yeah, and I've been thinking about this some more, and I am having a hard time figuring out how to structure a game jam into something that would work for fandom, considering how asynchronous and decentralized it is. The point of a game jam putting everyone into the same place and compressing the time way down is that it means you are blocking out the time to just work on the game and committed to working on it in a place without outside influences. Fandom just doesn't work in the same way.

If we compress down the time, we run into time zone issues. If we spread it out too far, we can lose engagement and/or risking real life getting in the way. Like, it's one thing if an writer flakes out early on in a big bang or an artist does later on, because then you can get pinch hitters to fill in. It's something else entirely if the art for your game is half-finished and the artist drops off the face of the earth.

I am intrigued by another suggestion in this thread about holding a workshop on this sort of thing. I'd still need to think about how to structure it such that people are actively engaged building things instead of just reading about building things, but I like the idea of something a little more free-flowing and low-pressure as a starter. At least for me in terms of organizing. :p Maybe Twine 101? Would you be interested in helping out?

[sqbr]

NaNoReNo is a month long visual novel challenge which gets a lot of group participants...but there are definitely issues with dropout, my group is still working on our 2012 game with an almost entirely different team haha.

I poked through my comments, here's the choose your own adventure fest that died.

I have health issues and am in the middle of buying a house, so can't guarantee lots of availability, but am definitely open to helping out as much as I can with any hypothetical event. I'm more Renpy based than Twine but know enough Twine to make a moderately complex game, and have a background in computer science and scientific communication which has prepared me to figure out the answers to new problems as I go :) Twine is definitely easier for single person teams assuming they can write and are willing to learn a little programming, though as a fairly visual person and artist it leaves me a little cold.

[thedeadparrot]

Cool! I'll definitely take a look at those links.

And yeah, I have no idea what this hypothetical event would even look like yet, but I would definitely be okay with doing most of the organizational heavy lifting. I just wanted to gauge hypothetical interest levels early on. :) I'd definitely want more perspectives represented than just mine.

[theladyscribe]

Not sure if this is what you're going for, but tielan and I are doing a fic battle, where we write stories in response to each other's work (not remixes, but using our stories as jumping-off points).

For myself, I crave more LJ/DW-type interaction, and I'm excited to hear that other folks are feeling the same way. tumblr, etc. has its uses, but at the end of the day, I like having discussions in comments that are easy to follow, you know?

(PS. Here via newredshoes' link.)

[thedeadparrot]

That does sound cool! But that's not entirely what I meant here.

I'm coming more from a video game context, where you can create a work that allows the reader to interact with it. Choose-Your-Own-Adventure is the simplest and most obvious example here, though the possibilities really are endless. The indie gaming scene is full of really nifty and interesting stuff in this context, and some of the tools are actually pretty accessible. (Twine and Ren'Py are two of the ones that I reference above.)

And yeah, I do end up missing the sorts of discussion that we have on LJ/DW when I spend time on Tumblr. It's so confusing when you have posts with nested reblogs and such. Threaded comments! The way of the past/future.

[theladyscribe]

Ahh, okay, that makes sense. Not necessarily world-building, or back-and-forth, but interactive in that the reader chooses where the story goes next?

And oh man, sometimes I just want to shout at tumblr, "Give me threaded comments or give me death!"

[thedeadparrot]

Sort of! I think the way I'd describe it is more that the story is tactile, that it responds to reader input even if the direction of the story is fixed.

[niko]

I've love the idea of interactive fanfic since I first discovered the existence of the amateur IF community many years ago, but hadn't realized there was quite so much already out at the archive. It's nice to see it's been moving along. :) I've always been stymied in my couple efforts by just not being much of a writer to begin with. Writing anything close to a story is hard enough... doing it while also exploring interactivity and trying (at the time) to learn Inform from scratch was too big a hurdle.

I like the idea you mentioned of some sort of event for encouraging creation of *something* that wouldn't necessarily have to be super-polished. I wonder if giving it a fairly narrow focus (I'm thinking of something like the IF 'art show' or IntroComp) might help make it less daunting?

I'd also love to see a workshop or tutorial to learn the basics of one of the tools you mention that would sort of walk writers/coders through creation of a simple fanfic-ish scenario and encourage them to play along by tweaking the sample work to be a scenario that fits their own fandom.

[thedeadparrot]

I took a look at Inform, and it seemed pretty intimidating, and I'm a software dev by trade! I'm not super familiar with the IF community, though. I came around to it by way of the indie gaming scene, especially the parts of it that are interested in DIY.

And yeah, I'm coming from the indie game approach of a game jam, which tends to be super compressed and probably doesn't work for a lot of people, but maybe over a week? two weeks? just to get something thrown together and done. It'd be a good way to lessen the intimidation factor, I think, if everyone knows that everyone else is under the same time pressures that they are.

I would be interested in writing up some fandom-oriented tutorials for some of this stuff! There's a lot of tutorials that are on the internet already, but it wouldn't hurt to have more, I suppose.