Reader-Driven Adventure Musings
Here, I will ramble about the "reader-driven webcomic" without specific aim or utility. Join me, won't you?
First off, we are in dire need of a name better than "reader-driven webcomic." Some candidates are:
Collective Game —1d4chan Wiki
Webcomic Game —Bandit's Quest
Interactive Comic —TVTropes
Largely Reader-Driven Mock Games —MSPaint Adventures
Webcomic/Adventure Game Hybrid —Create.swf Adventures
Community-Dictated Comic Book Role Playing Game —What Do You Do.net
An 8-bit video game, a collaborative campfire story, and a crappy internet cartoon all rolled up into one incomprehensible mess —Lunar Hill
I'm hunting for a Lost Phrase of El Dorado where it's ≤2 words long, snappy-sounding, and accurately depicts the blurring of line between audience and creator control, but I may never find it. We're probably going to have to settle for just something snappy-sounding, as that's the only parameter that decides which terms stick around. (Look up the arguments about if comics should even be called "comics." They are as vehement and logical as they are utterly inconsequential.)
I am going to throw my insignificant weight around and declare the format to NOT fall under some names.
It is not a game.
It imitates games, but usually there isn't a way to really "lose" when these stories happen. There's no real competition; both the author and the audience want the story to unfold. However, there are ways to turn this format into a game. One way would be the introduction of branching paths, like Bard Quest. Bard Quest would also be more gamelike when it is "played" once enough of the story has been produced by a later reader, identical to a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book. Some commands produce dead ends, i.e. loss.
Another method would be waiting until someone, or some amount of people guess the "right way" of progressing the story. I don't have an example of this, but loss in this case would be the possible indefinite suspension of the story if nobody/not enough people can figure out the answer.
Derived from tabletop gaming as they are, the 1d4chan threads would often adopt die-rolling, character sheets, and other conceits of game mechanics. These certainly have the adventure resemble a game, but I'm unsure at what point the needle tips over into "yes this is most definitely a game" territory.
Homestuck and Prequel Adventure have straight up little minigames that slot into the story at large, but I don't think this makes the whole a game (even if you don't start analyzing whether these minigames are actually playthings or toys or whatever).
Whoops, tangent there. The CYOA adventure is a tremendous amount of work if not pruned vigilantly and contained to smaller stories, but is easy enough to grasp. The second method of suspending storytelling sounds like a downer, but I wouldn't mind testing it out once or twice. Reminds me of internet riddle competitions like notPr0n. The introduction of "game rules" or minigames is intriguing, and I'll have more to say about that later. What I'm trying to say here is that game elements CAN be included, but they're not necessary to the format. Moving on.
It doesn't have to be a webcomic.
The whole picture/caption dealie doesn't seem like a traditional comic, but it's words and pictures working in tandem. It's got my vote. However, it doesn't necessarily have to be a comic. Pants Seat Carpet Ride was text-only. This format is more of a modifier that could be used in different forms of media. I could see it working in video and the like. The part where we declare this format to be a member of any sort of medium is unimportant. The important part is the author-audience interaction.
Some of the options may be technically correct, but suggest the wrong things.
"Interactive" suggests Flash animation and other computer buzzword wizardry, like NAWLZ. "Collaborative" is closer, but sounds like more of an intimate working relationship between parties than the audience getting to shout at the main character. Besides, "collaborative comic/writing/etc." already has an entrenched meaning.
"Community-dictated" and "Reader-driven" and other swell hyphenated terms are there if we have to fall back on them. But I think, if I'm going to figure out what to call something, I have to figure out what the something is first.
So what IS this "new" method of storytelling?
I don't have a name for it yet. We just got done with this, sheesh. Read the top part again if it didn't sink in. Because I don't have a real answer, I'm going to try and figure out what it is, starting with its ancestors.
The most obvious ancestor is traced by MSPA; obsolete text adventure games, sometimes known as "interactive fiction." Input a command, and the main character executes it. The important difference is that instead of a humorless computer parsing a limited vocabulary, a human accepts almost every input and can respond meaningfully to any sort of abuse or squirming. This lineage has put its stamp all over the format, thanks to MSPA adopting its conventions and MSPA influencing the current interest in this sort of collaborative storytelling. Commands being preceded by a >caret, important items and actions appearing in ALL CAPS, and the aping of videogame constructs and tropes are frequent.
However, I feel this analogy is inadequate for a few reasons. The first and simplest is that text-adventure games are of very limited audience. They're not making any more, and video games weren't enjoying their current widespread popularity when they were making them. It's been noted before that the majority of Homestuck's current audience most certainly has never played text-adventure games.
The second strike against this analogy is that the creator is allowed, and indeed practically forced to ignore perfectly valid commands, something only the shittiest of game engines would perform.
The dynamic reminds me of tabletop adventure games with DMs/GMs/whathaveyou. The players can cajole, chat with, test, and instruct the Game Master as much as they like, but the GM retains ultimate power. (Caveat: GMs have to adhere to some soft rules to avoid the players leaving out of disgust, which is not unlike this storytelling format. More on this later.)
I think tabletop adventure games are the middle of the axis starting with text adventures and then leading to another codified format: improv theatre. Audience participation is extremely common; some improv troupes base their entire show around this gimmick.
This still has the difference that each player (both the tabletop player and the theatre player) gets their own character to direct, and retains an iron grip on that character. This is a far cry from reader-driven adventures, where only the smallest are able to accept every command. This has a paradoxical effect: as a reader-driven adventure gains popularity, it loses the immediacy of what makes the format special. You stop driving a character by committee, and instead play a lottery.
At least, that's what would happen if we were to adhere to how MSPA officially does things. It is true that given a number of commands, the author can expect every obvious route to be available for the character, along with some more of the outlandish in case the author would like a change of pace. MSPA has closed its command submission boxes for this very reason. They no longer perform their original function.
However, MSPA is still largely influenced by its audience. Hussie has stated that fan speculation either directly inspires the development of the story or causes him to avoid fulfilling the speculation. This, to me, is the important bit. "Reader-driven adventures" are very much immature in their technology, and here we are, poised to take advantage of it.
So far, we have direct reader input by way of commands and indirect input in the form of the creator reacting to speculation. Let's look at some other examples of how readers can influence the development of a story.
1. Jailbreak — First command received is the command used. This causes a flurry of fun and activity, but has three large problems:
With no quality control, the story naturally drifts to the haphazard and stupid.
The audience must be very small. If only the first command is valid, only one fast person each time gets a chance.
The author loses creative control. Sure, you can belittle and ignore commands every once in a while, but you defeat the point if this becomes the norm. You have to embrace the stupidity and unpredictability. The Jailbreak format is unsuitable for anything else.
2. Polling — The direct opposite of the Jailbreak format is having EVERY audience member have a say. The easiest way of doing this would be polling. Aetheria Epics employs this approach. The audience is presented with a poll listing the available actions, and the option with the most votes is selected. While this approach has merit, I dislike the lack of unexpected solutions and other hallmarks of "reader voice." However, I like the increased importance each reader enjoys. Ideally, there would be a way to marry the poll and the command box.
3. Submitting and Recommending — Reddit's upvote system could be one way to marry the poll and the command box. Users would be able to submit their own commands, drive out poor commands, and recommend their favorites. I feel some degree of opacity ought to be implemented, however; submissions' current scores would be hidden to avoid bias, and users would not be listed on their submissions. The current reddit system has failings in that it too often feeds mob mentality and silences dissenters, along with enabling "karma-whoring." I wouldn't be happy using the setup as-is.
Rebuild Empyrean has a system much like the above. The main difference is that a suggester can either submit his own command, or recommend another's—not both.
I would love to try out a modified submission/voting system for no reason other than the experimental, but, uh... the problem would be coding. I have a while yet before I could figure something like that out. For now, I'm going to stick with basic commands, and perhaps polls for situations in which choice is limited.
4. Indirect Influence — We touched on Hussie's reaction to fan speculation above, but that's only one example of how the audience changes a work in progress. Fanart, fan mail (the old-fashioned kind, not the tumblr kind), reader questions, hate mail, editor feedback, reviews; basically all of the reactions from others everywhere. This is obviously important, but it's not exclusive to reader-driven adventures! The point here is that in order to be a "reader-driven adventure," suggestions have to be the forefront, the whole point of the adventure.
That last entry uncovers another interesting facet. The actual methods of soliciting and accepting reader input are just a question of technology; designing the perfect tool for a specific purpose. We want a suggestion system that fits the working relationship between the author and the audience.
What is the working relationship between the author and the audience? I think it's individual to each work. Jailbreak was a case of playing with no quality control, Aetheria Epics wants to explore a world based on paths the authors decide are a good idea to explore, and a lot of the 1d4chan adventures were more gamelike; a few of them end unceremoniously when the main character follows a particularly stupid command.
Going back and rereading my list there, I've stated that I want a method that allows each suggester to feel like they have an impact, but also allows for reader creativity. I keep thinking of a quote by the author of RubyQuest, Weaver:
"I figured you'd kill him or leave him, but then like a billion people were like SAVE HIM, and I'm like 'Well... I... OKAY!' I honestly couldn't think of any reasonable excuse not to let you save him: I mean, he wasn't locked up or anything."
I think this quote perfectly illustrates the value of allowing suggestions to step outside the lines the author has drawn. So that's what I want. What does my (currently hypothetical) audience want?
I haven't put out extensive and annoying feedback surveys, so the only way I can figure this out is to look at the usual complaints for reader-driven adventures.
"Railroad!"
"Cherry-picking!"
"==>" [This symbol basically means "next page;" used here, it's more like "keep writing/drawing no more commands"]
"Why don't you ever use my commands?"
"God dammit people stop derailing"
"EVERYBODY SHUT UP AND GIVE REAL COMMANDS"
"Hold on, that's against the rules here..."
The first four complaints are directed at the author, the next two at one's fellow commentators, and the last... could be either. Either the suggestions aren't keeping something in mind or the author is doing things he said he/she wouldn't. Both of these are spiting a third entity, which makes 3 agents influencing the story:
The Author
The Audience
"The Rules"
"The rules" are in quotes because they're not a list of unbreakable tenets or whatever the real definition of "rules" is. (This is another bog of semantic arguing.) We could have hard rules like "The Protagonist may only shoot his gun once every ten commands." We could have rules that apply in spirit but are "softer," such as Ruby's third eye needing an unspecified cooldown in RubyQuest. Or even the "rules" of the story's internal logic and characterization.
This is what I've figured so far for the possible roles and responsibilities of each agent.
Author
Content Production - Straightforward. The author creates the bulk of the adventure in reaction to reader commands.
Story Cohesion - Why would the author want to veto any commands, and rather should serve as the conduit through which the desires of the audience are translated into story? If you've ever engaged in free-form collaborative drawing or storytelling ("I draw a line, then the next person draws a line, etc."), I think you know the reason why. You end up with a fun diversion, but an extremely unfocused end result. With no ultimate enforcer of the story, the million voices produce a story with a million motives.
Story Foundation - You could make an adventure where the universe was slowly built up from nothing by reader input, but most have some groundwork already done or done along the way.
Aiming the Story - Since the author usually has such a large share of the work, he or she is ultimately responsible for the "point" of the story. Whether it was an experiment or aimed to just be entertaining or even a moral or god knows what else, with the author taking up even a plurality of the responsibility this usually falls to them.
Opposing the Audience - The more gamelike the adventure, the more this comes into play. Blocking progress until a solution is procured, resisting certain commands, or just straight up fuckin'-with.
Audience
Reading the Story - This is the default role of every audience ever. Usually the end goal of any work.
Content Production - While the readers are not directly responsible for much actual content, they spur the author into unusual directions and may be ultimately responsible for running gags, major themes, and even plot twists (see Problem Sleuth for an example of minor dumb commands being woven into an elaborate mythology later). This is regardless of how their input is delivered or even solicited.
Characterization of the Commanded - When the commands go to a given character, the accepted commands over time shape the character's personality and other traits. The author may have more total control, but I imagine the commands seep into the character even if not accepted.
Opposing the Author - Basically the converse of the author's similar role. I think this conflict produces good things.
"The Rules"
Establishing the Format - There are all sorts of explicit and implicit rules about how pictures work, words work, pictures and words in tandem work, and especially how submitting commands to the website work. That last one is important; how else will people know how to influence the story?
"The Contract" - This role is to play the arbiter between the author and the audience. This includes explicit restrictions for submission ("Give me commands and I will choose the one I like best") tips ("Keep the protagonist's character in when directing them"), and even unconscious boundaries that aren't written out anywhere ("I will choose stupid commands when I can work them into a good joke").
Setting/Character Rules - Otherwise known as "the story asserting itself." Settings have rules to them (how magic works, how the government works, what the climate is like, etc.) and characters fall apart if they act unlike themselves. I consider this outside the purview of the author's roles because if broken, you can hemorrhage readers and quality.