A service aimed at teasing out “meaningful stories” from its users. The main tool for this seems to be an ever-growing list of categorized questions, such as this, from the category Life: “What life lessons would you tell your 13 year old self if you had the opportunity?”
Tag: SAKE
As Dave Winer noted, Medium does content categorization upside down: “Instead of adding a category to a post, you add a post to a category.” He means collection in Medium-speak, but you get the idea: Topic triumphs over author. Medium doesn’t want you to read something because of who wrote it; Medium wants you to read something because of what it’s about. And because of the implicit promise that Medium = quality.
Blogging for its relevance to project SAKE, where I am also struggling with finding alternative organizational schemes for contributions from players. A stream metaphor seems wrong. Also, we really want to incentivize quality over quantity (or frequency) of posts. Medium might have gotten a few things right, there.
Another SAKE reference point — National Novel Writing Month is an annual writing challenge. It isn’t about the quality of the writing, it’s simply about getting to 50.000 words in 30 days. I guess a large part of the fun comes from the knowledge that many others are doing the same thing as you are.
- Content authority — over what we’re calling back-story, e.g. whether Sam is a KGB mole, or which NPC is boinking whom
- Plot authority — over crux-points in the knowledge base at the table — now is the time for a revelation! — typically, revealing content, although notice it can apply to player-characters’ material as well as GM material — and look out, because within this authority lies the remarkable pitfall of wanting (for instances) revelations and reactions to apply precisely to players as they do to characters
- Situational authority — over who’s there, what’s going on — scene framing would be the most relevant and obvious technique-example, or phrases like “That’s when I show up!” from a player
- Narrational authority — how it happens, what happens — I’m suggesting here that this is best understood as a feature of resolution (including the entirety of IIEE), and not to mistake it for describing what the castle looks like, for instance; I also suggest it’s far more shared in application than most role-players realize
A clever web-based tool for making interactive stories. That is to say: stories with branching paths. Although there are some options for rudimentary logic, which I imagine might enable experiments that diverge from the typical Choose-Your-Own-Adventure mold.
A collaborative storytelling site that encourages users to write short bits of fiction. Others can react to those stories with sequels or (the neatest part I think) prequels. There is also the possibility of posting challenges, which are just that — challenges to users to write something according to some kind of theme or other constraints.
An interesting example of a play-by-post (aka forum) RPG that is heavily slanted towards storytelling. This means: no experience points, skill checks and that sort of thing. In stead, it features mechanics (some quite clever) that control who gets to say what about the storyworld. Points are awarded for participation in stories, which in turn can be spent on describing new creations. It is, however, heavily reliant on game master oversight, as not all rules are fully described.