I’ve recently been working on a concept app and would love to know your thoughts. It’s basically a “Choose Your Own Adventure” where anyone can create a new branching path, at any point in the story. You can also keep bookmarks of your favourite chapters, leave a like so that the chapter is featured and more people can read it… There’s still a lot to improve, but I believe the basics are there.
It’s also pretty much ready to go for iPhone, but before paying the publishers fee I wanted to see if this is something people would enjoy using. If so, I’ll make it available for both platforms.
The main problem with that type of collaborative CYOA is that it’s never finished unless someone copyedits the contributions. There have been many similar wiki-style efforts and they inevitably end up full of sudden endings and unfinished branches, with generally bad writing. In other words, not something that’s fun to read.
If I were to make something like this, I’d have a set time when everyone can add new branches and make edits, and then someone edits it based on those contributions, treating them as suggestions only, mercilessly editing and deleting anything that doesn’t fit properly. Then maybe repeat for a couple of iterations.
Yeah I can see that being an issue. Though I would say that there being a voting system would help mitigate the problem. Or we could just say that the “freedom” and complete “randomness in content” (and quality) is a feature, not a bug
Crowdsourcing the editing stage is an interesting idea. But I think the goal is consistency in style and content for any single playthrough. So it wouldn’t work with a simple upvote/downvote system weighted by karma, because even if all players rewarded consistency, they would each have a different idea of what ideal the passages should be consistent with. So you would have to look for correlations between players: Others who entered the tavern also enjoyed the episode with the fishmonger, but preferred the purple prose variant. That sort of thing might scale.
That’s an interesting thought, though a bit too complicated for the little toy that I meant this app to be. I’ll definitely take it into account once I decide to start a bigger project!
