Monday, June 25, 2007

My Newest Fiction Adventure

Othar Tryggvassen has a Twitter. It's a mostly day-by-day account of his adventures as a professional hero. Full of lines like "Have noticed that Spooky is staring at me. Follows my every move. Unnerving. Ate some cheese."

I love stuff like this. Square Zero has something similar--the characters post in the comments section. Which is weird, especially if you've read Schism, the webcomic it's based on. (And which I wish would update. Hasn't in ages, but when it was updating I liked it a lot.) They'll often have these odd, extended arguments with people. I don't know if the author already knows these people, or if they're just random, but either way, it's cool.

Having characters interact directly with the fans of a production is cool. It's the sort of thing that works especially well with webcomics, and other web-based media. The reader space is less formal, and it's easier to get from a webcomic to whatever forum or blog you're using. Not a bad marketing technique, really. Especially when done on a social type site, like the Othar thing is.

But what would be really cool is if the character interaction system was the whole point. Say you had a blog, or a series of blogs, and they interacted with each other and with the audience. There could be some kind of plot, and it could even be set in some world other than mainline Earth, but you'd also have the audience interacting with the characters in more or less the same format that the characters interacted with each other. Be a bit like roleplaying.

I need to get on this.

4 comments:

  1. remember... what's her name, lonelygirl13? these two amateur filmmakers an d this one female actor made up a bunch of vlogs on youtube about this girl, and at first it was typical, but as they interacted with the user comments, a plot began to unravel.

    of course, some people were mighty angry when they found out it was fake, but at the same time, it was kinda cool.

    there's certainly more market for it. but perhaps let them know it's not real.

    the idea of multiple, fictional blogs linking together in a plot sounds VERY interesting. like one of those books where each chapter is a jounral entry, execpt this has more customiziability, and people would update at different times, so WHEN people posted affected the plot! ha ha HA!

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  2. That could be our online campaign. Rather than resolving the chatroom/forum debate, we could just make the whole thing happen in blogs.

    Might be harder to get people to update, though. Also, harder to create a coherent plot or limit ourselves without a rules system. Hmm.

    At any rate, I'd be up for making it a collaborative thing. Maybe planning out the basic plot arc to some extent, then role-playing the characters? Sounds like awesome.

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  3. It could make an interesting campaign if there was no party, but each of the characters went off and did their own things, interacting tangentially.

    Of course, we'd need a good GM who updated their GM blog frequently (*cough*), but it could work. If it were on the web, it would be fun to set in a close to modern world. So that people might wonder.

    Honestly, the only problem I have is that I've never read a personal blog. I don't know how they go.



    Oh good, I'm glad Othar's role as comic relief is being reinforced.

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  4. Actually, if I was going to run it as a collaborative project, I'd do something more along the lines of TV writing. Collaborative on the concept/plot level, mostly solo for drafts, and then collaborative again before anything gets published. Fewer messy "what am I allowed to do with the other characters?" problems. Not that the more standard roleplay style wouldn't be an interesting project in itself, it just wouldn't be what I had in mind.

    Roleplaying doesn't just mean the player/character/GM set up, anyway. That's certainly the standard model, and you (usually) need that kind of regimentation if you want to make a game out of it, but there are other avenues, if you have other goals.

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