End of the road.
Well, EK is complete.. finally!
It has been an interesting experiment, and I thought I'd post some of my thoughts.
I think offering the user the ability to choose *any* route, ie. they have to think about what happens next and create the story, rather than guiding it, means that participation is rather onerous. Apart from it being daily, having to pre-empt what might happen and come up with creative solutions as a reader is not why we read books, its why we write books. Readers are generally passive in their interaction with a book, and this is breaking that common way of working. On the one hand, it makes for an interesting project, but if the 'reader' isn't that interested (the story lasted 40 days - thats quite an involvement to ask of someone), it, as you see, loses pace after a while, and *then* to ask them to write the story as well as just reading it, that gets hard/boring. Perhaps a simple multiple choice offering would make more sense (although, then, thats not written on the fly.. you could write out all permuations, and just let a user play through on their own).
Keeping up with the story was difficult. A draw back of blogger's ability to read 'forward' from the oldest post to the most recent. Also, a basic structure issue. Books are meant to be read from start to finish, not dipping in at any time. You don't know characters, past plot etc, so driving additional users to the site after the first two week's of chapters have been released didn't really work. The writing perhaps was not good enough to make a reader want to go back and read all the previous posts.
Writing it was hard! During a busy day - its hard to get time enough to write something of interest. Its hard enough writing a blog period, but writing a coherant story daily - thats just painful :)
Still, i hope it was as an interesting experiment for you as it was for me.
It has been an interesting experiment, and I thought I'd post some of my thoughts.
I think offering the user the ability to choose *any* route, ie. they have to think about what happens next and create the story, rather than guiding it, means that participation is rather onerous. Apart from it being daily, having to pre-empt what might happen and come up with creative solutions as a reader is not why we read books, its why we write books. Readers are generally passive in their interaction with a book, and this is breaking that common way of working. On the one hand, it makes for an interesting project, but if the 'reader' isn't that interested (the story lasted 40 days - thats quite an involvement to ask of someone), it, as you see, loses pace after a while, and *then* to ask them to write the story as well as just reading it, that gets hard/boring. Perhaps a simple multiple choice offering would make more sense (although, then, thats not written on the fly.. you could write out all permuations, and just let a user play through on their own).
Keeping up with the story was difficult. A draw back of blogger's ability to read 'forward' from the oldest post to the most recent. Also, a basic structure issue. Books are meant to be read from start to finish, not dipping in at any time. You don't know characters, past plot etc, so driving additional users to the site after the first two week's of chapters have been released didn't really work. The writing perhaps was not good enough to make a reader want to go back and read all the previous posts.
Writing it was hard! During a busy day - its hard to get time enough to write something of interest. Its hard enough writing a blog period, but writing a coherant story daily - thats just painful :)
Still, i hope it was as an interesting experiment for you as it was for me.
posted by webponce at 2:57 pm
0 comments
