ExamineKey Discussion Blog

End of the road.

2006-01-02T14:57:00.000Z

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.

Drying Up.

2005-11-01T10:09:00.000Z

The novelty has worn off, Slim is away and not posting, and the posts are generally getting fewer and fewer. I suppose i've been wavering between puzzle, plot point requests, and decisions, rather than sticking to a single method of writing.

I'll probably try and round it up in the next week or so.

General Comments and Feedback

2005-10-27T08:49:00.000Z

I've created this entry to use as the general comments and feedback, if you have general discussion around EK, rather than a response to any posts in this blog.

Thanks.

scary profile

2005-10-26T12:54:00.000Z

nh is rather concerned that his corporate firewall content filter at work will begin to block examinekey due to recent episodes. I checked against the stats today, and equally, some worrying keywords are finding the site:

1. tied
2. a
3. club
4. is
5. -sex
6. key
7. unlucky
8. Explain
9. persuasion
10. 13
11. gagged
12. -rape
13. what
14. -murder
15. rainmac
16. girlfriend

Fortunatly, they're very low search hits, and most come from the same search phrase (and the - prefixes mean that the user *didn't* want to see results with rape, murder etc..)

I might start putting in some fluffy bunny rabbits and kittens to address the bias.

new genre?

2005-10-24T17:03:00.000Z

It came up in conversation with someone the other day that EK is quite film-noir, or rather, I said, blog-noir. I quite like that. I hereby coin that phrase ;)

the new readers are tailing off, (ie there are none..) i need new places to advertise or get people reading the concept. i'm going to send it around to everyone at work tommorow, but if anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.

hyperegotism

2005-10-11T08:40:00.000Z

its funny, but once you have a website, you spend more time hunting for people who link to you out of some form of demand for recognisation than you do writing for it

one of my eurochums is linking to me (twice) now.. so that's appeased the hunt for reciprocals for now:

http://europrattle.blogspot.com/

although she'll be back to the UK fairly soon. one wonders if she thought about the brand's lifespan beyond her time out there ;)

in my everquest for finding hypermes, i stumbled across the seven ages of blog.

i like - although i think geeks probably branch out around stage 5/6 and start creating new genres within the blogdom, or experiment a little more (or write their own framework etc.)

i've also realised that i should probably combine my two blogs.. examinekey-chat and webponce-rants, as i'll maybe have more to say that way. it truly depends on if anyone actually wants to listen.

so far...

2005-10-04T20:12:00.000Z

I've just added a page on webponce.com which has the entire story to date, so for readers who didn't start when we did, its a great deal easier to read forward than skipping around the blog posts (which aren't great backwards, but not forwards).

http://webponce.com/ek/story-so-far.php

An outsider's point of view

2005-09-30T09:39:00.000Z

Cool.. stumbling across people commenting about ExamineKey on other sites.
Found this today:

She's all grown up

and someone else had also posted EK to del.icio.us:

http://del.icio.us/everdred

The webstats stuff i'm using currently isn't very advanced, so i can only see referrer, not search terms etc.. but i might try and find something a little better so i can spy upon how people are finding the site

New look and feel

2005-09-24T19:07:00.000Z

i've managed to squeeze some time out this weekend to create a new look and feel for examinekey. i've not migrated it to this blog yet.. will try and do that tommorow, but please let me know what you think.

i need to find a way of allowing people to easily read the older posts in order.. which is painfully hard at the moment.. i'm also thinking of creating a 'previously on EK' kinda page, which recaps on the important plot and clues so far - which may help people in realising they've missed something key, and also for new users, its a way of rapidly getting up to speed without worrying about having to read all of the story.

Choosing a thread

2005-09-22T21:26:00.000Z

Still finding it quite difficult to choose which route to take, compounded by the fact that many comments are multi part - ie. at their most basic, a comment would be "Go North" or more in context "Call Lena". However, many comments are proving to be more similar to "Call Lena, and whilst you're on the phone go back to the car, and then rummage through the dead body and then hail a cab and then..." etc.

As the episodes are one per day, or thereabouts, it would be a shame to break it down any more than it currently is, or force comments to be a simpler set of statements.. but it may make more sense to break down the comments into simpler actions, and get voting to choose the selected route. That way, i'm not always tempted to pick the route which is easiest for me, but there is no real way of handling that unless we do it within the same day.. Comments are made, and other can vote for those comments, or make more comments... which is kinda happening now anyway.

Dunno.

Link-o-matic

2005-09-20T16:32:00.000Z

Jake Shillingford, over at Exileinside (Ex-s of the world unite!) has posted a link to ExamineKey today in his blog. Hopefully a few well placed references and links on sites will help to continue people commenting on the articles.

Jake also suggested a more 'democratic' method of suggesting the next move, with some sort of voting mechanism, allowing commenters to both make a suggestion, or agree with other posts. It might be a good way of forcing me to write a particular comment rather than simply the one i like the look of best ;)

By the way - if you haven't heard Jake's music already - check out Exileinside - great music and great concept for a band. Maybe we'll get a soundtrack put together for the site.. ;)

Weekends

2005-09-18T18:52:00.000Z

Slim asked me if I was going to continue writing over the weekend - which I originally intended to do, but realised its probably less practical - considering i'll generally get up around midday on a Saturday - so I think I will probably try and write on weekdays only, and leave a friday cliffhanger / puzzle for people to have the weekend to solve and ruminate over. I know most people who read during the week probably do so at work anyway, so may well prefer just weekday posts. Besides, i'm quite often busy on weekends, and wouldn't want to promise the undeliverable.

I've had a comment passed to me that some of the passages are 'too wordy' or too long - and its hard to read the entire passage. I've spent some time on this thought, realising that i don't want to annoy readers this early on, but cannot really (currently) see a way of shortening the passages.

At their most basic, games of this sort could be as such:

Game: You are standing in a clearing. You can go N or S.
You: Go North
Game: You go North, you find an ogre and a knife
You: Pick up ogre
Game: You pick up ogre and stab the knife.

Which is fine, but when waiting 24 hours for the next installment, this would become rather dull rather quickly. Also, as it is, in part, a challenge for me to write the next installment based upon the comments, it needs to be more a story than simply providing the next scenario - especially so that intrigue can be built, a one liner would not suffice. I will try and vary the lengths of the passages, and feedback on this issue is more than requested.

Anyway, hope you had a good weekend, and the next episode will be with you on monday.

Choosing is proving harder than it looks

2005-09-15T10:16:00.000Z

Okay - so i've already reached my first point of difficulty - choosing who is selected to take the next step.

One the one hand - the story has a rough concept in my head - so I could choose options which would push it in the direction i had intended, but isn't that just writing a story in the traditional sense? On the other hand, choosing a comment which takes the story in a completely different route would make the story go in that direction, and thats closer to the core idea of collaboration, but would it get a bit flimsical? If someone suggests "take all your clothes off", or "read the secret code to access the secret room you've spent your life searching for" - the latter is more helpful to the plot (ps... you're not looking for a secret room.. this is just an example... or is it?? ;) however the former would be a) more amusing and collaborative, and b) more of a challenge for me to write the next step.

I think I know how i'll approach it, but we'll see how it pans out.

This morning for instance - two comments: stay still, or get in the car. One punches the pace up a notch, the other allows room to breath and consolidate - either should result in the next step of the story - i just have to work out how quickly to feed the plot through i guess.

So, I suppose by way of apology to those who don't get selected - it may be because i need to use a suggestion to push a plot element forward, i select the less interesting/amusing/flippant suggestion. Although I am determined to make it a little off the cuff, so amusing/flippant are all welcome. Maybe we will get the guy to "take all your clothes off", and wait for the aftermath.

No Anagram

2005-09-14T10:16:00.000Z

I've already had my first complaint:

no anagrams in this one :(

Sorry, no anagrams today, but whilst the story kicks off, there will be a bit of a mix of clues and plot. Today is mostly about plot, to get some intrigue building and hopefully give an idea of where we could take this.

To be honest, I've had two complaints, the first one actually coming last night, when my girlfriend asked why I didn't pick her suggestion. Sorry, but its all about building the plot a little bit. The idea is that I'll generally pick a single suggestion, or occasionally a blend of two or three if I feel they're fairly close or work together. The danger is that picking a suggestion which, whilst may be interesting, may not always pull the story that much further ahead - I think it may be a long struggle against keeping a story flowing, and the interactivity.

That being said, I'm quite looking forward to the more off the wall comments which I just have to swallow my pride, and accept that the readers are guiding the story, not me.

You're the voices in the characters (and my) head now, and that's what we'll follow.

Also, for those of you who know my other piece of vaporware - Hyperconsequence, which kind of ties in closely to this, I was discussing with Slim (I say discussing, he was taking the piss out of me for still not having completed hyperc. in over three years [birthday of domain registration in July]) how the concept of hyperc. closely ties in with this. It does, but the concept of hyperc. was more truly collaborative writing, rather than single author with mulitple inspiration partners. Who knows... if I ever get a moment to do some coding, I might fire up hyperc. once more and finally get it off the ground (although everytime I look at the existing code base, i realise how poor it is, and start it all again.. I hope that means i'm improving as a developer ;)

Welcome to ExamineKeyDiscuss

2005-09-14T08:41:00.000Z

I thought I'd create a secondary blog which is for discussion of the plotlines and next steps in the story, or maybe a chance for me to react or respond 'outside' of the story itself. Also a chance to discuss around the concept of the site, new functionality we can add in, etc. etc.

I welcome all comments and feedback.