Protagony.

I stumbled across Protagonize today, and thought I’d mention it here, for what it’s worth. I think I remember doing this in some English class once when I was a kid— somebody starts a story on a piece of paper, folds their part down, and passes it on to someone else, who adds a paragraph, and so on, until the class has created a collaborative monstrosity.

Protagonize is kind of like that. Except on the Web. And with a choose-your-own-adventure twist. On the site, users create “addventures”— from their web site:

An addventure is a type of online interactive fiction that combines aspects of round-robin stories and Choose Your Own Adventure-style tales. Like a round-robin story, an addventure is a form of collaborative fiction in which many authors contribute to a story, each writing discrete segments. However, like a gamebook, the resulting narrative is non-linear, allowing authors to branch out in different directions after each segment of the story. The result is a continually growing work of hypertext fiction.

As a user, you can start stories, add to existing stories, keep track of favorites, and even subscribe to stories in your favorite RSS reader, if you’ve a mind to.

The few stories I browsed through seemed to veer toward the silly and ridiculous eventually (some quicker than others!), but some seemed fun, regardless. If you’ve got an idea for the beginning of a story, it might be fun to post it, and see where others take it. Or, just log on and add your 2-cents to existing stories.

Teacherial advisory: I haven’t browsed the site extensively, but I’m sure that, since the site is open to the Intarwebs, that if you spend enough time there, you’re liable to run into some sort of offensive language or content. They do have posting guidelines, a designation for “mature” stories so they’re easy to spot and avoid, if that’s your desire, and a way to report questionable content.

That said, play safe and use common sense if you decide to check them out. :-D

1. 

   J P Barnett says:

   January 10, 2008 at 11:52 pm

   infinite story.com is another site that successfully uses this model (I think it has been around longer than Protagonize, from my brief research).

   One thing that IS has over Pro is that you can choose to place your own story there without additions from others, if you wish.

   I am a published gamebook author myself and like to write short gamebook stories to place on various appropriate internet sites to help promote my work. I store my own short stories on my own website as well.
2. 

   Mr. Ferrell says:

   January 11, 2008 at 6:30 am

   Nice. Thanks for the tip!
3. 

   Little Liz says:

   January 23, 2008 at 3:35 pm

   I remember doing that. My cousins and I called it “He Says, She Says.” Those were the good times. *Sigh*
4. 

   nickb says:

   September 1, 2010 at 9:25 pm

   Hey there – I run Protagonize ans just came across your post (a couple of years late, my apologies :). I wanted to mention that I’m putting together a bit of a focus group for teachers interested in using Protagonize for their classes.

   I’ve got a blog post up about it here:
   http://blog.protagonize.com/2010/07/14/calling-all-teachers/

   If you’re interested, I’d love to have you participate and get your feedback on our proposed changes to help support educators in their use of the site with their students.

   Cheers,
   -nick / protagonize