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.
:alert: 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. 😀