The web seems like a perfect medium for doing really interesting choose-your-own-adventure story interfaces. It's odd that there aren't really any examples (that I could find) that are more than just links to different pages. I wonder if it's just because video games, which are in many ways an extension of choose-your-own-adventure stories, are so dominant. I'm curious to see what sort of interfaces PlayStory comes up with.
Failbetter Games (http://about.failbettergames.com/), the people who made the excellent browser-based story game Echo Bazaar/Fallen London, recently released their toolset ("StoryNexus": http://www.storynexus.com/) in open beta for people to build their own story games with. And while it's a hosted application, they explicitly disclaim any ownership right to IP you create using StoryNexus, so you can build worlds there without worrying about problems taking the setting or characters to other media down the road.
Unfortunately, in my limited experiences with StoryNexus so far I have found it to be damn near incomprehensible to use. Hopefully they will clean up the interface and streamline the design process somewhat before calling it 1.0.
Interesting. Much more game-like than I was picturing. (I had in mind something like that old Choose Your Own Adventure series.) I guess the line between interactive story and game is pretty blurry. It's not clear what PlayStory is. The treatment of the feature list suggests a more story-oriented approach, less game-like.
"Beating" Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books is still to this day one of the funnest reading experiences I can remember. The other was House of Leaves (http://is.gd/njTgTf) which borrows a lot of concepts from the former (at least in terms of how you feel when you're flipping through pages frantically).
I know there have been a few attempts using wikis to recreate the experience (http://is.gd/GNwcAR), but the format just isn't quite right.
Maybe just thinking aloud, but the idea of being able collaborate with multiple people to create fractured stories that could be played by others sounds really promising. Curious to see how this evolves.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 22.6 ms ] threadUnfortunately, in my limited experiences with StoryNexus so far I have found it to be damn near incomprehensible to use. Hopefully they will clean up the interface and streamline the design process somewhat before calling it 1.0.
http://fallenlondon.storynexus.com/
It's a really well-done example of an interactive story game that's both "story" and "game." Lots of interesting ideas in there.
I know there have been a few attempts using wikis to recreate the experience (http://is.gd/GNwcAR), but the format just isn't quite right.
Maybe just thinking aloud, but the idea of being able collaborate with multiple people to create fractured stories that could be played by others sounds really promising. Curious to see how this evolves.