Can A Million Penguins Write A Wiki Novel?
This isn’t specifically Second Life-related, but it’s a project that a Second Life resident is helping to run and it’s very cool, so I thought I’d mention it here. SL resident Jeremy Neumann helped bring excerpts from the seminal metaversal novel Snow Crash to Second Life last August. Now, in the guise of his real-world avatar Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher at Pengiun Books UK, he’s created and launched a very interesting collaborative novel that’s being written by many people at once on a wiki. Anyone can contribute, and anyone can edit anyone else’s writing. The novel has been seeded with contributions from a team of MA students, but over the next six weeks anyone will be able to contribute, after which, it sounds like, pages will be locked and the novel “published,” at least in Web-based digital form. The progress will be chronicled on the Penguin blog. Already the wiki site has proved so popular that high volumes of traffic are forcing Penguin to switch in some heavier-hitting servers. No one at Penguin is making any claims for the quality of the finished product — they just want to see what will happen, and explore the results of crowdsourcing an artisitic work like a novel. I’m all for it. I’d love to see this kind of thing in Second Life, as well, whether it’s something made from words or prims. How can we make that happen?
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[…] 3pointd has a great post about a collaborative wiki/novel experiment. Being very interested in how these things self organize I thought I would take a look. I was instantly struck by the fact that it was being run out of DeMontfort University my old uni.(Leicester Polytechnic when I joined). All through this past year serendipty has played a huge part in the things I have chosen to look at and pursue. So this fits right in there now. The collaborative ability to tell a story will probably not make a stunning novel in the traditional sense. However we have plenty of novel writers to do that. Mark asks how we can get this sort of thing happening in Second Life? In reality (virtual) we have this to some extent already. Hursley private island is a self organized mix of buildings, that has over time changed and developed a plot of its own. Many of the builds in SL are collaborative creations, some planned with a storyline or style, others evolving. I think the real metaverse collaborative beauty though is temporal. An event, a chance meeting, a concert. How we choose to record these and tell them as stories (as we have in this blog over the past year) and the language and tools required is where we can all make some progress. The many expressions of all things Second Life in machinima parallel the real world of film and video. The blogs are newspapers/novels. Snapzilla a photo archive. Is there a place for a holographic history, ghosts in the machine to help us understand the significance of an event and share it? […]
http://glypho.com has been doing this for a while now. The format is different from wiki, in fact it specifically caters novel writers with its character and plot tools.
this is very interesting, also the link the previous reader mentions. i recently tried to analyse the state of open-source film making and the key problem i see is with mass collaboration on fiction works without any kind of limitations, someone taking final (undemocratic) decisions. if you ever tried to develop a good story or script, on your own and with others, you probably understand why this is so difficult. this is part two of (what turned out to become) a four part series about online video (and getting paid for it) and open-source film making, creative mass collaboration (see the second paragraph: “Collaborative Media Works”): http://indiworks.blogspot.com/2006/11/online-video-getting-paid-open-source_23.html