BLOG FICTION
This whole ANYEC thing has got me interested in fictional weblogs.
Incidentally, I’m going to start writing ‘weblog’ instead of ‘blog’ because holy christ does that word ever still suck. I thought I would get used to it, like when a band has a stupid name that you start to think sounds cool after you’ve heard it for a while.
“Tragically Hip.” “Pearl Jam.” “Fudge Tunnel.”
That hasn’t happened. To me, ‘blog’ still sounds like a synonym for ‘grogan’, so from now on the word shall only be used in oh-so-clever substitutions like RESERVOIR BLOGS.
Anyways, looking for info on fictional weblogs I started with a Guardian article from April 2004, How to write a blog-buster, which gives a pretty good overview of the state of this strange micro-genre. The article kicks-off with the case of Belle de Jour, the wildly popular and possibly fictional weblog of a London prostitute, (which I’d never heard of before today). Again, whether it’s fiction or not is beside the point. The point is that it could have been fictional, and this phenomenon gets people thinking about adapting creative fiction to this new medium.
One thing that inevitably gets added is interactivity, the bitch-goddess of online art. Before blog fiction there was something called Interactive Fiction. You know, the old text-based games like ZORK or Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy? Well, from the loins of these early pioneers two lineages burst forth: graphical adventure games, a genre which died of creative exhaustion with Gabriel Knight 3; and interactive fiction, which focused on the text.
Although Interactive Fiction was certainly interactive, it was what I like to call “shitty interaction,” a series of pointless hoops the reader must jump through in order to win the priveledge of enjoying the story. I’m told that Photopia is considered the high-water mark of interactive fiction. I tried it and wasn’t impressed enough to read/play for more than a couple hours, but it’s probably great if you like to solve arbitrary puzzles to unlock paragraphs of descriptive text. Or maybe I’m just impatient. (I used to really like those Steve Jackson choose-your-own-adventure books, but that was when I was younger and stupider.)
One characteristic that distinguishes most online fiction from a novel, (for example), is that online fiction is something which occurs in time. A post is made at a particular point in time, and this is built into the interface of modern weblogs. By definition, or at least entrenched convention, weblogs are a sequence of discrete entries ordered chronologically last-to-first. Given the simplicity of the concept, it’s a wonder it took so long to catch on as the design pattern of personal websites. It certainly wasn’t because of technical limitations.
A weblog is more like performing a play than writing a novel, a form which allows for improvisation and interaction with an audience. If ANYEC is fictional, then the most striking thing about it is the way the author addresses her audience and reacts to their comments. After her description of the extremely sinister interview, the comments are filled with people shouting “Don’t do it!” And then Alexa doesn’t. The commentators, (the audience), feel like they have some power to give Alexa advice which may affect her decisions, and the “story”’s direction. (In this case the description of the event seemed to be consciously written such that anyone would immediately see the danger, pretty well forcing the audience to advise her to steer clear.) If anybody can find an explicitly fictional weblog that does this, I’d be very interested to see it.
Unlike IF’s hoop-jumping, this sort of interactivity is voluntary and rewarding, it’s a donation instead of a cover charge. That’s the innovation of ANYEC over the comment-disabled Belle de Jour, (whether one or both or neither are fictional), and the innovation of weblog fiction over painful, anachronistic Interactive Fiction.
Of course, there are other ways. At ftrain.com each entry is a node in a network, connected to other nodes at the whim of the author. The result is a branching structure based on semantics rather than a linear chronology. But that isn’t what makes ftrain great, it’s great because the posts are actually interesting, funny, clever, weird, whatever.
I’ll post some reviews of my discoveries as I discover them.