Choose Your Own Adventure #Life #writing

For a while, I've been thinking about writing a choose-your-own-adventure wiki. Imagine ten people collaboratively writing 500,000 words of choose-your-own-adventure in a month. (Hmm, would the text of the choices count toward the word-count goal?)

It turns out somebody beat me to it. There are a few things I was thinking about doing differently (like allowing anyone to edit existing pages, and having RSS feeds), but what they've got is pretty functional.

It's also proven to be quite amusing; since anyone can contribute, they get some colorful stuff (amid the stuff that's just stupid). One of the story pages includes the text "All those martial arts movies you watched as a kid really come in handy in this busy Roman marketplace.", and the choices from that point include "Offer his horse some peanut butter". I may have to make a NaNoWriMo dare out of those phrases come November.

(In case anyone is curious, the track of choices that led there was: Another Monday Morning > Call in sick > Go to the park under the bridge for a game of basketball with the bums > You pull out your pistol and shoot them all in the head... > go back in time to 6AD > pull a kung-fu move. Nice, logical progression, ain't it?)

I've only added two pages so far. One was just begging to be written (there was a knock at the door, and one of the choices for who was there was "Somebody deliver a pizza?" — I couldn't resist making fun of it). The other was just to cauterize one of the loose ends on a very bizarre story spike that had gone on way too long.

Quite entertaining. I've already spent three evenings reading through the "Another Monday Morning" story alone, and still haven't gotten through all the paths yet.