Legacy LD5

This is just an idea I'm tossing around here... Does everybody remember the old Goosebumps books? If you don't, they were a horror series that put you the reader into the situation of the protagonist, and allowed you to react to situations by giving you a few different choices and corresponding page numbers. Even if you didn't like horror, it was immensely entertaining. There was a similar non-horror series that came out not long afterwards with the generic title "Choose Your Own Adventure" with the same premise.

What I'm thinking of doing is writing down a few paragraphs, maybe a page or so, then presenting you with a number of different choices that will yield different results. It would take a lot of effort (and a lot of forum space) to write out a dozen different scenarios for every possible choice, so I would wait a while to see what the most common choice was, then continue writing based on that choice. The difference between this and the books is that I wouldn't immediately kill the protagonist for making a wrong choice. XD If this works, I'll be doing it both on FA and here.

Before I start though, I want to see if anyone is actually interested in it. It would be rather anticlimactic if I got all excited about this only to have maybe one person actually voting. So I'll tell you what, if I can get five different people between here and FA, I'll go through with it.

So... Who's interested in playing with some paws?

I'm sure I remember seeing something like this...

Found it: http://www.digiartistsdomain.org/lemons ... hoices.htm

Oh, that's cool! It's not exactly what I had in mind, but it's the same premise.

I fondly remember Give Yourself Goosebumps as well as the general-interest series. "Don't Eat the Purple Peanut Butter" was a favorite for obvious reasons. However, those stories were published with every possible branching path pre-written, allowing for a coherent narrative that could reveal, omit or even change details depending on the reader's previous choices. CYOA was the best hope books had of matching the replay value offered by videogames.

The concept you suggest (writing only the most popular choice) is far closer to the recent trend of interactive storytelling - MS Paint Adventures, RubyQuest and various offshoots. These have been successful largely due to the addition of digitally-drawn sketches with each post, and the writer/illustrator working under a very strict timeline and also somehow fitting in casual responses to comments/opinions not related to the current vote. A text-only story of this nature would have to be very clever or at least very prompt; otherwise interest would drop off quickly.

If you instead seek assistance on a collaborative writing project of this scale, a full-length PDF could be published. Each person would cover a range of pages, and a spreadsheet or flowchart could keep track of which pages led where, and who was in charge of filling them.

Heh, well I am on a pretty tight schedule, with finals coming up and my break only lasting so long, so there's no way I would have time to do anything on that level. Besides, as I mentioned before, there's no point in putting a lot of effort into something that nobody shows interest in. And right now, it's not looking like this is going to happen. :/

<insert rant about literature being unappreciated>

Again, it's not necessary to have a live audience as this type of story is being put together. That puts far too much pressure on yourself, especially in terms of some arbitrary effort-to-interest ratio. You could write something much like what Chikara linked, bits and pieces at a time, whenever you could find time. Without a bunch of folks hanging on your every word, you can set whatever deadline(s) you want. We wouldn't need to hear about the project at all until you were finished and ready to share.

If the reception is positive enough, you could reintroduce the interactive aspect for the sequel!

I suppose that's true, but just writing down a few paragraphs a day at most wouldn't be too difficult for me. I'll think about it, but if I'm going to do something like what you're suggesting, then I'll have to wait until after my finals. With that, it's not so much the writing itself as the organization that would take forever.