RE: Critique and Advice; the treadmill of adventuring.
05-11-2016, 09:57 PM
The mirror issue is a critical one, because as a genera, forum adventures are limited.
If you're a reader and you plan to invest several hours in a webcomic or other story, which would you choose: A carefully thought out and edited work, or a work slapped together with reader suggestions on an update by update schedule?
You'd be foolish not to choose the former! (I think this is a point worth discussing, so I'll leave it undefended here). Often, the primary motive for reading an adventure's backlog is to catch up so you can suggest for where it is now. But if that's your goal, then you're not trying to read a story, you're trying to play a game.
Now forum adventures, or interactive webcomics, whatever you want to call them, blur the line between story and game pretty well, but in all honesty, the rules of the game directly inhibit the telling of the story.
There is a larger post, somewhere here, about what the real advantages and disadvantages of forum adventures actually are. It's a discussion that involves questions like "is this a sustainable medium?" "can a forum adventure be financially viable?" "Can adventures draw in and handle larger audiences?"
EagleTime is a tiny space on the web, but the idea of the medium it is ostensibly built around is much larger, and one that, I think, should be explored and promoted beyond what a forum can offer.
Returning to ideas about mirrors, I recently discovered Adobe Slate, which although far form perfect, I think has real potential to make reading a mirror an engaging, unique process, separate from the adventure-suggesting portion.
If you glance through that, can anyone think of other resources that could expand the idea of what experiencing a mirror should be like? (Perezi comes to mind, but other than that I don't have many examples to go off.)
If you're a reader and you plan to invest several hours in a webcomic or other story, which would you choose: A carefully thought out and edited work, or a work slapped together with reader suggestions on an update by update schedule?
You'd be foolish not to choose the former! (I think this is a point worth discussing, so I'll leave it undefended here). Often, the primary motive for reading an adventure's backlog is to catch up so you can suggest for where it is now. But if that's your goal, then you're not trying to read a story, you're trying to play a game.
Now forum adventures, or interactive webcomics, whatever you want to call them, blur the line between story and game pretty well, but in all honesty, the rules of the game directly inhibit the telling of the story.
There is a larger post, somewhere here, about what the real advantages and disadvantages of forum adventures actually are. It's a discussion that involves questions like "is this a sustainable medium?" "can a forum adventure be financially viable?" "Can adventures draw in and handle larger audiences?"
EagleTime is a tiny space on the web, but the idea of the medium it is ostensibly built around is much larger, and one that, I think, should be explored and promoted beyond what a forum can offer.
Returning to ideas about mirrors, I recently discovered Adobe Slate, which although far form perfect, I think has real potential to make reading a mirror an engaging, unique process, separate from the adventure-suggesting portion.
If you glance through that, can anyone think of other resources that could expand the idea of what experiencing a mirror should be like? (Perezi comes to mind, but other than that I don't have many examples to go off.)