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Introducing Fictionsuit
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 10:59 pm on 3/31/2005
I’m pleased to be able to tell the world just exactly what it is I’ve been hacking on for all this time. By sometime this summer, we’ll open Fictionsuit to the world. “We” are myself and Ouroboros, a content editor at Everything2. I am a former heavy user of E2 with a background in literary hyperfiction, as well as an active reporter on games and their ongoing merge with social software. Fictionsuit is fundamentally about this latter kind of social play.
The intent of Fictionsuit is a function that was almost fulfilled by E2: that of collaborative fiction. We’ve been saying that it’s “like Wikipedia for things that don’t exist and haven’t been dreamt of yet.” To be more specific, Fictionsuit will support a kind of writing we might call “creative documentation”: the non-fiction-style of writing on fictional topics. This is what Jorge Luis Borges called “ficciones,” a word perhaps best coined in English as “fictives.”
Fictionsuit will be able to support many concurrent projects, and contributors are invited to be involved in as many of these projects as they find interesting. Fictionsuit contributors will generate ideas for the projects, some of them will be approved by the editors (”editors” is what we’re saying instead of “admins,” because Fictionsuit should be considered a publication as much as a platform). There will be a small number of public projects open at any given time, and the editors will likely create private projects for those interested. At first, we will focus on a single project at a time, and increase the number of simultaneous projects as the number of contributors increases.
Fictionsuit is for collaboration, which precludes both encyclopedia-izing an existing fiction and fleshing out your own personal world-building project. Fictionsuit is also not a place for posting short stories or fan fiction, as those are usually considered “complete” by their authors and hence don’t support collaborative play. (Fictionsuit projects will be licensed by default under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license; other licenses may be available on a per-project basis.)
Some of you may be familiar with the semi-competitive frameworks for fictive collaboration, Lexicon and Noteworthy. Fictionsuit will support those frameworks soon after launch and develop others as well, as we permute and pervert the wiki-like engine that we’ll start with.
As for the name, comics writer Grant Morrison coined it in The Invisibles to mean the identity you wear when you enter a story; computer gamers would call it an avatar. We thought it sounded much cooler than “fictive.com,” although that’s not bad either. But while alternate personae are not a big part of our initial vision for Fictionsuit, there’s something inherent in the fictive that doesn’t call to mind the starched-white-shirted neutral voice of Wikipedia, the more disheveled E2 or the million fractured faces of the authority-less web at large. We’re wise enough to know that our voice, our avatar, will be a bit more subversive. The devil wears gray flannel suits.
So get your game face on, people. We hope to have a closed beta version ready before the end of May; if you’d like to be considered for the beta, drop me a note at misuba@fictionsuit.com.
April 1st, 2005 at 6:03 am
I’m up for anything inspired by Borges.
I recall on E2 there was a project called Planetmovers that tried to do exactly this sort of collaborative world creation for the purposes of a series of interlocking short stories set in that world. The stuff we came up with as a group was quite interesting, but without any real framework for organizing our ideas, the project floundered and nothing much really came of it.
I have questions, though. What will the copyright policy be? Constructing such collaborative worlds invites a users to jump off from there and start writing their own narratives for personae, probably outside of the Fictionsuit site itself. I myself am frothing at the mouth for the chance.
There’s a problem in that, however. Original ideas for characters, features of a world, and its mechanics are generally considered the creative property of the writer. For example, I can write fan-fiction set in the Harry Potter world to my heart’s content (with all the exagerated homoeroticism that generally entails), but I certainly can’t go publishing an actual book set in that world, even were I to find a legitimate publisher who’d risk such a copyright violation.
The worlds of Fictionsuit, unlike individual novels’ settings, would be collaborative. But what happens when a user wants to take material from a fictive project and write his or her own stories based off them? Specifically, what happens when the user takes material (like some character figure, a magic system, a technology, whatever) that he didn’t contribute to the project?
If each user retains the copyright to his submissions, then the picture’s gonna get muddled pretty damn fast. Who’s inspired by who? What’s derivitive? What’s not? It would be a disaster to work out for the purposes of basing fiction off the world. Basicly, you couldn’t–in which case the fictives produced within Fictionsuit would be trapped there.
I’m not very familiar with the blizzard of alternate licenses the internet has tossed out with this problem in mind, but I think any non-copyright agreement with the users would need careful consideration. Would it really be alright if someone who contributed nothing to the site surfed on in, read through the collective content produced through the creativity of dozens of users working together, and lifted the material wholesale to write a short story or a novel? I’d personally feel like all the energy I’d put into that project had been stolen from me, but I can’t really see why it would be unacceptable.
To condense all that excess verbage: what would Fictionsuit’s policy recognize as fair use of the fictives produced? Without some firm means of recognizing user’s creative input without hampering an effort to craft microcosms within the fictive macrocosms, I’d find myself continually disappointed to help build a world I could never work with outside the context of Fictionsuit.
April 1st, 2005 at 3:54 pm
As you’ve just read, the default license for Fictionsuit projects will be the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. What we don’t come out and explain above is that whichever license a project’s drivers choose, and whether a given project is designated as wiki-able or not, players will be compelled to license their contributed content under the project’s license. Any given project will maintain a list of contributors, so that attribution for a project’s IP in general is as simple as copying and pasting.
But it feels like you’re putting the cart before the horse a little bit. We want to use Creative Commons licensing because we don’t want to muddy the waters for any derivative projects that do arise, but derivative projects are not fundamentally why we’re building Fictionsuit. Our project is the site itself and what happens there. We’re a stage, not a rehearsal room, and Fictionsuit projects will be works, not groundwork.
That said, I’m really excited to see what sorts of secondary effects that works created on Fictionsuit will have on the larger net and the larger world, and I am super glad you’re excited about it too.
April 27th, 2005 at 4:34 pm
Izu (as ever) makes a good point.
I like your idea and write a bunch of factual fictions and am only going further into that direction, however, copyright (for us dummies) must be an issue. My initial creative feelings about your proposed project are VERY positive, in the sense (as with E2, albeit differently, as a resource to help me write more work) of creation, but nervous without clarification as towards what my agent -I know; blahblahblah)would say/freak/fall over about :)
April 27th, 2005 at 5:31 pm
Yes, on the flip side, if you have professional obligations within which your “giving away” your writing is a problem, Fictionsuit projects that use the default licensing terms will not be for you. There will be other licenses available.