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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.