Branches: What could interactive writing do for us?
What if writing was interactive? Inspired by TikTok Duets & Git Forks
I’m new to Substack and have been inspired by newsletters that are exploring interactive writing. Some examples I stumbled across so far are:
Inviting readers to write to a prompt
- Chuck Palahniuk's Plot Spoiler (submissions in comments or tagging)
- love & liberation daily (contests, submissions in email)
Structuring interactive stories
- A Branching Narrative (allowing readers to make Choices via Polls and navigate those later via Numbered Choice Posts)
These are amazing in that they are pushing innovation on the platform and creating deeper sense of community. They’re also encouraging the reader to become involved (make choices, submit, join the conversation) as a participant.
Traversing the Tangle
In the case of prompts, I have not seen a way to semantically connect submissions (or branches) with the seed post on Substack (please let me know if I’m missing this). People submit their writing in comments, their own Posts, or off-platform via email. This puts the onus on the original author to collect & create Recap posts manually (at some specific point in time), and it is difficult to re-experience the thread of posts later. It gives the experience an artificial expiration date and is only going to be as coherent as the organizer’s ability to construct the context.
In the case where submissions are made in comments on the original post, there’s a concern of the original author not being able to properly reference the submissions with attribution. Either the OP publishes excerpts manually in a Recap post, or alludes to it with a sense of “you had to be there, read the old comment thread." There’s also a nod to licensing expectations, with authors telling people not to submit “gold” as a constraint. I think it’s fine that these are ephemeral moments-in-time now, but there’s an opportunity for them to be more lasting, engaging interactions as we figure out the model together.
Semantic Inspiration (TikTok Duets & Git Forks)
Two inspirations for models that allow more free-flowing, evergreen collaboration are TikTok Duets and Git forks. They answer questions of consent (opt-in), attribution & licensing, and handle the infinite logistics of semantic relationships between objects. Once enabled, these features allow collaborators to build on or diverge from the original work, while maintaining context.
What if we were able to Branch off someone’s poem or prompt (with their permission), and Substack took care of the attribution link, semantic navigation, and recap roll-ups? Then we could really build on each-others work and create some deep interaction loops.
In the case of interactive stories, there is so much potential. What if Substack allowed each writer to have their own “Session State” for a story thread? You could have an inventory, a log of choices made (instead of a single Shared choice for all readers based on majority Polls), and gameplay logic programmed by authors. This is maybe stretching the Substack platform intent, but if you allow Branching relationships between Posts, you can start to build this type of interactive storytelling experience on the platform (ZORK-style text adventures with 2024 media authoring tools, anyone?).
In either case, the roles of writer and reader start to wobble, and we’d encourage more people to express what’s on their mind, or how they see the story evolving. I’d love to connect with anyone who is doing work in this area, or who has a Newsletter that is pushing on the edges of this capability within Substack today!
I am trying this out by inviting people to branch off the beginning of an open-ended poem:
Van Miranda
Who else is interested in this, and what do you foresee us being able to do with interactive writing?