Neverending story

At Protagonize.com, users contribute story threads to keep fictional narratives moving in different directions. (Taunt Media)

If you were a kid who came of reading age somewhere between 1979 and 1998, you likely remember the Choose Your Own Adventure series. Published by Bantam, these interactive novels boasted fantastical cover art, bearded mystery men with hooded eyes, valiant steeds and mythical foes. The adventures came couched in simple, declarative language and featured a direct, second-person address (“You are standing at the base of a pyramid…”). The hook, of course, was the multi-branched structure of each story — after every action, “you,” the reader, were able to choose how the plot would advance.

Admittedly, the choices were limited to the routes laid out by each volume’s author. But oh, the thrill of playing literary god! It was partly nostalgia for those books that inspired Nick Bouton, a 29-year-old software developer from Burnaby, B.C., to create Protagonize.com. It’s an online community devoted to the creation of “addventures,” round-robin-style fiction in which users create and develop interactive stories.

“I used to try and write those kinds of stories on my own,” says the fast-talking Bouton over the phone from his Burnaby home base. “It was a lot of fun. Back in the ’90s, there was a site called Snoot.com that had a build-your-own-adventure function, but it seems to have died now. I mean, there have always been interactive fiction things on the internet since the advent of hyperlinked media, but they’ve never seemed user-friendly or aesthetically appealing enough.”

A screenshot from Protagonize.com. (Taunt Media)

Enter Protagonize.com, which officially launched on Dec. 28. (Bouton did a soft launch on Christmas Day, but was still working out the kinks.) The site has an engaging interface, pretty typefaces and easy-to-read graphic buttons. The most active stories pop up on the left side of your screen under a Hot Stories flame.

While Protagonize offers users 18 different story categories, a quick scan suggests the bulk of the tales fall under the jurisdiction of “fantasy,” “science fiction,” “horror” or “humour.” Such genre bias isn’t surprising; the internet has long been a haven for niche interests. Protagonize seems at least partly inspired by the success of fan fiction, those titillating tributes in which people create new stories about beloved cult characters. Joss Whedon’s series Buffy the Vampire Slayer inspired reams of fan fiction; more recently, Harry Potter fans have weighed in with imagined scenarios for the boy wizard and his pals.

“Fun is the entire aim of the site,” Bouton offers. “It’s supposed to be a game site, a creative writing exercise. I love community sites, and participation is the whole point of Protagonize.com. I mean, some people might be afraid of writing, or worry about being criticized, but you don’t even have to log in to read the stories.”

While Bouton suggests that certain “professional writers” are taking advantage of Protagonize to test new material, the site is definitely more geared to weekend writers. (The closest anyone on Protagonize.com comes to being a professional writer is sci-fi/fantasy author N.D. Hansen-Hill, who posts as NDHH.) More of a Facebook-style community-interaction hub than a locus for creative development, Protagonize has many stories that are absurd, if not completely nonsensical.

Bouton contributes a considerable amount of writing himself, under the name surreal78, a nod to his year of birth and the former name of his consulting company, Surreallogic (now Taunt Media). Quality-wise, his offerings stand near the top of the Protagonize heap, and betray an odd avian obsession. (Choice titles: What’s with all the feathers?! and Wheeeel ooooof pooouuultry!)

By day, Bouton is a product manager and developer for a company called OpenRoad Communications. A computer nerd since he was a kid — his dad got him started at age five — Bouton started programming in junior high. He switched from art school to computer science when he realized “I’d make a pretty mediocre artist,” then dropped out of university for good when he got a summer job in the tech department of an ad agency.

A screenshot from Protagonize.com. (Taunt Media)

As of this writing, Protagonize has 200 registered users and 24,000 page views. On its best day so far — Jan. 3 — there were 9,700 views, likely due to the word-of-mouth buzz that Protagonize has been generating on techie blogs. Those statistics may seem incomprehensible, but it’s a fairly impressive performance for a site that’s essentially a labour of love.

“I don’t like a lot of the sites where they’ve created this false sense of community but they never ever interact,” he says. Bouton started strategizing the site to pass the time during his fiancée’s weeknight shifts at nursing school. Since he began sketching out the project in June 2007, it’s kept him busier than he ever expected. Over the last several weeks, he’s averaged four hours of sleep a night. Judging from his output, he’s up late cobbling together his own curious narratives.

Unlike the limited plot options dictated by the authors of those old-school Choose Your Own Adventures, these Web 2.0 versions can stretch on into perpetuity. Sometimes, Bouton plays the part of deus ex machina, stepping in to rescue a narrative from a premature death. Bouton cautions users that the quickest way to kill a ripping yarn is by offing its main character. In one hilarious instance, the hapless heroine of the tale “Hot or not?” succumbed to death by “cuncer” (likely a misspelling). Seeing this pitfall, Bouton quickly intervened. “Fortunately,” Bouton wrote, “Cuncer is 100% curable, unlike the notorious Cancer. Whew, close call there.”

For someone who writes so prolifically, Bouton seems to have little interest in actually publishing a novel. Given the middling quality of the writing, Protagonize.com is unlikely to produce the next literary star. The strength of the site, however, is the process than the product. Bouton claims that even at this early stage, users have inspired some unlikely innovations.

“I got emails from a couple ESL teachers who are interested in using Protagonize for what they call ‘action mazes.’ It’s an exercise for teaching English in which one student will write a story and pass it on to the next student, creating a self-contained round robin. To do that, though, you’d have to be able to create private groups, so I’m trying to figure out how to make that happen in the next little while. It’s my next big project.”

Adapting the site for educational and private uses down the road is his best bet for turning Protagonize into a profitable enterprise, Bouton admits. For now, he’s trying to keep his project self-sustainable through basic ad revenues, but his vision extends into the future.

“I don’t get paid enough that I can quit my day job just yet, but I have two other sites I’m developing in addition to this one, so the long-term goal is, yeah, to retire on this stuff,” he says kind of sheepishly. “My dad actually ran a digital camera review site from 1998 to 2004, just an online magazine, and he sold it to Jupitermedia, which is a pretty huge digital media site. He just stepped down as managing editor and can basically retire comfortably, so he’s kind of my role model.”

Sarah Liss writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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