"So," you're asking yourself. "What exactly is Protagonize all about?"

Protagonize is an online community originally dedicated to the (nearly) lost art of the addventure (yes, that's spelled right), a very specific type of collaborative fiction. Recently, the site has been expanded to support the creation of linear stories, as well. We hope this will allow the site to attract a broader community of authors looking to create collaborative, interactive fiction.

Linear stories are familiar to everyone, but you may be asking yourself: how exactly does an addventure work? Early forms of this on the web date back over a decade, when Snoot.com popularized a site called "Choose Your Own Schizophrenia", a collaborative fiction site popular in the mid-to-late '90s. Of course, this all dates back to the old Choose Your Own Adventure™ series that started back in 1979 and ran until 1998, published by Bantam Books. To quote the wondrous Wikipedia (and to save us writing something that's already been explained better by someone else):

An addventure is a type of online interactive fiction that combines aspects of round-robin stories and Choose Your Own Adventure-style tales. Like a round-robin story, an addventure is a form of collaborative fiction in which many authors contribute to a story, each writing discrete segments. However, like a gamebook, the resulting narrative is non-linear, allowing authors to branch out in different directions after each segment of the story. The result is a continually growing work of hypertext fiction.

The idea to revamp the concept popped up a few months ago. The old web-based collaborative fiction implementations were always a lot of fun, but were generally pretty flawed or lacking in a variety of ways. The old Snoot.com addventure site was uncontrolled and organic; there was no moderation of any sort and people pretty much ran amok, causing havoc and generally enjoying themselves in a chaotic sort of way. Protagonize is an attempt to modernize the collaborative creative writing arena a bit and inject a little Web 2.0 love to produce a better interface. So far, so good.

Are we reinventing the wheel here?... well, hopefully not. So, what's different about Protagonize? Well, it allows a bit more flexibility all-around than the old implementations did. The ability to read and browse stories, branches (the individual posts that make up an addventure) and chapters is open to everyone, with or without an account. Protagonize members can post a story, branch or chapter wherever they want (registration is free, of course), as well as comment on author profiles or story fragments, and keep track of their own posts.

Members also have access to a bookshelf-style interface that allows them to flag favourite authors and stories, or add markers to track specific story branches or chapters, so as to not lose their place when reading a story. We believe that these are probably the handiest features of the bunch, as members can track their favourite authors, see what those authors have posted recently, easily navigate to new content, and the site will provide the user with suggested reading the entire time.

Readers can rate stories, which translate into author ratings based on average rating for all of an author's stories. Each author has their own personal profile page that's visible to everyone. The profile page aggregates each author's content and allows readers to see similar authors, related stories, etc. Relationships between user-created content is maintained mostly via a combination of story categories and tags, though we may expand on that in the future.

To top everything off, the homepage serves as a giant content aggregator for the entire site, listing off both hot and top rated stories, providing random snippets of content extracted from story sections throughout the site, as well as recent activity, newly posted comments, top story tags presented in a cloud format, and other relevant information. Both stories and authors have their own aggregator pages as well, which act as a more focused breakdown of the higher-level topics you'll find on the homepage.

A variety of RSS feeds are also available, such as hot stories, top rated stories, recent activity, and feeds for each author and story posted. Of course, we've got all sorts of other features in the works, too, but we have to save something for the official Protagonize blog, don't we? :)