Dan's Questions and Morbus' Introduction

[Morbus Iff]

>Who's defining the story, the content creator or the audience? Can the
>audience alter the story, or just the manner in which it's told?

I think the more important question at this point is: Who's defining the
world? The creator or the audience? It's impossible for one person to
create every single avenue that the audience will want to take
(audience-defined) -- at best you can make as realistic of a world as
possible with a central theme, and let them take it from there.

>Can "Choose your own adventure" work in this medium when it's failed in
>all the others?

I've always liked Choose Your Own Adventures... my friend and I had an idea
to create (well, actually it started out as two ideas, and then morphed
into one) a RolePlaying Game / Interactive Fiction story through HTML only
-- with no directions.

You had one story, with maybe 4 innocent links. Reading one story/chapter,
and then clicking on a link, sent you to another story - with four more
links, ad infinitum, looping and circling back. The more you read, the more
you grasped the tail. But you read what you wanted to read - instead of us
forcing you into chapter one, two, and three.

>The origins of the idrama list were that a couple of us got together
>with the idea of making some vision of interactive storytelling into a
>commercial venture. We eventually decided we had a whole lot more to
>learn, and we want to learn.
>
>So, introduce yourselves, give a quick rundown of where you are and
>where things are going, and let's get some discussion happening!

I'm Morbus Iff, real name Kevin Hemenway from Concord, NH. Morbus is latin
for disease, whereas Iff is based on Simon Iff - a character in Aleister
Crowley's book "MoonChild".

I run Disobey.com - home of Ghost Sites, NetSlaves, Low Bandwidth, Devil
Shat, Zero, and more - ten major sections in all, an eleventh in October.
Minor ideas and ventures are broken up in one section called "Detergent".

And now I'm going to ripoff Cameron's style of introduction, simply because
I have a bad head cold and I don't feel like thinking:

Just like CamWorld has a weblog, Disobey kinda has one as well - called the
"Disobey News Network". I keep archives of everything I've ever reported,
mentioned, and so on.

I too used to write a lot in school. Fiction mostly, which slowly evolved
from fantasy and science fiction when I was young to horror and
Vonnegut-eased nowadays. Most of my writing nowadays is centered around
Disobey - whether it be editorials for Devil Shat, or minor stories for the
Collected Works section. The idea mentioned above about the Interactive
Fiction piece was my prime jump to get back into fiction writing - but
alas, I have had no time to start. (This would probably be a great time to
look into it again).

My days are spent mostly working on Disobey or working at Total Net NH - an
ISP about 20 feet from my house whom Disobey is hosted on. I'm their only
employee and love the fact that the coding languages I would have learned
on my own (had I had time) are now required - and I'm getting paid to learn
them.

I run four mailing lists - mostly mail versions of the webcontent (Devil
Shat, Ghost Sites, NetSlaves, and Chico's Groove). I plan on starting a
fifth with my friend IGNORE the HYPE sometime in the coming months (hey!
speak up, man! I know you joined the list ;).

I'm really looking forward with doing a collective piece of interactive
fiction with everyone - utilizing our tons of talent to do something
interesting.





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