All Together Now: Collective Knowledge, Collective

Narratives, and Architectures of Participation

Scott Rettberg
The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey
Arts and Humanities, Literature Program

ABSTRACT suggests in Invisible Rendezvous, [37] there are historical reasons

This essay is an exploration of the history and methodologies of for the rise of the author, which can be boiled down to
collective narrative projects, and their relationship to collective accountability, marketing, information management, combating
knowledge projects and methodologies. By examining different piracy, and the “genius model” that explains quality writing as the
forms of conscious, contributory, and unwitting participation, the product of extraordinary minds. The myth of the solitary author,
essay attempts to develop a richer understanding of successful toiling in isolation on the great work, is largely a convenience to
large-scale collaborative projects. The essay then examines large- simplify the complex collaboration involved in making and
scale architectures of participation in Wikipedia and Flickr to distributing books; the idea of authorship is driven more
extrapolate from those observations potential methodologies for fundamentally by legal and market concerns than by artistic ones.
the creation of collective narratives. In the domain of electronic literature, the collaborative effort
involved in creating, publishing and distributing works is more
Keywords clearly evident, if only because there is effectively no electronic
Collective, social, systems, literary, collaboration, hypertext, literature publishing industry. The roles of contributors such as
constructive, constraints, writing, process, architecture, designers, artists, and editors are typically more clearly
participation, narrative, literature acknowledged because without assistance, authors are compelled
to do everything by themselves. There are few traditional
publishers of electronic literature, so there is no apparatus in place
1. Social Systems to keep the labor of producing and distributing the work invisible.
When we are with others, we are always something other than
what we are when we are alone. In the phenomenological If, for the past few centuries, literary culture has centered on the
approach he describes in Being and Time, Heidegger distinguishes cult of authorship, collectively written works of literature are not
between Da-sein, being in the world, and Mitda-sein, the state of unknown in literary studies. Both the Judeo-Christian Bible and
being-together-in-the-world [18]. In discussing how we arrive at the works of Homer, for instance, could be considered as
consensus, Habermas writes of “linguistically generated collective texts. The writing of the Old and New Testaments took
intersubjectivity,” the use of language to create a subject that is place over about two thousand years and involved at least forty
not the self, but subjectivity shared with others [16]. Luhmann, in different writers, some of whom were adapting elements of an
Social Systems, argues that people are not society, but parts of its oral tradition. The processes of editing, canonizing, and
environment [16]. Society functions as a system in its own right. translating the Bible are also collective endeavors, which will
Luhmann’s distinction is important to consider in a network likely continue to be practiced by different sects for the
context: whenever people are collaborating on a project of foreseeable future. And while we assign the “authorship” of the
knowledge sharing or creative production, they are collaborating Iliad and the Odyssey to one figure, “Homer,” almost nothing is
not only with other people, but with a system which they, the definitely known about Homer as a historical figure. Someone
other participants, and the communicative environment help to living between the 12th and 8th Century B.C. gathered, synthesized
create. In networked computer environments in particular, and wrote down pieces of an oral tradition of poetry originally
collaboration is always both collaboration with other people and passed from generation to generation. While the individual or
with systems. Processes are co-creators of collective knowledge. group who aggregated, edited, and inscribed the Odyssey was
Any collaboration is the product both of its authors and the social instrumental in the fact that we are now able to translate, read and
system their collaboration creates. enjoy the epic today, Homer is best understood not as an author of
the solitary genius model, but as a function in a social system of
collective authorship.
2. Collaboration and Literary Culture
Printed books are almost always products of collaboration, not 3. Hypertext and Collective Knowledge
necessarily in the sense of multiple authors writing together, but
The idea of hypertext itself is based to some extent on harnessing
in the less-considered sense of multiple people working together
collective knowledge. From the moment the idea of associative
to produce an edited, designed, bound, printed, and distributed
linking was conceptualized, hypertext has been associated with
artifact. Yet literary culture operates in a manner that makes the
collective knowledge. Even the Memex, the stand-alone device
contributions of those involved in the production and distribution
imagined by Vannevar Bush in his 1946 essay “As We May
of books, other than the author, less visible. Asked to name their
Think,” was based on the idea of making collective knowledge
favorite authors, almost any reader could rattle off a list of writers.
available to individuals in new associative ways. The operator of
Ask same readers who their favorite book designer, typesetter, or
the Memex would record the trails of associations he constructed
editor is, and you’re likely to draw a blank stare. As Rob Wittig
over the course of his research. These trails would then become with exploratory hypertexts, constructive hypertexts require a
the foundation of further research by others. Bush envisioned “a capability to act: to create, to change, and to recover
new profession of trailblazers, those who find delight in the task particular encounters within the developing body of
of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the knowledge. [21]
common record.” Although Bush imagined a device based on
What Joyce terms “exploratory” hypertexts are more in line with
microfilm, rather than computers, we might usefully think of the
Wikipedia as one example of the “new forms of encyclopedias” the idea of finished “works” we are familiar with from book
Bush envisioned, “with a mesh of associative trails running culture. Exploratory hypertexts are stable editions. The work itself
through them” [9]. is understood as a separate entity from the reader’s interaction
with it. Thus, in the hypertext system Joyce discusses, the reader
Ted Nelson, who coined and conceptualized the term “hypertext,” may explore, mark, and make annotations to an exploratory
conceptualized Xanadu, his vision of an ideal hypertext system. hypertext, but in doing so the reader is not modifying the work
Nelson describes a hypertext system based on the idea that each itself. In a constructive hypertext, neither the structure of the work
field has a “literature,” a “system of interconnected writings,” nor its contents are yet fixed. All exploratory hypertexts were first
persistent but open to constant expansion: constructive hypertexts. The pleasure of a constructive hypertext
is not received narrative, but the process of constructing a
In our Western cultural tradition, writings in principle remain narrative topology. Constructive hypertexts can be individually
continuously available—both as recently quoted, and in their written, in which case the author/reader is interacting with her
inviolable incarnations—in a great precession. [28] own creation, or written collectively, in which case a community
Nelson asserts that individual researchers always have their own of reader/writers are actively interacting with, forging
thought-trail of associative links through a given body of material. connections, expanding upon, and reacting to the work of others.
He notes that a field’s collective view of its own past is A constructive hypertext can then be as productively understood
furthermore subject to constant reinterpretation. Nelson bases the as a participatory writing performance, an “event” as well as a
file system of Xanadu on the idea that an ideal literature would “work.”
both remain continuously accessible and that any given item could Both constructive and exploratory forms of hypertext literature
be linked to any other item in the database according to any have been written and published, though there are considerably
criteria. more notable examples of exploratory hypertext literature
Nelson considers the absent link, the lacuna, to be as important as published in both Storyspace and web formats than there are of
those already forged: constructive literary hypertext.

Within bodies of writing, everywhere, there are linkages we 5. Types of Constructive Collaborations
tend not to see. The individual document, at hand, is what we Most classic Storyspace hypertexts including Joyce’s afternoon, a
deal with; we do not see the total linked collection of them story [20] and Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl [19] are purely
all at once. But they are there, the documents not present as exploratory. Deena Larsen’s Marble Springs [22], the story of the
well as those that are, and the grand cat’s cradle among them people of a Colorado mining town, enabled readers to contribute
all. [28] to the story by adding scenes and character biographies to the
Nelson emphasized the importance of the ability to introduce new work’s HyperCard stacks. While published as an exploratory
material, and of new methods of organizing material that could work, Cathy Marshall and Judy Malloy’s Forward Anywhere [24]
coexist simultaneously with extant systems. Xanadu would not wore its constructiveness on its sleeve more explicitly than other
only preserve existing connections between bodies of writing, it early hypertexts, by virtue of the self-conscious collaborative
would allow for new ways of connecting the material according to process through which it was written.
the values of future readers. Many hypertext narratives on the web are exploratory, an author
One limitation of the system Nelson imagined was that the core presenting a finished “work,” typically within a similar apparatus
technologies would remain centralized. The most successful to that of a print publication, for instance as an article in an online
hypertext systems since, including the World Wide Web itself, new media journal such as frAme, Beehive, ebr, or the Iowa
have been based on extensibility, the ability to adapt to and Review Web. During the first stages of its evolution, the web
integrate both new technologies and new systems of organizing retained many aspects of print culture, including the terminology
material. We experience the web not as a unified hierarchy of used to describe web “pages,” web “publishing,” and web
organized information, but as a collective pool of knowledge, “journals.” It was not uncommon in the Web’s early years to hear
which we can access, view, and reorganize in a variety of ways. it described as “the biggest thing since Gutenberg” to happen to
the written word. Beyond its initial promise as a widely
4. Constructive Hypertext accessible, inexpensive, and global publishing platform, however,
In considering not merely organized aggregations of collective the web has also retained the initial promise of hypertext to
knowledge, but in particular collective narratives, it is useful to change the nature of the reader’s interaction with the writing and
consider the distinction that hypertext author Michael Joyce made reading of texts. The web is not simply a global library of
between “exploratory” and “constructive” hypertexts. individual texts, but offers the potential for new types of
collective authorship.
Scriptors use constructive hypertexts to develop a body of
information which they map according to their needs, their Early experiments in collective narrative on the web included
interests, and the transformations they discover as they “chain stories,” in which participant readers would build upon the
invent, gather, and act upon that information. Moreso than contributions of previous authors in order to further develop a
sequential narrative. Even concepts as rudimentary as “The
World’s First Collaborative Sentence,” [8] to which readers were preferably several player characters are necessary in order for the
encouraged to contribute a phrase, flirted with the promise of potential narrative to become narrative. The unfolding interactions
literature authored by no single person, but by the collective effort between the characters are typically what would be retold as a
of many people. Roberto Simanowski has described “Beim “stories” from the MOO. There are examples of MOOs built with
Bäcker,” a German chain story initiated by Carola Heine in 1996. “story-disclosing objects” [23] and even time-based dramas that
Heine began the story with the introduction of a woman buying unfold as the reader enters a particular room, but the majority of
lollipops for three girls short on change in a bakery. A male the collaborative storytelling involved is either descriptive or
contributor then responded to the first section. He wrote from a takes place in the course of an active interaction with another
different perspective and changed the character in a way that the character. Like a work of interactive fiction, a MOO is only a
first author did not appreciate. The initial author then responded in potential story until readers respond to and perform within the
the next section, attempting to correct the second author’s text. Unlike most interactive fiction, MOOs are typically
contribution while integrating it into her portrayal. Other authors cosmopolitan in the sense that the architecture of the virtual space
who introduced further characters with their own trajectories then is written collectively, and the dialogue is primarily dependent on
continued the experiment. Simanowski describes this type of multiple human intelligences interacting simultaneously in the
collaborative writing in terms of confrontation. The principle same textual space.
limitation of a linear collaborative narrative of this sort is that it
relies on an intimate and successful relationship between any Different ideas of coherence apply in constructive writing
given chapter and those that precede it. Putting voice and style environments than in fixed narratives. When a writer participates
aside, the success of the story depends on continuity and causality, in a MOO, “play” takes precedence over “work.” Narrative
and on implicit contracts between the various contributing writers emerges from the interaction of writer/characters with each other
to respect the ontology presented in the early chapters in in an environment structured for that purpose. Insofar as writing
events in MOOs constitute collective narratives, they are
producing the later chapters. Simanowski reports that this lack of
agreement caused problems for the project, “In the end, we realize narratives written in the present, for a participatory audience, with
that a new author hardly takes into account the legacy left by his the intention of provoking a response from readers who are also
predecessors” [33]. Without any explicit agreements between writing in the same space.
authors or editorial oversight, chain stories often succumb to
incoherence. 6. Writing Process of The Unknown
Like the Hypertext Hotel or a MOO, the collaborative hypertext
Robert Coover’s early electronic writing workshops at Brown novel The Unknown [15] was, for a period of about four years
University experimented with a collective constructive hypertext, (1998-2002) a constructive hypertext undergoing expansion and
the Hypertext Hotel. Loosely based on George Perec’s Life, a revision. New episodes being added to the work, links were added
User’s Manual [30], the hotel offered a spatial metaphor for a and removed, and the general structure of the hypertext changed.
collaborative writing event: The Unknown was written primarily by William Gillespie, Dirk
Stratton and myself, though about a dozen other writers and artists
In addition to the individual fictions, which are more or less
played some hand in its construction. The Unknown was not a
protected from tampering in the old proprietary way, we in
completely open collective narrative, but the product of ongoing
the workshop have also played freely and often quite
and shifting relationships between authors who knew each other
anarchically in a group fiction space called “Hotel.” Here,
fairly well.
writers are free to check in, to open up new rooms, new
corridors, new intrigues, to unlink texts or create new links, We began with a general scenario (we would write a satirical
to intrude upon or subvert the texts of others, to alter plot hypertext about a book tour), but beyond that there was little
trajectories, manipulate time and space, to engage in dialogue conscious agreement about how the plot(s) might proceed, how
through invented characters, then kill off one another’s the characters might develop, the general themes of the work, or
characters or even to sabotage the hotel’s plumbing. [12] how the work was to be structured. There was nonetheless a
certain general social contract in effect: if we agreed to nothing
As Coover described it, the Hypertext Hotel was never a fixed
else, we agreed to read the scenes that the others had written, to
edition, not a work, but a writing process of subversion and play.
link to and from them when appropriate, and to allow those
Although some fragments of the Hypertext Hotel can be found
previously written scenes to provide a context for the scenes that
online [13], if one were to assess the hotel as a finished work, one
we would subsequently write. That is not to say that we
would find it in disrepair. The Hypertext Hotel was always a
determined chronological relationships between given scenes;
writing event, anarchic in nature, never intended to conclude.
early in the process of writing The Unknown, we abandoned the
The relatively early hypertext experiment (1993-1996) of the idea of establishing precise chronological relationships between
Hypertext Hotel was similar in structure to the type of collective all the scenes in the novel. We structured the story in terms of
storytelling employed in MOOs and MUDs, in that its primary geographical space more than in terms of chronology: the
organizing principle was the description of imaginary spaces. In character of the place where a thing happened was given more
these virtual environments, setting exists on a different diegetic importance than when it happened. The scenes are linked by
level from plot and character. While rooms and objects can recurring motifs and tropes rather than by sequence.
possess both descriptions and behaviors, MUDs exist only as
Because it was an extensively multilinear hypertext novel with
potential narrative until fulfilled by participant readers. The
many associative links through different scenes, we realized early
players become architects of their own rooms within a MOO,
in the writing process that the novel couldn’t be dependent on any
contributing to a collective textual geography. While a great deal
type of traditional narrative arc or sense of closure. The majority
goes into the writing of descriptions of rooms, objects, and
of our readers would read only fragments of the hypertext, and
personal descriptions in MOOs and MUDs, at least one and
those fragments would have to function individually. We began 7. The Use of Constraints
talking about The Unknown as a picaresque, scattered across a Successful collaboration is always built upon constraints, whether
vast territory of time and space. This allowed us some degree of the creators of the collective work explicitly agree upon the
flexibility in terms of the ontological continuity of the story. constraints or they are simply built into the system used to create
Certain tropes, character tics, and obsessions recur across scenes the work. Unlike individually authored works, collaboratively
and serve as a kind of connective tissue, but the characters of The authored works are both the work itself and the series of
Unknown could not be said to “develop” in the traditional sense. negotiations between subjects that govern the work’s creation.
There are plenty of character developments in many different
scenes, but they don’t follow an overall arc toward epiphany or Harry Mathews addresses the question of why one would want to
catharsis. write under constraints in his ebr essay, “Translation and the
Oulipo: The Case of the Persevering Maltese”:
During the bulk of the time that The Unknown was being written,
The Oulipo supplies writers with hard games to play.
play took the place of explicit agreement between the authors on
They are adult games insofar as children cannot play
the directions in which the multivalent work would proceed.
most of them; otherwise they bring us back to a familiar
Because the characters of the hypertext were eponymous with the
home ground of our childhood. Like Capture the Flag,
authors, the writing got personal, albeit in a playful way. As in a
the games have demanding rules that we must never
MOO, the collaborative writing process of The Unknown was
forget (well, hardly ever), and these rules are moreover
oriented towards play in the present moment and towards
active ones: satisfying them keeps us too busy to worry
provoking a response from the other participant authors. The
about being reasonable. Of course our object of desire,
writing process became a kind of elaborate version of the dozens,
like the flag to be captured, remains present to us.
each of us taking control of the others’ characters and putting
Thanks to the impossible rules, we find ourselves doing
them into increasingly absurd situations, and then challenging the
and saying things we would never have imagined
author to extricate his doppelgänger from whatever
otherwise, things that often turn out to be exactly what
unpleasantness his cohort had concocted for it. I woke one
we need to reach our goal. [26]
morning to find that the character named “Scott Rettberg” had
The forms of constrained literature range from the very complex,
become a heroin addict, Dirk Stratton opened his web browser to
for example the constraint to “write a 2002 word story that is also
find that he had become a suspect cult leader, William Gillespie
a letter palindrome,” followed by Nick Montfort and William
discovered that the character with his name had suffered from an
Gillespie in producing their 2002 [14], or “write a novel without
unfortunate bungie-jumping accident. Unlike a MOO however,
using the letter E,” followed by Georges Perec in his A Void [31],
the play of writing in the present moment was heuristic,
to the more mundane, such as “write only interior descriptions,”
conducted not for its own sake, but in order to arrive at a
or “write episodes no longer than 500 words in length.” Even Mad
“finished” scene.
Libs, those juvenile writing games wherein the reader is enlisted
As we were writing The Unknown, we experimented with a wide to contribute random adjectives, proper nouns, names of places,
variety of collaborative writing processes, ranging from in-person types of animal, etc. before reading the resulting zany story, are a
get-togethers where we would literally take turns at the keyboard, rudimentary form of constrained literature. In essence, a constraint
to collective expeditions, when we would haul a laptop to a is simply a rule that a participating writer agrees to follow in the
location and write a scene set there. Occasionally we would invite process of producing writing. The constraint itself need not be
others, friends and traveling companions, to sit in for a session or evident to the reader; indeed it is typically not revealed. The
two. In addition to this form of “live” collaboration, we also wrote overall architecture into which a piece of constrained writing
scenes and some linear sequences individually. might fit also needn’t be evident to the contributing writer.
To the extent that The Unknown succeeded as an experiment in Literary critics in the structuralist camp have long insisted that
writing a collaborative hypertext novel, its success was dependent there are deep structures to story, and that any story can be
on the fellowship of its authors. While we had very few explicit discussed in terms of those structures and shared elements. In his
agreements, along the way we had many conversations about the Morphology of a Folk Tale, an analysis of Russian folk tales,
general direction of the project and the structure of the resulting Vladimir Propp maintains that that they can all be classified
“work.” While The Unknown was certainly a writing event, a kind according to thirty-one narrative functions fulfilled by seven types
of performance, it was also always intended to result in an end of dramatis personae [32]. Regardless of how one feels about the
product. The Unknown is an example of a type of collaboration application of structuralist theory to works of literature generally,
directed by play, negotiation, confrontation, and compromise. Its structuralist ways of thinking can be quite useful in the context of
authors understood each other both as people and as writers. developing a collective storytelling system, or for that matter a
Without these pre-existing relationships and ongoing negotiations storytelling “engine” of any kind. In designing the interactive
about the shape of the story, the project would neither have come drama Façade, for instance, Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern
to pass nor to completion. designed the engine to track an Aristotelian dramatic arc, based on
a system of “beats” described in Robert McKee’s screenwriting
While the hypertext novel itself is expansive, the personalities guide, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of
involved were known to each other, and for that reason we were Screenwriting [25].
able to make up the rules of collaboration as we went along.
Collective narrative projects in which the majority of contributors If truly collective web narratives, open to contributions from
do not know each other pose different challenges than anyone on the network, are to be successful as stories, they either
comparatively small-scale collaborations such as The Unknown. need to be edited and structured by some subset of the
contributors, or need to be structured by the system used to create
the work. The larger the scale of the collaboration, the more
important it is that contributors’ roles in the writing of the project writing methodologies were highly structured, such as a set of
are clearly defined, as are the constraints under which individual seventeen instructions intended to elicit a thorough description of
contributions should be written. exterior and interior settings (56), while others elicited
anonymous one-line suggestions for major plot turns in the novel
Some collaborative electronic writing projects are essentially such as “What happened to Proteus?” (the main character of the
nothing but constraints. The site resulting from such a project is
novel) and “What was Proteus’ mission in Seattle?” The architects
essentially an aggregation of examples of that particular of Invisible Seattle were inviting both macro and micro-level
constraint. The “Noon Quilt” produced by the trAce Online input. It’s relevant that even before the project involved a
Writing Community, during five months in 1998-1999, is one computer of any kind, the invisibles had “begun calling text ‘data’
such project [2]. The project asked its contributors to look out and spoke of gathering contributions in ‘data files’” (69). In the
their window and record what they saw at mid-day. The project process of assembling a collective narrative, the invisibles thought
resulted in two quilts – web pages with a quilt format, featuring of themselves less as authors than as functions of an enormous
animated patches, each of which leads to a fragment of story. The text-machine.
result is not a coherent narrative, but a pastiche of a more than two
hundred vignettes. The project was successful in inspiring After this summer of engaging Seattle writ large in a variety of
collective writing activity, including contributions from writers all constrained writing assignments, the invisibles found their larders
over the world, and in providing a window into the offline worlds stocked with more storytelling material than one novel could
of a writing community typically connected only in virtual space. possibly contain. A group of invisibles culled and remixed several
different versions of the material into versions of a novel. The
8. Writing Process on a Large Scale most widely distributed version, Invisible Seattle: The Novel of
Seattle by Seattle (version 7.1 published by Function Industries
Collective Narrative: Invisible Seattle Press), Wittig reports:
One of the most successful experiments in collective narrative
took place well before the widespread adoption of the internet. was a flagrant, multi-genre collision involving the noveau
Invisible Seattle [37] was a writing group first formed in 1979, roman, a Dos Passos/Joycean catalog of particulars, the pulp
which regularly gathered in the basement of Eliot Bay bookstore detective/thriller genre, careful historiography, and a full
to present its members with a variety of collaborative, load of what one kind commentator termed “je ne sais the
psychogeographic, and Oulipan writing games. The group’s first fuck quoi.
project was the Map of Invisible Seattle, a project loosely based The nature of the material that ended up in the novel was to some
on Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities [10]. The project’s intention extent determined by the constraints that governed the nature of
was to recreate the city of Seattle, substituting draconian the data gathered. A writing process guided by different
modernist structures with “architectural visitors,” and imaginary constraints would have generated different types of material from
spaces, for instance replacing the Space Needle with the Eiffel the same group of writers.
Tower, and the Kingdome with the Coliseum of Rome.
A collective narrative project such as Invisible Seattle cannot be
During the summer of 1983, the invisibles launched a described solely on the basis of the published work or works that
multifaceted data-gathering project throughout the city of Seattle, proceed from it. As Wittig reports one of the invisibles remarked
the goal of which was to produce a novel authored by the city on IN.S.OMNIA, the BBS where many of the group’s other
itself. The methodologies employed in the construction of experiments took place, “There cannot be one, authorized version
Invisible Seattle are useful to consider as we contemplate of the novel, just as no one, neat version of the city is the city.”
contemporary network-based collective narratives. Different Invisible Seattle was both the published versions of the novel and
strategies were deployed to collect writing for the collaborative all of the other versions that could have been derived from the
novel including “roving safaris” conducted by “literary workers” same larger pool of story material the invisibles gathered. It was
who would roam the city with questionnaires asking questions of also all of the events and interventions through which the texts
passersby. Other ways the group gathered material included mad- were gathered. Any type of collective narrative must be
lib style fill-in-the-blanks; clip-out-and-return coupons distributed understood not only terms of end results, but also as a
in The Daily Zeitgeist encouraging readers to contribute photos performance.
along with descriptions of settings, and even soliciting major plot
developments; data (such as overheard conversations and The editorial process of constructing the versions of the novel of
descriptions of quotidian life) gathered via a call-in show of a Seattle is not described in great detail in Invisible Rendezvous,
local radio-show; and finally by having anonymous participants though it appears that the procedures that guided this task were
type segments of narrative into a fantastical word-processor improvised, and not aspects of a preconceived system. In
“Sheherazade II -- the first of a new generation of literary retrospect, we can certainly imagine enhancements to the Invisible
computers,” at Bumbershoot, a Seattle arts festival. Seattle project. Twenty years after the writing event, readers can
consult only accounts of the project and the various printed
The novel experiment of Invisible Seattle involved thirty active editions of the novel. If all of the text involved in the project had
‘literary workers’ who spent a summer combing Seattle “in search been archived electronically, one could conceive of the project as
of novelistic fodder.” The project captured the imagination of the a Nelsonian hypertext, which would include both the end product,
city, and was covered in national print media and local radio and the finished versions of the novel, and all of the texts that
television. The project’s climactic writing event at Bumbershoot preceded the final versions. The collectivity of the endeavor could
featured the Mayor, Charles Royer, throwing out the first word. also extend to the editorial process. Given access to all of the
The writing process of Invisible Seattle was idiosyncratic, source texts, and a system to rearrange the fragments, every reader
simultaneously systematic and anti-systematic. Some of the could remix their own version of the collective narrative.
9. Collective Play and Performance in daily lives. Jane McGonigal describes the approach of “The
Beast,” the first large-scale ARG:
MMORPGs and ARGs
We can distinguish between collective narrative projects that The game called players at home, faxed them at work,
result in a literary experience that can be revisited and re- interrupted their favorite television shows with cryptic
experienced by non-contributing readers and collective narrative messages, and eventually even mailed them packages full of
projects, such as MOOs, that are intended to be experienced as game-world props and artifacts via the United States Postal
event, game, or performance. In recent years, the most populated System. The Beast recognized no game boundaries; the
and utilized collective narrative systems in digital culture are not players were always playing, so long as they were connected
works of literature, but massively multiplayer games, virtual to one of their many everyday networks. [27]
worlds, and alternate reality games.
The basic approach of the ARG is to breach the ontological
The relationship between games and narrative has been boundary between network play and lived reality, helping the
extensively discussed elsewhere. After the smoke of the border players to suspend their sense of disbelief by immersing them in
skirmish between the narratologists and the ludologists has the game. To enhance this sense of ontological fusion, the creators
cleared, it seems reasonable to declare the result an armed truce. of The Beast denied that it was a game. Both The Beast and I Love
While it is generally agreed that games can’t be described solely Bees spawned large communities of players. One of the
in the terms used to describe narratives, which aren’t adequate to compelling aspects of these, and most other ARGs, is that the
describe gameplay, there is also general agreement that narrative work of solving them is distributed across groups of users. The
is an element of many gaming experiences. Elements of games motivation of the player involved in the ARG is not an individual
including backstory, setting, and non-player characters can be reward, but to make a contribution to a collective endeavor. While
described in narratological terms, and games recollected and the storyline of the game is guided by “puppet masters” who write
recounted are themselves narratives. the backstory and puzzles, provide the clues, and prompt the
players in a variety of ways, the players experience most of the
Massively multiplayer online role-playing games by definition game as a collaborative hunt for clues that takes place on
involve collective activity. Although games such as World of discussion boards. McGonigal reports that some members of the
Warcraft or Everquest take place in carefully constructed Cloudmakers, a group of players who coalesced around The Beast
environments with quests and challenges provided by the game’s and figured themselves “a collective intelligence unparalleled in
designers, many of the other characters a player will encounter entertainment history,” even banded together after 9/11 in an
and perhaps cooperate with in a group or guild are also players. attempt to harness their skills, which had proved adept at solving
The interaction and dialogue with these other player characters an orchestrated mystery online, in solving the real crime of the
comprises a group performance, each of the players performing a terrorist attack on New York. The players felt so empowered by
role in addition to playing a game. their experience of solving “The Beast” together that they felt they
In addition to MMORPGs, in recent years virtual world could together solve any puzzle laid in their path.
simulations have become increasingly popular. Virtual worlds The term “puppet masters” implies a different relationship
such as Second Life and There provide players with avatars, rich between ARG designers and players than between either
environments, activities, and social structures, but they do not computer game designers and players, or between authors and
provide players with specific quests, challenges, or goals. readers. A puppet master causes his puppets to move, and uses
Gameplay in this context does not consist of achieving objectives them for the entertainment of an audience. In some ARGs the
laid out by the game designers, but in the development of a puppet master’s actions literally set the players in motion: for
distinctive player character and in compelling and meaningful instance in I Love Bees, the puppet masters sent players rushing to
interaction with other players. In Second Life, players can specific phone booths to catch the latest installment of the story.
additionally develop their own in-game objects, stores and The relationship between the puppet masters and the players is
attractions. Other players can then purchase these virtual however in reality much more symbiotic than that of a puppeteer
commodities and services. Linden Labs, the company behind and his marionette. If ARGs were mystery novels, the puppet
Second Life, provides player/developers with 3D modeling masters would be responsible for authoring the crime, the setting,
software and other tools to create in-game objects, but does not most of the characters, and the clues. The crucial role of the
claim ownership of the resulting content. By allowing players to detective, and the narrative of unfolding the plot, is left to the
keep intellectual property rights to objects they create in Second players. The simultaneity of ARGs further complicates the
Life, the game’s designers have explicitly acknowledged that relationship between puppet master and player. The puppet
Second Life is a collective endeavor, that its players are also masters monitor and respond to player discussions and activities
designers [4]. as the ARGs unfold. The puppet masters of The Beast were
The notion of play in virtual worlds is distinctly collective, worlds shocked at the speed with which the Cloudmakers solved the
apart from the platform games of yore. The form of play in puzzles of the game. Rather than declaring an early defeat, the
Second Life is closer to the kind of play that children have in a puppet masters added more complex puzzles that required
well-equipped sandbox or game of dress-up than it is to Tomb cooperative play, and introduced new elements in the story. The
Raider or Pac Man. plot and progression of an ARG is then derived from a collective
process based on a feedback loop between the puppet masters and
Alternate reality games are another form of collective play that their players. While the puppet masters have a greater degree of
has recently captured a great deal of attention. Alternate reality agency, authorship is distributed between them and the players as
games such as The Beast and I Love Bees are meant to be they perform the game.
immersive, played both within the network and through other
media channels the players might encounter in the course of their
10. Conscious, Contributory, and Unwitting web sites that the agent sampled were unwitting participants,
having no knowledge that their work was being repurposed in this
Participation way.
If we view networked literature not only as literary “works” in the
traditional book culture sense, but also as literary systems 11. Recent Collective Narratives
functioning within other systems, then we need to reconsider the
Every night for 1001 nights, Barbara Campbell is performing a
connection between authorship and agency. Collective narratives
short text-based work via web video. Her project 1001 Nights
are collective to varying degrees, dependent upon the distribution
Cast [11] is structured around the frame tale of Scheherazade and
of agency both to distributed authors and to aspects of the system
1001 nights. Participants contribute stories through the following
itself. Collective literary and artistic production in new media
procedure: each morning Campbell wakes and scans the headlines
ranges from works in which principal authors are equally
for a short phrase to use as a prompt. She then creates a
conscious participants in all aspects of the work’s production, to
watercolor image of the text of the prompt, which she posts to the
those in which the contributors are not at all conscious that their
site. Reader participants then respond to the prompt, writing a
activity is resulting in artistic production. We can distinguish three
story 1001 words or less in length. Each night Campbell reviews
types of participation a contributor might have in a collective
the day’s submissions and adapts one for performance, or, if she
narrative project: conscious, contributory, and unwitting.
has received no suitable submissions, generates a text by other
Conscious participation: Contributors are fully conscious of means, such as a Google search. The stories are preserved on the
explicit constraints, of the nature of the project, and of how their site as a text archive, though the video performance occurs only
contribution to it might be utilized. live, at a scheduled time published on the site. As of August 2nd,
forty-two nights into the project, it seems to be going well.
Contributory participation: Contributors may not be aware of Twenty-three different authors have contributed stories. The
how their contribution fits into the overall architecture of the stories don’t seem to be interwoven beyond the frame tale, so each
project, or even of the nature of the project itself, but they do take story stands on it own. Although the editing process is expedited,
conscious steps to make their contribution available to the project. the 1001 word length–longer than a short short but shorter than a
Unwitting participation: Texts utilized in the collective narrative typical short story–is conducive to concise stories with a well-
are gathered by the text-machine itself, and contributors have no honed sense of economy.
conscious involvement in the process of gathering the material. The performances themselves leave something to be desired, at
least dramaturgically. The live videos feature Campbell reading
These three levels of participation are not mutually exclusive, in
the story, but the camera remains tightly focused on her moving
the sense that one collective narrative project could utilize
lips. The viewer is denied the full range of facial expressions one
contributions on all three levels. For instance, in the case of The
might expect from a storyteller. Perhaps this choice is meant to
Unknown, the three principle authors were fully conscious
reflect on the Sheherazade frame. Perhaps Campbell is denying
participants in all aspects of the project. Certain co-authors were
the viewer her body, just as Sheherazade conspired to use stories
asked to contribute in a limited way, such as contributing to a
to delay King Schariar’s destruction of her own. On the other
group writing in a New York bar. While Joe Tabbi and Nick
hand, Campbell’s choice to restrict the performance to her moving
Montfort were aware that The Unknown existed and that we were
lips might be a reflection on the collective nature of the project
“writing an Unknown scene” they had no conception of how their
itself: these aren’t, after all, Campbell’s stories alone, but have
contribution might be linked into the hypertext as a whole – they
been contributed by others. Delivered in this oracular fashion, the
were contributory participants. Finally, certain scenes in The
disembodied lips might emphasize the collectivity and anonymity
Unknown were over-writings of other texts, such as a typing test
of the oral tradition, which the project emulates. The fact that the
used to gauge the typing speed of temporary employees of a
videos themselves are not archived but available only as a live
Chicago law office, or a scene from Thomas Kinsella’s translation
webcast similarly echoes the oral tradition. The texts are archived,
of The Tain. While the resulting texts were without a doubt
but to experience the performance, the viewer must be “present”
collaborative, neither the author of the typing test nor Thomas
at a scheduled time. The project is an ingenious mix of
Kinsella were consulted; they were unwitting participants.
contributory participation and individual performance.
The data-gathering safaris described in the production of Invisible Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood (2000-present) is one of the most
Seattle provide a good example of contributory participation. successful online contributory collective narrative projects. The
Simply by filling out a questionnaire, members of the public were project is conceptually fairly simple; it combines a collection of
contributing to a collective novel, whether or not they understood stories about or based in particular locations in New York with a
how the constraints of the particular set of questions they were series of satellite maps of the city [1]. The project includes
answering fit into the evolution of the project as a whole. hundreds of nonfiction vignettes and recollections that the reader
Projects based on aleatory elements typically make use of may “zoom into” on a satellite map. Users can either locate stories
unwitting participants. The Impermanence Agent by Noah by zooming to a particular location in a particular neighborhood,
Wardrip-Fruin et al. [36], for instance, began with a story of loss or can choose stories by sets of topics, such as “9/11 and Its
by Wardrip-Fruin that was then “customized” by material Aftermath,” “On the Subway,” or “Crime and Punishment.” The
gathered from the browsing patterns of each participating reader. project uses geographical arrangement in a very powerful way, in
In this case, Wardrip-Fruin and his coauthors were conscious the aggregate creating a rich portrait of the characters and zeitgeist
participants by virtue of designing the system and writing the of one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities.
original story, the users of the agent were contributory participants
as their process of browsing the web selected the material the
agent would then integrate into the story, and the authors of the
12. Architectures of Participation anyone could access, write to, and furthermore overwrite, the
As the web moves towards systems of organizing material based darker angels would have their day, and the project would quickly
on tags and collectively defined “folksonomies,” as access to devolve to graffiti. While Wikipedia is in fact susceptible to
bandwidth expands, as more different types of media sharing vandalism, and is in fact mostly written by amateurs, it turns out
become available, and as web applications become more that a large enough group of amateurs, passionate about the topics
powerful, collectively written constructive hypertext has become they know and care about, tends to trump both inaccuracy and
everyday practice on the web. Wikipedia is one prominent vandalism over time. Spam on Wikipedia is quickly removed, and
example of a constructive hypertext built on open source software articles that are vandalized are quickly repaired. Each page on
and user-contributed content, which every reader has the Wikipedia includes a link to a discussion forum for that particular
capability to modify. Tim O’Reilly has described systems like page, where interested parties can, and typically do, debate
Wikipedia as “architectures of participation,” systems in which “a perceived inaccuracies and build consensus about the content of
grassroots user base creates a self-regulating collaborative the article, and anyone and any time can jump in and make edits
network” [17]. While it is not an open source project, Flickr, an they perceive necessary.
online photo-sharing application and community, provides So how does anarchy govern itself? One of the strengths of
another example of a successful architecture of participation. Wikipedia is that it has a clearly defined central mission, and that
Flickr and Wikipedia are examples of projects that, by virtue of the principle functions that the Wikipedia community plays in
flexibility, openness, and extensibility, have enabled interested fulfilling that mission are also clearly defined. The Wikipedia
user communities to develop and repurpose rich pools of shared page “Wikipedia Community” explains:
information. Wikipedia and Flickr may offer some insight into the
The community’s role, as some kind of nebulous science-
potential ramifications of the next generation of web applications
fiction super-entity, is to:
and sharing methodologies on the development of narratives
produced by collective activity. • Organize and edit individual pages
In only four years, the free encyclopedia project Wikipedia has • Structure navigation between pages
expanded from one entry to 1.5 million articles in ninety-two
active language editions [5]. Wikipedia forked from two • Resolve conflict between individual members
antecedent projects, Nupedia, which lasted from 2000 until 2003, • Re-engineer itself–creating rules and patterns of
and GNUpedia, which was conceived by Richard Stallman in behavior [6]
1999 and launched in January 2001, but which fizzled shortly
thereafter. The difference between Wikipedia and its immediate This stops just short of saying “the community’s role in Wikipedia
predecessor Nupedia offers one compelling secret to Wikipedia’s is to do everything,” and indeed there are things that the
phenomenal success: community is not expected to do, such as funding, hosting, and
maintaining the servers. But Wikipedia offers the collective a
Nupedia was characterized by an extensive peer review great deal more responsibility than virtually any other historical
process designed to make its articles of a quality comparable reference project. By making the distribution of power clear, by
to professional encyclopedias. Nupedia wanted scholars to establishing collective responsibility, and by empowering literally
volunteer content for free. Before it ceased operating, anyone to not only opine, but act in the formation of the
Nupedia produced 24 articles that completed its review knowledge base, Wikipedia has managed to avoid the
process . . . [3] bureaucratic bottlenecks that have plagued similar endeavors in
While Nupedia shared the same idealistic central mission as the past.
Wikipedia, to build the best possible free encyclopedia on the Although it is an encyclopedia, and therefore a project committed
internet, it failed to trust the collective intelligence of the network. to knowledge in the most general sense, the specificity of
The developers of Nupedia wanted all of the articles on the site to Wikipedia’s goal, “to create and provide a freely licensed and
go through a rigorous peer review process. A Ph.D., volunteering high quality encyclopedia to every single person on the planet in
his or her time and expertise, would ideally have vetted each his or her own language,” [34] enables the formation of a kind of
article. One reason that Stallman others launched the GNUpedia intentional community; the central mission moderates all conflicts
project was that they thought Nupedia’s methodology contrary to and debates that occur on Wikipedia.
open-source ideology. Open source methodologies posit
everything as a draft in progress, open to revision. A centralized “Wikipedia Sociology” [7] describes various forms of
authority does not approve projects before they are launched, but “factionalism” within the Wikipedians, including Deletionism vs.
rather decentralized authority improves them constantly. When Inclusionism and Eventualism vs. Immediatism. Given the
Larry Sanger proposed that Wikipedia be launched as a wiki- collective responsibility for organizing the world’s knowledge, the
based mechanism to begin articles that would later undergo the Wikipedians’ differing approaches to methodology have taken the
peer-review process, they almost immediately found an active and shape of competing ideologies. In brief, the Deletionists consider
engaged community willing to contribute and more than willing to the role as caretakers of Wikipedia to be the deletion of any scrap
critique and review, and furthermore actively revise articles that of erroneous information, favoring objectivity and conformity,
they find inaccurate or incomplete. Wikipedia ultimately does while the Inclusionists favor the idiosyncratic and subjective. The
have a peer review process, but the only necessary qualifications Eventualists believe that short undeveloped entries (stubs) should
for reviewers are an interest and a willingness to act. be given time to develop through future intervention into fully
developed and accurate Wikipedia articles, while Immediatists
Wikis have anarchic power structures, and before Wikipedia,
believe that each article should be published in a fully-fleshed
many feared that such a project would be prone to amateurism,
form, with only minor revisions necessary to bring the given
hucksterism, and vandalism. The logic ran that given a system that
article to complete fulfillment. Much of the debate that takes place sorting them into clusters based on the other tags on the same
in the discussion forum attached to each individual article relates photos. The result is more fined tuned differentiation of
not only to the content of the articles themselves, but also to these categories, based on a conceptually simple process. One
differing perspectives on how to edit an ideal encyclopedia. compelling aspect of tagging and the clusters of similarly tagged
photos that emerge across the Flickr network is that individual
The success of Wikipedia suggests that large-scale collectives
Flickr users aren’t consciously thinking about forging connections
with a clearly defined central mission, clearly defined roles for with others. The first purpose of tagging photographs for
contributors, and an active and fervently deliberative community individuals is to organize and make more accessible their own
structure can develop more useful resources than traditional collection of images. In doing so they however simultaneously
hierarchical approaches to managing knowledge. In the case of enrich the Flickr database as a whole. Tim O’Reilly describes this
Wikipedia, the technology of the wiki enables this knowledge characteristic as a distinctive feature of architectures of
community to flourish by empowering every individual reader to participation:
act on behalf of the collective in a structured way.
This architectural insight may actually be more central to the
13. Procedural Collectivity and Play: Flickr success of open source than the more frequently cited appeal
In the past several years, web-based social networking tools have to volunteerism. The architecture of Linux, the Internet, and
rapidly evolved and diversified, moving from an online dating the World Wide Web are such that users pursuing their own
service model to one focused on more general social activities. “selfish” interests build collective value as an automatic
While sites such as Six Degrees, Friendster, and Tribe focus on byproduct. [29]
purely social activities, sites such as Flickr, Del.ico.us and
The name of the company that developed Flickr prior to Yahoo’s
CiteULike utilize the architecture of a social networking system to
recent purchase of the service was Ludicorp, who describe their
enable the sharing of more specific types of information and
mission as “groupware for play.” Flickr has indeed developed
media such as photos, web bookmarks, and notes on academic
architecture of participation based one part on the structured play
papers. The idea of the social network in these cases is not simply
of groups and another part on the emergent folksonomy of
to secure an automatic introduction to the friends of your friends,
tagging.
or to pick up a hot date, but to share art and knowledge, to
contribute to and benefit from a specific collective endeavor.
14. Architectures for Collective Narrative
Flickr, a web-based photo management and sharing application After they had completed the Invisible Seattle, in 1987 the
and community, is a demonstrative example of the result of invisibles laid out The Plan for Invisible America. They imagined
combining a powerful database application, a user-defined tagging expanding upon the vision of Invisible Seattle and, taking
system, and community tools, with an interested, variously advantage of network computers, conducting a collective narrative
skilled, and active user base. Flickr is oriented both towards experiment on much larger scale. The plan was epic in scope:
enabling its users to store and share their photos and to fostering
micro-communities around specific photographic projects. Flickr First, it presents three years’ worth of diverse activities and
events–research, writing, programming, publicity,
groups are oriented not only towards social activity and to sharing
knowledge about specialized topics, but also towards collective performance–as equal parts of the same project. There is a
art projects defined by specific constraints that range from simple book in the mix, but it is only a small element. Then it shows
to complex. There is a “squared circle” group dedicated to a group the project interacts with different sectors of the audience in
pool of photos of circles within squares. There are various “a day different ways encouraging them to be authors, game players,
in the life” projects, in which participants document one particular and spectators. [37]
day in quotidian detail. There is a “photo hunt” group, in which Invisible America never got past the conceptual stage, and a large-
participants are provided with a list of words, some concrete and scale narrative of such scope, at least one with a literary outcome,
some abstract, to interpret in a series of individual photographs. has never been attempted. At the time, the project as laid out in
The possibility for constrained photography projects is virtually The Plan for Invisible America would have required a great deal
endless, and Flickr members seem intent on creating a group for of funding to pull off. Existing computer and network
every constraint they can think of. technologies at the time were furthermore extremely rudimentary
In “Feral Hypertext: When Hypertext Literature Escapes Control” in comparison to contemporary technologies.
Jill Walker describes the tagging systems used by Flickr, This essay has to a great extent been inspired by the thought
CiteULike and Del.icio.us as feral hypertext: experiment of Invisible America. What may have seemed
This doesn’t mean there are no structures or rules. Quite the outlandish in the 1980s is merely an extrapolation of existing
technologies and methodologies today. One can imagine a writing
contrary: these systems work because they have simple but
flexible ground conditions that establish environments that community with robustness of Wikipedia, dedicated to a
make emergent organization instantly visible. [35] collective vision of writing a novel that is in effect many novels
with interchangeable parts, written according to sets of specific
Walker argues that tagging systems allow for emergent constraints to ensure a degree of formal unity, and tagged with
connections. In addition to groups that Flickr users consciously metadata that would make it possible to easily remix novels in
participate in, as a result of the procedure of tagging photos, they thousands of structured configurations. Such a project would be
also create associations with groups of photos taken by other performance, game, and literature. What we do today with our
Flickr users. This is a form of contributory participation. Flickr collective references and photographs we could soon do, together,
recently upgraded their tagging system to include “clustering,” a in collective narrative. It is well within our reach.
hypertext system that organizes the search tag results by the
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