Fimfiction Writes Ponies! - In Retrospect · 7:44pm Apr 13th, 2014
Hi guys. So, anyone who's been following me probably has probably heard an awful lot about the whole Fimfiction Writes Ponies! thing lately. You're probably pretty sick of hearing about it by now, so lemme promise you that this'll be the end of it. The project's done, the results are published, and now all that's left is for me to wrap some things up with a few closing thoughts. Which I'll compartmentalize below.
First and foremost, lemme take this opportunity again to thank each and every person who helped contribute to this endeavor. Almost one hundred in total. Not everyone listed wrote, edited, or otherwise directly worked for the project, and some merely cheered along from the sidelines, but everyone who was given editing access helped to make this experiment possible, in their own way. So give these people some applause. Seriously. Hats off to you guys. And to anyone who knows me, 'hats off' is a pretty big deal.
Now...
So, what was this 'Fimfiction Writes Ponies!' thing all about?
Fimfiction Writes Ponies! was an effort to take the Twitch Plays Pokemon concept, where thousands of people input commands for a single streamed game of Pokemon, and transpose it into writing fanfiction. The internet has this certain way about it where really fascinating things can happen if you give people a task and set them loose on it. I wanted to see what would happen if you took Fimfiction and, well, set everyone loose on writing a My Little Pony story.
"Surely," I said to myself, "even if something goes horribly wrong, the results will be fascinating."
I was not to be disappointed. I hope none of us were.
Anyhow, to that end, I created a single, blank Google Doc, which anyone could edit. People seemed fascinated with the concept, and we all had a grand time writing for the entire shebang. In the end, we managed to produce a story of thirteen-thousand words within a couple days. It clearly wasn't the next great American novel, and it was never supposed to be. The goal was simply to produce an actual, functionable, semi-coherent pony story under the burden of "A hundred or so different people who're all trying to write over each other," and in that respect, I think we succeeded handily.
You can go read it here, if you haven't already.
BleedingRaindrops even did a reading of it, which you can find here. You might want to turn the volume up while listening, though -- it's a bit quiet.
Any thoughts you'd like to talk about from when the project was ongoing?
Before I get into anything else on this, lemme say that Fimfiction Writes Ponies! was pretty demanding as my online projects go. For about three days in total, it ate up most of my energy, free time, and attention. Whether it was writing for the doc, editing work, managing the doc to make sure everyone who was requesting access had access, revoking permissions from anyone trying to destroy the doc, or repeatedly making back-ups so that nobody'd lose too much work if a troll surfaced... It was a little bit exhausting.
Keeping the whole affair from buckling under its own weight was more or less a one-man-show, and it was a lot of effort to keep the show going. Maybe I could've helped that with some better planning or set-up effort on my part. Maybe. Alls I know is that it demanded a lot more from me than I'd really expected, and generally more than I'd like to give up again anytime soon.
THAT ASIDE, the whole affair was pretty great. It was really fascinating being a part of an evolving story, and working to keep the pieces of it all together. We occasionally had to invent or fabricate new pieces of the story wholesale, so as to stitch the disparate chapters together. I think the key moment for us was when the concept of "Lord Apep" was introduced, and the Fourth Wall as a plot-critical structure became a dominant idea. Between Lord Apep and the Fourth Wall, we had a centralizing villain and a plot thread which could explain most of the more horrifyingly wacky bits. So, overall, hooray!
Also impressive was how well people seemed to work together, with very few arguments breaking out over how things should progress or attempts to write over other peoples' work. I wonder if, to some extent, this might've hurt the chaotic fun of the effort overall -- since part of the experiment's charm is that everyone's trying to write the story as they think best. But on the whole I guess it was a pretty good thing that there were no big conflicts, since those might've led to some bad blood outside the effort. Or otherwise a War within the project itself.
We did have a few trolls surfacing, with notable instances being "Post a bajillion gifs of Maud punching Luna" and "find-replacing crucial letters or words." That was unfortunate. Not just for the trolling itself, but because it created obscene amounts of lag in the doc, which made it difficult to figure out who was doing it and who needed their editing permissions revoked. In the end, though, we managed to walk through without too many incidents, so hooray for everyone.
Anything you'd do differently, knowing what you do now?
If I had infinite resources, time, and knowledge, one thing I'd certainly have avoided is using Google Docs. It's a nice platform for small-scale collaboration, but it simply wasn't designed for big-scale efforts like this, and these limitations showed up repeatedly.
One thing I learned from this project was this: the genius of Twitch Plays Pokemon is that there's only so much a single person or small group of people can do to screw the collective effort over. They can't delete the save, or corrupt the gamedata, or whatever. The absolute worst thing they can do at any given moment is press the wrong button at the wrong time. That's... not the case in Google Docs, where feasibly you could just paste a thousand gifs over what everyone else has written and crash the doc.
Big lag spikes, the inability to disable certain destructive features trolls could've used, etc. These were all big problems. If there were some method by which I could've disabled stuff like find-replacing, copy-pasting, and so on, for anonymous editors, I think the whole venture could've gone much more smoothly and would've needed less oversight.
Alas. Those were beyond my capabilities.
One thing I think I could've done differently is approach the project in a chapter-by-chapter approach, where a first doc would be used to produce chapter one, and once it's finalized a second doc would be used to produce chapter two... and so on. This would probably have produced an even more stable and coherent story, because we'd be able to approach events chronologically and with the foreknowledge of "Okay, this is a thing that happened in the last chapter, so we should try to connect this to that." While still maintaining the "Everyone's writing together simultaneously" aspect of things.
It's possible that might've stretched peoples' attention spans, and forced me to devote even more time and effort to things... but it's a nice what-if, I suppose.
So, what now? Any plans to do this again sometime?
So, I'm proud of all of you. I'm glad we all had fun getting involved with this project. As aforementioned, though, Fimfiction Writes Ponies! was a huge drain on me, and I have no plans to instigate another effort along these lines anytime soon. If ever. If anybody else would like to try running and organizing their own venture like this, though, I'm happy to lend my support, as well as put the Fimfiction Writes Ponies! group up for your use. Honestly, I'd totally be fascinated if this concept continues without the need for my direction... but whether that happens or not isn't up to me, I suppose.
For me, the curtains have closed on this particular show. It was a great play, and I ask again that you give a hand to all the actors involved. I can only hope you all enjoyed the performance.
Have a nice day.
Fimfiction plays Pokemon pls
My only regret was that it happened all in a blur for me. Next one on the weekend would be better!
2007023
Yeah, that's probably another thing that could've been done better: the scheduling. I simply did not expect everything to happen as fast as it did. Honestly, I'd expected it would've taken us 'til at least the weekend to produce anything even approaching finished!
Surprises abounded.
I am proud to have played such a significant role in the development of this insanity.
~The lizardman had lots of fun and would like to salute all else who helped in some way, shape or form
Thank you again for the opportunity, Obs. This was a tremendous amount of fun.
2007006
In retrospect, the Helix Fossil should've figured into the story at some point. An homage to its spiritual predecessor. Oh well.
It might be interesting to take a look at Wikis for a possible next attempt. I'm not sure if one could handle the flurry of activity that happened here, but wikis tend to feature tools to easily find trolls and revert their damage.
Now I wonder what could be produced with a similar approach, but slower and more coordinated. Something that falls in the middle between a traditional cooperation and this experiment, perhaps with some organizational hints taken from open source projects. If it works at all, the results might be surprising...
2007023
I got into the group, went back to work and to finishing a fic for the EQD WTG, and next I see there was a post saying the project was almost finished with a fic of more than 10K words
2007196
Oh wow, a wiki is a great idea. You could give mod privs and everything to help police it!
The drawback is you would have more clashes as there is no real-time editing.
2007081
What's all this about the Helix fossil lately? Did PokemonXY reintroduce Omanyte or something?
2007554
One of the running gags of Twitch Plays Pokémon was commanding the player character to try to use the Helix Fossil. Or "consult" it, in the memetic parlance.
In short, KNEEL BEFORE US!!
And I'm kinda sad that it seem's you're not wanting to do another one, but I understand completely.
And I think another problem we had with FIMFiction Write Ponies! was that basically co-operation was a double edged sword. Some people did try and help others, others... Well, the Maud punching Luna thing is a good example, or people just pretending to be ignorant of what's going on and getting pissy if their idea wasn't accepted (A certain Muse of the Middle of the Night, for example).
But, in the end, it was fun as Hell to do, and I'm glad I was able to contribute.