Speaking of Chaotic Fiction
There’s this blog roundtable, right, and the topic du jour is chaotic fiction. Here’s the other post in the roundtable (we’re part of an exclusive club, I guess.) Also note that the somewhat mundane post title is not meant to imply that I am unenthusiastic about the topic — I just couldn’t think of a clever wordplay on “chaotic fiction,” and got frustrated. Chaotic diction? Erotic friction? No.
For the uninitiated, chaotic fiction is a term coined by Sean Stacey to define a space of participatory creative works. I guess if you were so inclined, you could call it Fiction 2.0 (except you would probably get punched.) Although Sean came up with the term in an attempt to contextualize the ARG-definition controversy (and get everyone to shut up about it I suppose), the idea is that it describes a space that contains a wide variety of genres, so it’s not strictly necessary to even bring up ARGs in this discussion… except I just did, so never mind.
Chaotic fiction is a nice framework, because it situates a number of hitherto discrete genres within a single conceptual space. Moreover, it recognizes the fluidity of that space. Second Life may be superficially distinct in nature from SFZero, but there is certainly something similar going on there — a truth that is manifested in the way that virtual games and live games are bleeding into one another. Cross-media entertainment is the big thing these days, and I would argue that it’s not because of interesting synergies between unique platforms, but because they’re all part of the same delicious pie. I expect the media theorists have known this for a long time.
While I like the idea of chaotic fiction, it’s really the aforementioned theorists I’m waiting to hear from. The idea is inherently academic, but I haven’t seen it appear on any academic radars. This is unfortunate because (a) there’s little doubt that Stacey’s thinking overlaps with a significant corpus of previous literature, so discussing chaotic fiction without the benefit of those insights is at best arrogant and at worst profoundly misguided, and (b) there’s not been a useful conceptual framework that entered the world fully formed; there need to be iterations, there needs to be a synthesis of viewpoints.
A brief synopsis: chaotic fiction inhabits a 3-dimensional space where the three axes represent authorship (centralized or distributed), ruleset (loose or strict), and coherence (less plot or more plot.)
Those are some good axes, but they don’t really represent the full space of possible variations between projects. Of course, the set of possible axes is infinite: How much of a project takes place online? How many participants does it scale to? How many cats were tangentially involved in the creation process? Etc. The question is, how do you choose which axes are salient enough to include in this sort of framework? Stacey might have had certain criteria in mind, but unfortunately, he didn’t explicitly share them. He sort of implies that he’s looking at properties that exist independently of specific media, and focusing mainly on abstracted patterns of behaviour rather than material details. That strategy makes sense, but it doesn’t exclude seemingly relevant properties like scale. Is a project geared to handle millions not fundamentally different from one geared to handle dozens? If someone were to really build on Stacey’s ideas, I’d say this is the way to do it: refine and justify the choice of axes.
One of the other interesting things about Stacey’s analysis is the way he situates the space of chaotic fiction as being connected to the larger trend of participatory online culture in general. This is certainly an apt observation. My question is, what exactly is the relationship between these spaces? Do they exist alongside each other, or is one within the other? How much overlap is there? Tellingly, if you treat “coherence” simply as a measure of structure, rather than a measure of plot, you get a space which very clearly includes projects like Wikipedia and GNU. Stacey has constructed a very thin barrier between what he calls chaotic fiction and virtually the entire sphere of participatory projects. In this model, all that distinguishes an ARG from a collaborative encyclopedia is the presence of narrative — and narrative being a fairly subjective concept, that’s not much of a distinction. Far from being a bad thing, all this means is that the ARG-definition controversy is inherently very silly, something which Stacey himself implied very strongly in his essay.
Enough theory. A framework isn’t very interesting unless you actually try to frame things within it, something that only Stacey has actually done so far (to my knowledge.) Stacey framed various projects within each individual axis, but when you’re in a multidimensional space what’s really neat is the interaction between axes. With 3 axes, you’ve got 8 sectors, each of which can be construed as a distinct category. Looking at each of these categories ought to be an interesting thought experiment. Of course, this is a ruthlessly mathematical way of looking at things, but I’ll save that critique for a later post wherein I refute everything I’m currently saying on the basis of postmodernity.
So, just for fun, let’s take a look at a few sectors in this space of chaotic fiction. In particular, those where distributed authorship lives, because that’s all that’s worth talking about anyway these days, right?*
- Distributed authorship, loose ruleset, low coherence. People sort of just do whatever they want. Absolute anarchy is (arguably) not particularly worth exploring, but finding a magic balance with just enough rules and just enough coherence can lead to some highly empowering and compelling experiences. I’d argue that Second Life inhabits this space — it’s really quite chaotic, and despite the presence of a shared world, there is very little about the world itself that actually encourages any sort of normalized behaviour. There aren’t many examples of other scaled environments that allow users to do almost anything, probably because it’s hugely risky and challenging to give so many people so much freedom. On the other hand, there’s a plethora of small groups who create their own personalized spaces for these sorts of activities. Kupopolis, for example, is used by about 20 writers to write stories within a shared universe — there aren’t many rules because there aren’t many people. Unbounded freedom on a large scale is a tough thing to harness, but I’d wager that there’s a lot of room for Big Ideas that could pull it off.
- Distributed authorship, loose ruleset, high coherence. It’s somewhat difficult to think of a system for distributed authorship that could facilitate high coherence without a significant set of rules. About the closest I can get are the “interactive story” communities like Kupopolis — a small group of authors trying to create something reasonably coherent, where strict rules are unnecessary because of participants’ like-mindedness. It’s an interesting concept, though: let users run free while somehow compiling their output into something that is greater than the sum of its parts. ARGs get rather close. They tend rather closely to centralized authorship and a strict ruleset, but one can certainly imagine an ARG with less of each. The trick, I expect, is finding a minimal but effective management/planning strategy that’s capable of coordinating emergent, unstructured behaviour without getting in its way. Well, duh, that sounds like a cinch. Arguably, something like Wikipedia does this well — but the extent to which that sort of output is coherent is debatable. Still, an ARG that borrowed patterns from Wikipedia would be rather intriguing.
- Distributed authorship, strict ruleset, low coherence. This is pretty much the baseline for Webs Two Point Oh, and is consequently a space littered with the detritus of a million mediocre startups. Consider your standard YASNS (Yet Another Social Networking Service): it’s built entirely on the users’ backs, you’re pretty limited in what you can do on it, and ultimately there’s not really much to it. The idea is to reach some sort of level of coherence — a point at which the swamp of unassociated data comes together into something magical, like when you look at clusters in Flickr. Most don’t succeed…
- Distributed authorship, strict ruleset, high coherence. …but when they do succeed, it’s something to get excited about. Of course, the kinds of projects I’m talking about don’t strictly fit into the realm of chaotic fiction. But, as I argued in my previous overlong essay, there’s a lot to be learned from the internet at large.
*My other reason for not probing the entire space in detail is the fact that I wrote most of this post about a month ago, and only came back to it now. You ever try starting a lengthy blog post and coming back to it after several significant life events? It doesn’t work. No thanks.
