How would you format a log for publishing?
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I've been mulling over an idea for adding more focus on the end product of RP, the collaborative fiction that we create. I want to interact with logs as short stories that could compile into anthologies (I think?) and ultimately being able to share them in.. any format really, So I thought - What about something that you could put on Amazon? While I love writing and RPing, my developer's brain is always looking for things to solve. Mainly that's how to spread the word about Mu*, and I could really truly use some advice from actual writers and enthusiasts.
As the title says, what kind of formatting would you do on a raw log to make it Kindle ready? How would you group those scenes to make a short story format for an appealing read for the uninitiated as well as the community as a whole? Is that possible to do?
I think self-publishing stuff would feel like an accomplishment! An actual thing I've made with my friends doing this thing I love. And hell, what if I can make a little pocket change doing it? Not that I'd expect too, but the prospect of finished work is fun! Plus games could 'tag' the fiction - a line/link at the bottom, or like a last page 'ad' or something.
I'm mulling over if this is something that can be done automatically with things like pose breaks, and inserting author names at creation and just feeding raw text into a script - or if this would have to be a tool that includes an editor and doing something like Markdown to format the logs, and maybe giving access to some basic spelling/grammar check tools - but I honestly think Google Docs and browser extensions have that pretty covered.
Any ideas or insights would be amazing! If I do have the opportunity to do something with the project, It would be open source and MIT. I'm more interested in advertising the art of collaborative fiction, and drawing people into the hobby! so what's been tried before? What's worked for you and what hasn't? What are your thoughts on formatting for a more professional polish? I look forward to the discussion!
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I could see a generic mush as perhaps an innovative way for collaborative storytelling for the purpose of publication. (For all I know collaborators have done this for years now, or something like it.)
However, I would never play on a mush that would take my writing pieces and then publish them to make money for someone else and that would give the rights away in that format to a third party publisher. I am not knocking people that would. However, because I do write for my own pleasure, and sometimes elements of what I'm writing influence my RP or vice versa, I would not want the challenges/entanglements should I ever get up the guts to seek to publish any of my personal work in the future.
But as for just saving/making a log printable for personal pleasure/enjoyment later, that's a good question. I have noticed that even when I doc RP with someone (which is pretty frequent when I'm playing, because of my schedule/time committments/inability to sit for as long as I used to be able to) we tend to stick to mush formatting rather than indentations and stuff. Maybe as an experiment I'll have to see if I can find an old log that survived my laptop purge and reformat it to something more like conventional formatting. I suspect it would be a little weird, and not flow as well as a piece written and then polished to seem like it was coming from one voice.
My gut says that it would seem very off to me, and they are just different things.
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@mietze said in How would you format a log for publishing?:
However, I would never play on a mush that would take my writing pieces and then publish them to make money for someone else and that would give the rights away in that format to a third party publisher. I am not knocking people that would. However, because I do write for my own pleasure, and sometimes elements of what I'm writing influence my RP or vice versa, I would not want the challenges/entanglements should I ever get up the guts to seek to publish any of my personal work in the future.
Yeah, I'll admit my first reaction to this is 'god there are a billion rights issues once you involve money and publishing beyond a game site that I would never, ever want to touch, including informing all players and staffers upfront of what you wanted to do and getting their permission' etc etc.
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@three-eyed-crow I could kinda see maybe an agreement you sign in order to make a bit (kind of like how in the olden days there was often a behavior agreement or disclaimer you had to type "I agree" to?).
But. For this purpose, you'd also need people to give you their legal names, probably at least the country of residency and inform them that you intended to publish their work, credited, in some kind of anthology like thing that you intended to put up on a third party selling/publishing site.
I am pretty sure that would turn a LOT of at least the old fogies off, and maybe scare off people who don't write on their own or don't plan to and probably wouldn't care if they thought about it, but that's a LOT of info to give out/sign away.
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@three-eyed-crow said in How would you format a log for publishing?:
@mietze said in How would you format a log for publishing?:
However, I would never play on a mush that would take my writing pieces and then publish them to make money for someone else and that would give the rights away in that format to a third party publisher. I am not knocking people that would. However, because I do write for my own pleasure, and sometimes elements of what I'm writing influence my RP or vice versa, I would not want the challenges/entanglements should I ever get up the guts to seek to publish any of my personal work in the future.
Yeah, I'll admit my first reaction to this is 'god there are a billion rights issues once you involve money and publishing beyond a game site that I would never, ever want to touch, including informing all players and staffers upfront of what you wanted to do and getting their permission' etc etc.
And this is totally why I brought it up here. I didn't even consider the rights problems! What about formatting to share through social media or the likes? I'm interested in ways we can do more with our logs then just store them (guilty! )
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It's been done, most (in?)famously by Otherspace back in the day.
The rights issues are the obvious stumbling block there. Otherspace had an advantage in that the world, at least, was original. Trying to do that with a Game of Thrones or Star Trek MU would be begging for a lawsuit. But a lot of people (including me) were very uncomfortable with the idea that playing on a game meant their characters/stories/writing were fair game for someone else to publish.
As far as formatting goes - I think MU wikis / log formatters take the general approach of making it seem like regular fiction. I.e. no pose breaks or other intrusive formatting. Just the text, ma'am.
Where I think it really breaks down is that MU scenes don't hang together like regular fiction does. There's neither an overarching story arc like you'd find in a novel, nor the stand-alone stories that you'd find in a short story anthology.
ETA: Many MU wikis outlast their MUSHes - often by years and years. (witness BSG Cerb's wiki, circa 2011) So I think there's already ways for the story to live on.
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@faraday is right - MU* logs make /really bad/ stories, much like transcripts of tabletop games do. (And yes, livestreaming has some success, but largely on the strength of the charisma and charm of the players and GMs.) The rhythm, pacing, and characterization is all wrong, you have different writing styles mixed up, the plots beats don't tend to follow a clear narrative arc...it's very bad fiction. It's a lot of fun as improv, but it's not good fiction.
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@pyrephox Yeah it's fun to go back and read your own logs, or to keep up with logs on your games because you have a personal connection to the story. But reading random logs from random games is really kind of jarring.
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@kumakun I go through phases of log posting. In ye olden days, I just stripped any OOC that wasn't either important to what was going on or really funny (to me), made sure there were blank lines between the poses, made sure it was dated/located, whacked it into a public directory, and that's about it.
These days I still have blank lines between each pose, but use indentation so that when there are multiple paragraphs (that never happened in ye olden days) there aren't confusing blank lines but it's clear where the paragraphs change. (To be fair, that's also how I RP now, so I'm basically setting things how I like them.) I try to have the descs of the location and the characters available in there, also. The exact format depends on if it's a wiki or my own site, but I've always intended them to be read online, so I can do things that wouldn't work right on paper or a standard ebook.
I rarely correct other players' spelling or grammar or anything, though sometimes I'll fix my own typos. And once in a while I've run into someone who didn't want their rp posted, or at least not anything one-on-one where they might have spilled secrets. It's rare, but a few people do object. It's safer on games where posting logs is known to be the culture.
At one point I wanted to make a website that was specifically for people to post and share RP logs, but I never really got around to it. I have one of my own, but I'm really slack about getting my (thousands of) logs into it, and the formatting can be a little finicky sometimes. But, one nice thing about intending it for online is that you can make followable references to other logs if you want, do next/previous, have things searchable, divide by tags, find a list of all logs with a particular character in them...
I have no idea if that answers anything you were asking, because I'm tired and sick and rambly today. But hey, have a ramble.
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@faraday said in How would you format a log for publishing?:
It's been done, most (in?)famously by Otherspace back in the day.
The rights issues are the obvious stumbling block there. Otherspace had an advantage in that the world, at least, was original. Trying to do that with a Game of Thrones or Star Trek MU would be begging for a lawsuit. But a lot of people (including me) were very uncomfortable with the idea that playing on a game meant their characters/stories/writing were fair game for someone else to publish.
I agree completely, now that It's been brought up. While the idea of publishing things is fun, the rights thing would be a nightmare - especially for non-original IP games.
As far as formatting goes - I think MU wikis / log formatters take the general approach of making it seem like regular fiction. I.e. no pose breaks or other intrusive formatting. Just the text, ma'am.
Where I think it really breaks down is that MU scenes don't hang together like regular fiction does. There's neither an overarching story arc like you'd find in a novel, nor the stand-alone stories that you'd find in a short story anthology.
What do you think of the Storium style formatting of collaborative fiction? It reads like a PbP, but it formats so that it's easy to follow PbP, with the art and character portraits and what not. I haven't looked into Ares a whole lot, but you're doing something similar with your scene system? The addition of visuals to break up the walls of text?
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I'm really glad I brought this up here before starting anything. The feedback is awesome!
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@faraday This is usually true, but somehow a couple of my characters back in the day actually had regular readers who didn't play on the games, or in a couple cases didn't even MU* at all. I don't think many people would get invested through the initial portion of things without some kind of connection, though.
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Without even looking at the rights of external entities, I'd side-eye any game that wanted to make a profit off of my work. And yes, I'd consider any input I have into the game's canon to be my intellectual property, at least to some extent.
As for logs that I've personally put on a game's wiki or whathaveyou, or if the game itself does when I've knowingly consented to it (ie Ares' scene system): pretty them up and share them around as advertising if you want, I've given those to the game. That's another point. I've given them to the game, not to any individual staff members or the headstaff or the host or anyone else.
Now, as for formatting for the purposes of reading later - regardless of audience - I think most ereaders and all browsers can use some nature of CSS for the formatting of their books.
If you want this to appeal to a wider, specifically non-MU*er audience, then you need to take a look at film novelisations. They take the script, in this case the scene log, and embellish and expand upon things and make slight alterations to the scripted 'reality' to fit the flow of a novel better.
As far as I can see it's a minefield of copyright and IP problems, mixed with a whole bunchload of effort, for no real payoff that I can see.
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@kumakun said in How would you format a log for publishing?:
What do you think of the Storium style formatting of collaborative fiction? It reads like a PbP, but it formats so that it's easy to follow PbP, with the art and character portraits and what not. I haven't looked into Ares a whole lot, but you're doing something similar with your scene system? The addition of visuals to break up the walls of text?
Ares does that while the scene is going on, but that's mostly a UX thing since individual poses can be edited/deleted while the scene's still in-progress. After the scene is over, it converts to a regular old narrative, with only system emits called out separately from the regular poses to help those who skim. (example)
My first version used the storium type style for completed logs, too, but people generally hated it. And it made it harder to edit/copy the entire log. So I ditched it.
