It’s been a long time — at least 5 years — since I’ve done a proper tour of the current tools available for interactive writing. Every system makes certain things easy and certain things more difficult (if not impossible), which necessarily influences the kinds of things people tend to make with those tools. Since I’m making arguments about the authorial affordances of various systems for my PhD, I wanted to get more up-to-date with tools I haven’t used in a while.
As I was telling a friend that I needed to do a tour of these tools, we starting complaining that we don’t write for fun anymore, and here was the perfect example. So I decided that if I was going to do this tour of tools, I wanted to at least have fun with it. After all, there’s a global pandemic, and I can use every bit of distraction from it that I can muster.
So I decided to start an ongoing game jam let others join us on our quest to reclaim writing as a hobby. Fortnightly Fiction Jam was my attempt to carve fun into my life.
The first round of the jam went well! We ended up with 15 submissions, and I submitted a prototype piece that reminded me how much I enjoy writing hypertexts for fun.
The second round was even better. I set up a Discord for jam participants and it was truly heartwarming to see people offering help and support to each other. The community has been incredible.
Round 3 opens on Monday September 7 at 12:01 AM PST. The theme is “Far From Home” and more information about the jam and joining the Discord is available on the jam page on itch.io.
