Learn about CYOW - History, Examples, Ideas!

Hello everyone, and welcome to

The Papercut Arcade.

We're getting ready for a jam month of

our CYOW 4 event.

That's our fourth

interactive fiction event.

My name is Kay Slater, I use

they/them pronouns,

you should be able to see me -

I am a white person who is wearing

headphones, I have a headset to the left,
( gestures at a microphone to the left )

and there's a black screen behind me.

I am one of the collective members of

The Papercut Arcade.

Today, what we're going to do is

we're going to look at some of the

previous CYOW events,

some of the projects that we've made,

the history of choose your own way,

interactive fiction,

projects and publications,

we're going to look at some of the

things that we've done in the past

archived on our website,

and then we'll look over some of the

ways that you could start getting excited

and inspired to create

your own project during

the month of April 2021.

So to begin with,

I thought what I would do is

I would take us all the way back

two whole years ago in the

spring of 2019,

where we had our first CYOW,

it was actually called CYOA

at that event,

we've since renamed them all CYOW, for

"Choose Your Own Way".

And you might know the other acronym

that has the "A" there...

But we of course, we don't call

our series that so that we don't infringe

on their intellectual property.

So Choose Your Own Way

is a way of presenting fiction

or writing or art projects

where you allow the audience

to make choices in how they're going

to engage with your work.

If you're familiar with video games,

you might have played a

walking simulator in the past,

where there wasn't a lot of what you would

recognize as game elements.

But you get to make choices,

you get to choose whether or not

to go left or right,

engage with certain characters,

go down certain narrative branches.

It's the same thing in

a video game as it is in a book

where you hit a fork in the road

where you can choose choice A or B,

turn to page 50

or turn to page 75 to continue your story.

A great example that I'd love to share

is the To Be or Not To Be project

that was done several years ago now

by Ryan North, where they -

this was a Kickstarter project

- where they took the story of Hamlet

and made it a choose your own

adventure game.

And so when you're engaged in the content,

that is Hamlet,

whether you're reading it,

or you're watching a play,

you follow Hamlet.

In the recreation of this story,

in doing it in this format,

you can now play, or be, Ophelia

or you can be the king.

And so they've taken a recognizable story

and used that as the base.

And that's something that

you could totally do.

And just like any kind of other

adventure book or gaming book

where you get to a certain point,

I get to this page -

( mumbles: I don't want to actually...)
there we go.

I get to the end of this page,

and it says,

"Talk about how sometimes

you say terrible things,

and sometimes, in private moments,

you wonder what that says about you.

Turn to page 279."

Then the next one,

which has a skull beside it,

which follows the actual Hamlet story:

"Talk instead about the nature

of free will. Turn to page 310."

And so that's an example that

you could check out.

I encourage you to buy this book,

because it's delightful

or to check it out of the library.

But yeah, that's just one way of doing it:

video games or a book.

In year one, so in 2019,

I originally took us back there

I'm going to share my screen right now.
( mumbles: And go, there we go. )

And so there we go,

That's CYOW number one.

And this was a picture of some of

the folks who were joining us that day.

And if you checked out our website,

thepapercutarcade.ca,

you could check out this original

event where we've listed all of the

original projects that were made

during that event.

And so I was there and what I had tried

to do was -

I did want to create

my own adventure story.

but what I also wanted to do was,

I wanted to see how it would translate

to Instagram.

And because I didn't actually have a

lot of familiarity with Instagram,

that year, I challenged myself to

learn the platform, while also making

this interactive story.

You don't have to aim that high;

you absolutely could use whatever tools

you feel comfortable with.

But I just started with paper and pen;

I just started to draw a story.

In fact, I had all of

these pages individually;

I just cut them out of a book,

and then I stapled them together in

order when I finally decided

what order I wanted them to be in.

That allowed me to create branching

paths of when you got to this page,

it says page 20,

page 23.

And down here, this is actually

numbered page 24.

Because I went back and forth.

It was just a quick prototype book.

If you wanted to do

something like this,

you absolutely could.

We could help you take pictures of it;

you could take a video of you reading

through the session,

there's no reason why a pen and paper

book couldn't be something that you

made and then presented at our

forthcoming salon.

As I went through this very rough draft,

I then created something that we -

that I could share at CYOW 1.

And it's basically the same book only

I created a just a slightly nicer

kraft cover to it.

And then I printed out the original

first pages or the pages that I wanted

to add into Instagram.

And because this was an exhibition,

I also have some sticky notes that have

some comments.

So for example, on page two,

I think I have

"I feel like this ending will change,

I wanted to seed an ending early,

so people would have to navigate back.

But the speech bubble is weird."

I'm going to take this moment to

encourage you to try something

but also not to stress yourself out

if it doesn't get finished.

That's something else that

our collective is very supportive of:

it's about the process - it's about

trying something

and it doesn't have to be a

finished, polished thing.

We're doing this jam,

we're doing this creation session over

the course of one month.

And it's really about the time that

you have to commit to it.

You might get an idea that is way

larger than the amount of time that

you can commit to a project

in one month.

And that's fine.

That doesn't mean that your

unfinished project at the end of the month

isn't worth sharing with all of us

who have also been under

that same time constraint.

So don't worry,

if you get to the end of it and

you're only three pages into the

300 that you have planned.

That's alright,

share those three pages with us.

And that's what I was able to accomplish.

Now what I'm going to share with you is-

I'm going to share with you what

happened on Instagram,

what I ultimately was able to create

when I when I put it in Instagram.

And so there we go,

this is my Instagram page.

And right here in my stories,

and you can check this out,

if you want to check it out, under #hungry

...I'm to go back to the beginning...

And there was Instagram stories,

there was my front page.

And if you're familiar with stories,

the story will automatically
( mumbles: and there you go... )

flip every couple of seconds

without you touching it,

and so I created this

"how to play" window,

so that people could find out more

about the interactions.

And so I decided,

this is not part of Instagram.

Instagram has a way of navigating left

and right by clicking on

the left and right side.

And so I used that functionality,

mapped out my own game,

and I put the page numbers down at the

bottom there.

And then as you navigate through the story

the first story goes,

"Follow to 2 or to 39."

So if you go 2 (pause )
there's the next page,

but you can also click forward.

And there we go.

And there's 39.

And so that's an ending that I wrote

in pretty early in my game.

And so that's that's a way that

I used Instagram.

But you don't have to use Instagram;

you can use whatever tool you want.

Last year, because we didn't actually

have the option of gathering and

having a public event,

we were forced to do a 100% digital

presentation of all the works,

and we were still able to come up with

some really cool projects.

I'm going to share my screen again,

so you can see some of these projects.

And so now you should see my web page

that says,

"Choose Your Own Way #3: Apocalypse",

which was our theme in 2020, last year.

And so you scroll down the page,

and there are all of our amazing

creators from last year.

And then down here,

you can check out

our archived conversation,

if you want some inspiration.

Maybe some of the questions you might

have have been answered

in last year's conversations.

But you can also click on itch.

So it's itch.io,

which is where we hosted all of these

amazing projects that we had.

And there they are down.

So we had these;

these were the projects from our

collective members.

This was from Lisa Smedman:

Quest for Home.

This was my maybe two thirds

of the way finished project,

Ending Bravery.

Jon created a project,

Death on Two Legs,

using Twine.

And then there's Chris'

Project Poseidon,

also using Twine.

And so you can come in,

these are all free to check out.

These are all projects that you can

check out right now.

They're all available on our itch page,

which you can get to from our website.

And even so, each one of these ones

had a slightly different way

of delivering.

I'm going to click on Awaken.

And Awaken used YouTube.

And so you actually have to go to

YouTube from this page,

and then go through and navigate using

YouTube.

And so that could be something

that you felt,

maybe you want to do an interactive

story using your own space,

maybe you want to go outside

for the area nearby,

and you make small videos of different

choices that people can make.

And then all you have to do is anchor

the links as you go along.

So yeah, you could use the space

around where you currently are.

We also had a student submission

( mumbles: there we go )
by Claire Jensen.

And they used an emulator for mobile.

( mutters: ...click on this right now.)
And there you go.

As if you were able to load this up

on your smartphone,

and you don't even have to have a

smartphone to use it.

My screen is doing something a little

strange to cut off the bottom.

But when you don't have

this in full screen

you can actually see

the entire mobile device,

but you can click on it as if

you had it on your phone,

and then read through it.

And then there are the decisions where

you could choose to go deeper into the

forest or be a fool

and go back into the city.

So there really isn't any one right

way to deliver a CYOW project.

It's really however you want to

present your story.

So you can find out more information

about the project this year by

visiting our CYOW page on

thepapercutarcade.ca website.

It's got more information, we've

created a promo video this year that

I encourage you to check out.

It has English captions.

And then we are also hosting

more workshops.

So this was the first workshop

of the month,

but we will have a workshop on

Sunday, April 11.

We're going to introduce Twine.

I talked about Twine a little bit earlier

in this video,

that some of our previous projects

were created using Twine.

And so I'm going to give a little bit

of a primer on that.

And then on Sunday, April 25,

we will also have a session about

getting your projects ready to present.

And so if you're at a point
where you've created this

really cool project,

but you don't know how to
present it online

or how to translate it to
an open audience,

that's an opportunity for you to come
and have those questions.

And we can brainstorm about the best

way to deliver your project on May 22,

which is our salon date.

One other thing that I want to

highlight is that,

while we're working together -apart-,

we are going to be hosting these

Wednesday working sessions with

Chris Slater on our Discord channel.

And there, even if you don't want to

be commenting or writing,

you can still be there while other

people are having conversations.

That's a place where you could share

your ideas.

You could brainstorm through any

challenges you're having.

Or even just watch what other people

are making to be inspired.

So that's going to happen every

Wednesday throughout April.

And I think it's going to happen from

six 6pm Pacific to 8pm

every Wednesday.

Oh, one last thing while I'm still sharing

I did want to show one other thing.

So, last year on

The Papercut Arcade Instagram,

and you can check it out,

it's one of the archived stories

up at the top,

you can see some of the things that

we had posted to get people excited

at the beginning of the month.

And so, here is one of the things that

we wrote, which was,

"Write a list of events, small single

scene events, like

'confronted with a big red button',

'meet a stranger',

'need to fix my glasses'."

So if you check out this archived story,

we've got a couple of ways that

you can get inspired to start generating

ideas for this year.

This year's theme is "blackout".

And really, you can go

whatever direction you want

to go with that,

whether that's looking at the word

'blackout' as one word or breaking it up

into "black" and "out".

So the theme really is up to you.

We accept projects from basically

anyone and everyone,

you don't have to consider yourself

an artist or writer to submit anything.

We do ask that you make sure that

your projects are respectful

to the audiences;

we're not going to accept anything

that has hate speech that is

trans-antagonistic

or homophobic, racist,

or misogynistic.

That's just not the kind of

environment that we are hosting.

But we do welcome projects that have

complicated themes.

If you want to explore something that

is complicated,

what we'll do is we'll work with you

in May, when you've completed your

project or gotten the project to

a point where you're ready to present it,

we'll work with you on content warnings,

because not all content is something

that all audiences want to check out.

But that doesn't mean that it needs to

be in any way censored by being a part

of our project.

Okay, so I think that is covering all

the things that I kind of wanted to

share of the pre-existing stuff

that we had.

Here's an opportunity for me

to suggest a couple of ways that you

could take some projects that don't

necessarily fit in the mold of

interactive fiction,

and making them interactive so that

you can present them.

So for example, perhaps you are

interested in writing some poetry.

How do you make poetry interactive?

Well, the poem itself, the content itself,

is going to have parts to it.

And whether that's going to be lines,

or stanzas,

or full pages,

you can start exploring poetry in

those pieces.

And whether that's people being able

to choose the order that they read

through your poetry.

Or if you have multiple poems,

you could create a framework or a

story about people coming to

whether they're walking through something,

or they're flipping through a book,

and they find poems,

you can encourage them to turn to page 47.

And check out a piece of poetry that

you have written.

You could also do some chance poetry,

where you do actually cut up

your poetry into pieces,

and allow people to build the poetry

based on the individual lines.

And so they're actually taking your

original work and reconstructing kind

of an ephemeral or one time

or one moment with your poem,

where they actually got to put their

fingers into the making process.

If you're a musician, it's the same thing.

Your music is going to have

different parts.

So there's no reason why you couldn't

cut your bridge or your chorus

from your music

and allow people to choose the order

in which they check out your music.

You could also use YouTube where you

have multiple pieces of music,

and have people choose which way they

want to go to get closer or further

away from your music.

What would happen if they

played at the same time.

Talking about YouTube,

when we were saying before,

where you could film different things.

These don't have to be high res videos.

If you have a mobile device

that takes video

there's no reason why you couldn't

test out what that would be.

But you could also use stills, you

could take your camera and you could

take individual images and apply music

on top of that,

to allow people to go through just a

visual version of a story.

And again, as long as you're providing

the option for people to take at least

an A or B choice as they move through -

If you had one photo that led you to

two different photos that people

could check out,

then you could say,

go check out photo A and then they

would go along that path.

And then where they're going to go next

depends on how you link that content

to the next part of your story.

If we're looking just at visual art,

there's no reason why you couldn't

film yourself in Photoshop,

where you present different layers.

And so now you're going to take images

of the different layers of your artwork.

And people can choose the path

or the layer that you're going to be

putting up on top

and then craft an image

based on the layers

or the order of layers that happen.

So you don't have to stick to fiction,

you don't have to just write a story.

To explore this interactive storytelling,

you really are open to however you

want to explore.

However, if you are a writer,

or you just want to try writing a story,

there are also ways that

you can do it beyond using,

say the Twine format,

which we're going to talk about later,

or a published book.

If you were to use a program like

Google Drive,

hich is a free cloud based word

rocessor that you can use online,

what you could do is create your story,

and then you could label each one of

your paragraphs with numbers.

And there's a table of contents that

is automatically generated on the right.

Same thing, at the end of every paragraph,

you could encourage people to jump in

and out of your story,

just based on the table of contents

that's interactive.

And that doesn't require any coding

on your part,

it really is just about you numbering

and creating a sequence of your story.

You could go to a plain text editor.

And same thing, you don't have to have

that interactive click feature, you

just have to clearly number where each

one of your paragraphs are.

If you're using Word

or a another word processor,

you could do page breaks in between.

and just the number of the pages could be

what people need to navigate through

to get through your story.

There are lots of different ways that

you can explore interactive fiction,

and we really are encouraging you to

try whatever works for your format.

We also encourage you to embrace it,

if it doesn't work.

That's something worth sharing with

our community.

If you have some big ideas,

and you want to try something,

and it just doesn't work,

that's something that we'd love to

hear about on our Wednesday

Discord sessions.

It could also be something that

you write about,

and that could be the thing that you

present at our salon.

Explain how you had these ideas and

the things you wanted to try and where

it just didn't work for you.

That can encourage you to make new

projects in the future,

and can also potentially encourage

other people to take that idea,

and then problem solve through things

that you weren't able to sort through

with your project.

It really is a collaborative project

where all of us are working together

to try and create something cool.

And by sharing your mistakes,

it really becomes something that we

can all own together.

It doesn't actually have to be a problem.

It's not a failure.

It's just something that didn't work.

Alright, so that's the end of the

formal part of what I wanted

to share today.

I'm going to turn off the video and

that's what we're going share.

But what I'm going to be available online

for a little while later for any kind

of questions or comments that folks have.

Thanks so much for joining me for this

first half hour.

I hope I've inspired you to try

different things for

this upcoming project.

And again, I encourage you to join us

this coming Wednesday on our Discord.

Thanks!

[Transcript and captions by
Jon Dawes & Kay Slater, 2021

[Captions by Kay Slater, 2021]