This is a placeholder entry for the development of Penumbral as a massively multicreator and multiparticipant, modular, distributed versioning world-building and interactive adventure network. Penumbral integrates most of my artistic projects and goals for over three decades. It's been delayed by my urgent work on inclusive p2p organizing frameworks, which is (as it turns out!) prerequisite for doing Penumbral properly.
Penumbral is one of the main collective goals linked to my author's profile.
I want to entwine the development of an interactive map/encyclopedia with multimedia art and narrative. At the very beginning, the user might start with a block of text, or with a very incomplete map that includes some text and/or illustration components. Either way, the user will be able to explore, and further develop, a sprawling narrative that’s built out of modular "scenes", each installed in one or more frameworks. (Each such framework is an overall narrative outline.) Each scene is broken down into small units of text or “pages”. Pages could typically consist of 1-3 paragraphs. They’ll often have one or more interactive components: key words or phrases that are subtly marked with mouseover links for small popup windows, which can then be expanded into a large side window or a new overlapping fullscreen window. These links may be short, optional textual “asides” that elaborate something that the characters are currently discussing or dealing with. In other cases, they’ll be visual illustrations or audio samples of people, places or things. If the page refers to any new person, place or thing that will be of ongoing significance, it will indicate a new entry in the “cyclopedia” (encyclopedia).
Both the cyclopedia and the map grow from (almost) scratch for each user. For instance, if a new city is referenced, it gets a dot on the map and a brief cyclopedia entry of common, basic info; but its entry can expand dramatically over time, depending on future plot references. There will be a visual indication in the narrative whenever an existing cyclopedia entry is expanded, and the new information within that entry will be clearly highlighted.
One of my main goals is to create a world in which the central narrative isn’t always the main focus. The cyclopedia can be a gateway to exploring aspects of the world that are entirely outside of the story. For instance, some cyclopedia entries will automatically create other new entries. It may also link to other stories that are mostly independent of the events in the main storyline.
The central narrative will be divided into “chapters” which each cover some span of time, within which the user may move non-linearly between separate storylines; but at some point, of course, each storyline must end for that chapter. At that point, the user may find that some other storylines, or at least parts of them, are mandatory in order to open the next chapter. (However, "time traveling" will of course be thoroughly integrated with the sequential development of storytelling chapters.)
The default setting for Penumbral is the (mostly) Earth-like planet of Volu. Much background material has been generated, and will be imported (and collaboratively iterated) as needed into the main project. Divergent settings can also be collaboratively generated.
Penumbral can be generated by any number of compatible creators (persons or teams) using distributed versioning control and community-supported media-rating tools. One key design premise is to use powerful media-rating tools to organize preferred content (both world-building and narrative) per searches and filters chosen by specific users. For example, perhaps one scene in a particular narrative framework will be overwhelmingly popular across the network, or overwhelmingly popular in association with any number of other selected modules, and of great interest to most users; perhaps another scene will be generally unpopular, but quite popular in a subset or subculture of people who apply a specific combination of filters to their scene search results. Of course, the generation of diverse (and reasonably high-quality) options will be a very long-term process.
technology, sustainable culture, magic, divergent dimensions (this is intentionally extremely generic here, for now)