After our discussion in class last week, I felt eager to try and break away from the weight I was feeling from the word "mod". I wanted to find a way to bend the project to something I could get excited about. I like building interactive applications and its something I wish I had more opportunities to do so I thought a bit about what was interesting about the Eden game to me in more abstract terms.

There were two key things that I liked about our game of Eden. One was the collaborative nature of the game. To invoke the DeKoven lexicon, perhaps the game more co-liberative than collaborative. We all sat in a circle and took turns constructing stories. I think I wanted to take this and make it a bit more collaborative in a way where the stories we were constructing would bear traces of everyone's participation. The other thing that I found compelling in Eden was the use of free association. I had my three cards and I intuitively figured out their sequence.

So the goal I had in mind of the conception of my idea was a collaborative, free-associating story constructor. My source for content: the infinite depths of the world wide web via the Google API. I'll walk through the interaction step by step.

The system prompts for a number of players so that it can coordinate the interaction accordingly.

The first player is asked to begin a sentence. They are free to begin the sentence with as many words as they want, but for the sake of the collaborative efforts should leave the sentence pretty open for other players to contribute to.

The beginning of the sentence that the first player typed is displayed at the top of the screen. The last word in that sentence is fed into google and the program fills the screen with words from the first page result that this word yielded.

The next player chooses a word from this pool of words and drags it onto the end of the partially formed sentence at the top of the screen. They are asked if this is the end of the sentence or not. If it is not the end of the sentence, the word the player picked is fed into google and a new pool of words arrives and the next player repeats the process until the sentence is finished.

If it is decided that this is the end of the sentence, the second player (that is the player after the person who began the first sentence) begins a new sentence and the whole sentence building process begins again.

After each player in the game has had the opportunity to begin a completed sentence, the story is finished and is displayed in full on the screen.

Thats the basic gist of it. You'll be able to try it for yourself in class on Thursday. I think that it could use a little more structure to guide people, but I'm not totally sure where. I've experimented with limiting the search results to pages on wikipedia and thought a bit about including extra search terms in the background (maybe even Eden, Adam, Even, Serpent in honor of the original Eden game), but I'm not sure. If you've got any suggestions, I welcome them and could probably even have some of them implemented to try out in the demo on thursday.