Addventure

An addventure, also known as a collaborative gamebook, is a type of online interactive fiction that combines aspects of round-robin stories and Choose Your Own Adventure-style tales. Like a round-robin story, an addventure is a form of collaborative fiction in which many authors contribute to a story, each writing discrete segments. However, like a gamebook, the resulting narrative is non-linear, allowing authors to branch out in different directions after each segment of the story. The result is a continually growing work of hypertext fiction.

The emergence of computer networks and electronic communication made the writing of collaborative fiction faster and more convenient than previous forms of correspondence. Round-robin stories were being written on bulletin board systems, mailing lists and USENET news groups, and many variations of the format were tried. One early form of branching story that emerged, where participants of such a round-robin group would start telling side-stories in parallel with the main story as it was still being created, led to very confusing and hard-to-follow stories if multiple branches were concurrently being extended on the same board or mailing list. Soon systems emerged in which such branches were formalized and easily separated from the main story.

The portmanteau word "addventure" was coined by Allen "Prisoner" Firstenberg when he created an add-on story for the Nyack High School BBS in 1987–88 and called it "Add-venture". In 1994 the story was transplanted to the World Wide Web in HTML format, where it garnered some attention—and soon many imitators.

The magazines Internet World and Wired both wrote about Firstenberg's addventure. Firstenberg's addventure site is still accessible as of 2016, but all three stories that he ran have been closed for new additions since 1999.

Since then, a number of other addventures have been launched on the Web, some using Firstenberg's software and others using their own code. At least two of these stories have been running continuously for over ten years:

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