I read this post with interest, as I hadn’t followed the Million Penguins project. It struck me that the idea of a wikinovel is very similar in many ways to that of an online text based role playing game. I don’t know if you’ve come across any of these (or even if I’ve mentioned them before, which I may have done). They tend to be fandom based, so for example there’s a huge number of Harry Potter games, but there are also original games such as this one, based on supernatural shenanigans in an art deco apartment complex. You’re right about limitations too – most of these games are heavily moderated to keep the writers in order, and the list of rules about what you can and cannot do can be long, depending on the game.

Thanks for the comment! I did think that byt fogot to say it. Well done again, is an impressive effort.

Eoin

I think the other thing it has achieved is given us ideas as to how we might proceed if we wanted to try and produce some successful collaborative fiction, as oppossed to this less structured experiment designed to see if a novel would somehow emerge through collective endeavour.Perhaps we, or others, might be inspired down this direction in the future.

Jeremy@Penguin