All the way back in 2009, under another name, I wrote something about the “addventure“, wondering if we’ll ever get an addventure in webcomic form. I remember being emailed afterward by Allen Firstenberg, who coined the “add-venture” term in 1987-1988 when he created an add-on story for the Nyack High School BBS, which he later ported to the early World Wide Web in 1994. I need to find that email someday. He’s currently a software developer and published writer. Good to see he’s doing ok.

The addventure idea, combining the “round-robin” and “choose-your-own-adventure” narrative ideas, has been used over the decades in both wiki and non-wiki formats.

Today I learned about “Endless VN“, a visual novel, in which all assets of the game are automatically generated from AI prompts while being played, allowing for theoretically-endless gameplay and theoretically-infinite numbers of plot divergences. From what I’m seeing so far, the AI generation is resulting in the typical deformed body parts expected of current AI generated media. But as a proof-of-concept, I can see some of the merit of this idea.

Also want to note this project, Myujen, which is intended to allow for creation of visual novels in VR.

If EndlessVN, Myujen and related platforms can actually realize a never-ending, AI-driven visual novel “addventure”, how much closer will we get to the “metanovels” depicted in Rudy Rucker’s novel Postsingular?