Jo has been a total star and been coding away at the pornograph (old joke being that I'm a pornographer without a pornograph.) It's a simple enough concept. Albeit slightly geeky. As with many ideas, beer was involved in its evolution.
Imagine a choose your own adventure novel (turn to page 7 if you want to fight the dragon. Turn to page 9 if you want to run away. Turn to page 12 if you want to ask the wizard for help.)
Add porn. (turn to page 7 if you want to cop off with Mark. Turn to page 9 if you want to cop off with Emma. Turn to page 12 if you want to cop off with them both.)
Add the internet. And thus the pornograph was born.
I'm curently populating the database with an initial story. Jo has created a great system that does all the hard work so that all I need to do is write each thread of the story.
The maths is terrifying. At the moment, each section is about 30 words long. Taking an approximate average length of 3,000 words for a Cliterati contribution, that's 100 places for the story to branch. Assuming three options at each branch, that means that by the time you're up to four versions of the same story at the first branch. Each of those versions has three further options each, taking it up to 12 stories. Each of these has three options, taking it up to 36 versions of the story. By the time you're 90 words in. It would take me far too long to figure out the amount of variations available by the time the story gets to 3,000 words long. But it's approximately a gazillion.
Why bother? For the hell of it. There's something intriguing about creating truly interactive porn. Once the site is up, people will be able to add their own threads to the story.
Which will make the maths even more terrifying.
Posted by emilyd at March 14, 2003 09:26 PM