Kairos: Past, Present and Future(s)

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Kairos Was ...
(Doherty's Thread)

Kairos logo circa 1996.
 
The Plan: "Hypertext Studios"
(Salvo's Story)

The best example I have of these teams is Mick Doherty's 1997 class experimentation with writing hypertext fiction, "Coraline Dreams" (unfortunately, no longer available online).

A team of students wrote the same scene from four different perspectives: one for each of three participating characters plus an omniscient narrator.

These writers each had to collaborate to achieve consistency — not too difficult when the experiment consists of a single scene with a limited number of characters within the confines of one-semester class. However, when the scope of the project expands, complexity increases exponentially.

In popular culture, the closest relative to this hypertext studio seems to be the comic book world. Writers of comics place their stories and characters within worlds and groups of characters and are responsible for maintaining consistency between these worlds. Science fiction worlds follow similar trajectories; for instance, those around George Lucas' Star Wars and Gene Rodenberry's Star Trek.

So what's stopping us?