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An idea that I have mused over but haven't attempted to pursue is a code repo (with history, pull requests, etc) as a vehicle for epistolary fiction. There are short stories as sequences of news articles or letters, novels given as diaries, etc -- so why not a story told through issues, pull requests, and the code base? In comparison to code as the text at a given point in time, the whole repo and its presentation of history would let you see both concepts and characters (contributors) changing over time, and a let a reader/user infer certain events outside of the repo (e.g. a merge is followed an hour later by a PR to revert it, with a curse-laden description and rapid approval lets us know that something broke).

Making something that really works in this form both involves a creative insight (What's the story that makes this format shine? What's the code that our characters are building?) and some technical nuggets (writing scripts+tools that generate git history and/or github/gitlab/whatever API calls, acting as multiple parties).




Definitely a workable idea. I used to play a lot of Rimworld and, as is good practice in heavily modded long-run games, would frequently make manual saves. The names of those saves weren't in the style of commit messages (more like episode titles) but it was a similar idea, expressing the current state of the world or my intentions or my reactions to events. Reading back the save names in chronological order is always a fun little way to relive the story of that colony :)


Surprised that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cookie_Monster_(novella)

wasn't told thus.

"Lena" is written as if it were an encyclopedia (or scholarly) article:

https://qntm.org/mmacevedo




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