Error

This is a document to organize some general and specific thoughts about Error as work continues on polishing it up.

Background

"Choose Your Own Error Adventure", or "Error" for short, was a communal interactive fiction project built by a bunch of weirdos and children in the early 2000s, right here on eopoint.com. It was inspired by Brad: the Game(approve sites), a similarly weird and dreamlike piece of interactive fiction written by Elbe Spurling(approve sites). Truth be told, there are bits of Error that were lifted wholesale directly from Brad: the Game, though perhaps it's closer to parody. Ms. Spurling, if you read this, we're sorry.

Anyway, after seeing Brad: the Game Mr. Encyclopedia quickly started making his own hypertext story, one also inspired by The Blog Game, an obscure and nonsensical minigame from Ultima Underworld II. The idea to make it a game you play when you get a 404 error is unclear but remains a cornerstone of Error to this day.

As Mr. Encyclopedia's web development skills reached their early zenith, they moved The Encyclopedia of Pointless from an all-HTML site to one run on PHP and MySQL. This provided many opportunities for making the site more interactive. One such opportunity was building a set of tools to port the first HTML version of Error to a mySQL database, and then providing those tools to other people who wanted to add entries of their own. In this era, Error went from a few dozen entries to over a thousand. Many of those entries were still penned by Mr. Encyclopedia, but there were others. Beat, The Rabid Sniper, CWhiteblade, a guy named "Toppan," it says here... and probably many others. Unfortunately the ability to track authorship was never fully implemented, so the specifics are lost to history.

Eventually the popularity of this version of the site waned, and Mr. Encyclopedia felt that his web development skills were falling behind the times. This old hand-coded site was abandoned and replaced with MediaWiki, of Wikipedia fame. While the content of that old site was preserved, it had to be hand-ported to this new platform. Porting Error was a monumental task, and while in-roads were made, not much progress was ever made.

Eventually this MediaWiki site too was scrapped and replaced with a simple blog. No effort was ever made to bring Error there. It seems that without Error, the big weird jewel at the heart of the Encyclopedia, the spirit to continue just wasn't there. The flame guttered, then died. The Encyclopedia of Pointless was no more.

Fast forward to many years later. Mr. Encyclopedia had successfully clawed ownership of eopoint.com back from shady URL squatters. Cohost was dying. A new place was needed for posting weird dumb text online, and what better than a very old place indeed? The Encyclopedia of Pointless was relaunched with a shiny new logo and a really old platform, venerable Wiki software PmWiki. Mr. Encyclopedia put a few of his Cohost posts up alongside some articles old and new, and once again started the laborious task of hand-porting Error to a new Wiki site.

After a small amount of work, he had an idea. PmWiki's file-based structure was intriguing to Mr. Encyclopedia. Thanks to several years of sharpening his PHP skills maintaining a ComicControl fork as well as many more years of general programming experience he was far from the dilettante who installed MediaWiki all those years ago.

First he wrote a script that output the entire Error database as a single HTML file, with anchor links connecting the different entries. Then, he wrote another script that output individual files in the format required by PmWiki. It took a few tries and required a bit of side-work since PmWiki wanted unique file names and not every Error title was unique. Eventually he got an acceptable, if imperfect, result. Error, in its entirety, was on the Internet again for the first time in 20 years.

There is still much work to be done. Error was written during a brief time when Microsoft was pushing special unicode characters for quotes. Some of the entries had spaces at the start of paragraphs, which PmWiki interprets as monospaced text. Links didn't always work. And the writing itself, oh the writing, so much fixing typos and removing unpleasant passages.

Fixing Error

If you are reading this, you are cordially invited to assist in the efforts to modernize this messy creation. Despite the effort taken to import all this old text, we aren't being precious about it. Keep what works. Remove what doesn't. Move entries around, change references, add new entries. There's no wrong way to participate in this project.

At the time of writing, there are only a few hundred unconfirmed entries left, down from over a thousand. Many of those are in orphaned sections, which should be attached to the rest of Error, or "deep" sections only reachable by making many sequential choices. Ideally, Error should be broad and recursive, not deep. We've made an effort to label how deep a given error entry is, based on how many steps it takes to get there from the start. Entries in deeper layers should bring readers back to entries on earlier layers as much as possible.

The ideal Error entry is about three paragraphs long, though there's no minimum or maximum requirement. Some of the best Error entries are very long.

Basic Themes

The protagonist of Error is a mysterious unnamed adventurer dressed in layered robes and a wide hat that hides their face. They carry a blade specially forged to slay Errors and they wield many different combat skills including the mighty HyperPoke, the ability to summon allies to aid them, and a vast array of magic spells such as ●Fish. They possess an iron will that can propel them past insurmountable obstacles and know many secrets that can get them into and out of danger. There is no hard limit to their power, only the power of imagination and good storytelling.

Johnny Wallbank is normal human man from Britain. He is often summoned to fight alongside the protagonist. Sometimes he can defeat his foes simply by being extremely British at them. Other times he and the protagonist fuse together into SUPERDARKLORD, a truly powerful and dangerous being that seeks world domination. Johnny's brother Ronny Wallbank is a recurring antagonist and mafioso.

Despite how it has been traditionally written, it's not "oFish." The intent was to emulate the way spells were written in old JRPGs, with an icon to indicate what color of magic a given spell was associated with. To the maximum extent possible spells should be prefaced by ● (written as " %white%●%% ") with whatever color is appropriate. ●Fish is a white magic spell, since it's supposed to summon a deluge of restorative fish. This formatting doesn't work when a spell is referenced in an entry's title, so simply use ● or ○, whichever is more appropriate.

When Error went from being an HTML story to its freely expandable form, "respawning" was used as a technique to allow the story to continue past points where the protagonist had died before. We want to remove "respawning" from the story to the maximum extent possible. We're not opposed to exploring the concept of death and rebirth in Error, but most of the time this was used as a way to move the character out of one situation and into another via messy demise. We think the story is more interesting if these shifts were made part of the narrative. The character can be knocked out and awaken somewhere else, or be thrown out of one situation and into another, but it's better if a longer chain of events can be written connecting the two ideas. Actually dying in Error should be fairly rare and marked by a genuine ending if the story doesn't continue into an afterlife.

Trogdor, being the height of comedy in the early 2000s, is referenced a lot in Error. We would prefer any instance of Trogdor getting summoned link to one specific entry, Summon Trogdor the Burninator. Other instances of summoning Trogdor should be replaced with related monster threat Gorgotron.

Short stupid entries should be expanded on while keeping the original text or intent as much as possible. It can be a fun writing challenge to make something interesting from a weird or poorly written prompt.

There are many broad topics in Error that should be consolidated as much as possible. Efforts to catalog these topics have just begun.

Earlier in this project I had the idea to identify "Choice Nexus" entries that can be easily linked to from other entries. This has somewhat fallen by the wayside in favor of broad topics, but are still a useful tool for adding additional choices to entries that need one.