Evokistan - Interactive graphic novels

To be honest, I haven't taken much notice of the comic book stuff on Evoke. When I come to this website, I see a 'panel' and nothing else. All that stuff described in the investigation file is hidden. I have no idea where it is, and didn't even know it existed until today. I don't know who the heroes are, and don't have a lot to contribute in terms of developing a story that has remained hidden to me.

I just checked, and it works in IE, but I use Firefox. If you want me to look at this stuff, it has to be compelling and easily accessible to everyone. Currently, it's not.

Anyway, here's my suggestion:

The graphic novel should be an interactive story. Players adopt the role of a character in the story from a list of options.

Below each panel there should be a choice of options, each leading to a different result. Each following panel within the mission comes with a new set of options, and each option leads to a different result. Many panels in one mission means many potential outcomes. The objective is to navigate through the mission and see what outcome you get.

Your results will be posted on your profile and be worth a certain number of points. The results will also be carried forward to the next mission and will influence the course of events. Players will have a rank based on the outcomes they achieve as the game progresses.

I doubt this will be easy using the Ning platform, but I've just looked into how this can be done, and it's pretty easy using off-the-shelf open-source tools. Basically, anything that can be flowcharted can be reproduced as a 'decision tree' and adding the graphics is no problem at all. The tools to do this already exist and are easy to use. The difficulty is to plan out the story arc and possible outcomes.

So the obvious topic for the first mission of Evoke 2.0 is open-source, crowdsourcing, GPL, etc. As the current season was eager to embrace Ushahidi (also open-source), perhaps the second could introduce tools like Joomla, drupal, wordpress, firefox, The Gimp, mediawiki, winamp, VLC, etc?

EDIT, part 2: the recurring theme throughout season 2 is a mythical country called Kahani, which has all the problems that will be addressed during the ten weeks. Players will have to navigate their way through the storyboard in order to reach the outcomes they desire for their country. The software can remember numeric values representing unemployment, civil unrest, transparency, corruption, quality of life, etc. and these will be adjusted depending on the choices players choose. Believe me, this stuff is easy from a technical perspective. It just needs really complex story-planning, but we have nine months to make it happen.

I picture season 2 opening with an image of 2-3 people discussing the Evoke network and wishing it was active in their country. Their options will range from doing nothing to googling alchemy to doing something themselves (the 'correct' option).

They can then navigate through a flowchart, with options to make use of various tools they will discover as they go along. These tools wil be needed in later missions, and they may need to go back to the beginning if e.g. they get to mission five and discover that they missed the free software they need to make something they will need.

There should be plenty of clues about how to proceed in the learn section of the mission, and the early missions will be fairly simple anyway, to ensure that players are able to progress without too much trouble at first.

Learn: A list of open-source projects, from wikipedia to TED translations to Joomla. Objective: write about one of them.
Act: install some free open-source software on your computer or server, or contribute something to an open-source resource. Write about your experience.
Imagine: The future of intellectual property.

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