After that monster if:book effort about ARGs, I rightly expected to be pulled up for not doing my homework. There is much that has already been thought about ARGs that I haven’t found yet.

So I wasn’t surprised to find that the wonderful Sol Gaitan had picked up on Unfiction’s definition of ARGs¬†as ‘chaotic fiction’ to expand on my attempt to situate ARGs as net-native literature, or something equivalent to literature but appropriate to the collaborative and messy nature of the Internet and the corresponding mutation of print-native notions of Authorship.

Halfway through the second page of SpaceBass’ article there s/he explains why ARGs resist precise definition: as they sit roughly halfway between total authorial control, and totally chaotic generation by their users, individuals can have radically different experiences of them. This means that their definition can only be thought of as an aggregate of users’ experiences.

This put me in mind of the rather messy GOOM collaboration I did with Wilfried Hou Je Bek some time ago. After a year of experimental persiflage we finally concluded that GOOM describes the sum total of what everyone thinks about something.

¬†Having begoomed the word GOOM by talking about it for a year without knowing what it meant, the final (for the last year or so) stage of GOOM research has been not talking about GOOM. So I am surprised and delighted that people are out there theorising an emerging genre of ‘chaos fiction’ in this way: not because I want to situate GOOM as the precursor or vanguard of the poetics of unfiction, but simply¬†because user-generated near-stories are rather goomy. And I always wanted to find a use for the word; and I always wanted to find a way of saying GOOM without saying it. And unfiction seems to have achieved what I had hoped the forking and suppression of GOOM would achieve: the degoomissioning of GOOM.