January 15, 2026
ProtFiSIG January 2026: Year Review and Strategic Planning
Participants: sachbenny, suspencer_nit, drevius., _vgr, randylubin, timber1997, thewanderingeditor
The ProtFiSIG group reflected on their first 2.5 months of activity, which primarily involved analyzing existing scholarship, theory, and literature through the lens of protocol fiction. For 2026, the consensus emerged to shift toward generating original protocol fiction work and theory. The group discussed using collaborative worldbuilding games—like The Quiet Year and custom RPGs—as preparation tools for shared universe writing projects, with rapid Discord-playable versions making these accessible during meetings.
A significant focus emerged on protocol-based mystery and thriller narratives as a promising subgenre where detectives use protocol knowledge to solve cases. The group explored patterns for managing consistency in collaborative worldbuilding, including selective canonization in wikis and explicit documentation of which world elements are absolute, common, or deliberately divergent. Examples like Neurocracy (wiki-based murder mystery), Discworld's genre collections, and The Good Place Season 1 were cited as inspirational models.
Key innovations discussed included newspaper-style "near future" landing pages for headline-based worldbuilding and consensus-building, an 'encyclopedia monster manual' concept, and application of the "profligacy principle" (needlessly multiplying entities) as a design philosophy opposing minimalism. Timber1997 proposed organizing a workshop in late January to implement these game-based worldbuilding sessions.
- The group plans to transition from using existing scholarship to generate their own theory and literature, creating original work that can be shared outward with consistent framing.
- Worldbuilding games (like The Quiet Year and premise-setting RPGs) should precede collaborative writing to align authors on key world elements, with optional newspaper-style headline pages as consensus-building tools.
- Protocol fiction works particularly well when combined with mystery/thriller narratives, where protagonists use their knowledge of fictional protocols to solve crimes or catch culprits, offering an interesting contrast to current API-based business practices.
- A successful pattern involves games generating broad worldbuilding elements, then selectively canonizing only a subset in wikis/docs, while being explicit about which world elements are absolute versus common versus divergent.
- The 'profligacy principle' (needlessly multiplying entities) can serve as a meta-rule for protocol fiction design, contrasting with Occam's razor and encouraging creative abundance.