about . . .

to play, you should do two things: fill in a dreamfield with your words (thus completing an unseen textual template that someone has previously written and left on the site) and also create a dreamfield yourself (thus leaving your template on the site for someone else to populate). just write automatically. write anonymously, if that makes it easier, or leave your name with dreamfields you create. the point is for players to see how their words fit together with those that other recent players have left.

fields of dream is a literary game in which participants can write fill-in-the-blank texts, called dreamfields, and blindly combine words they have written with other people's dreamfields.

the project is a collaboration between nick montfort and rachel stevens. we developed the game concept, overall design, html, and css together; visual design and illustration is by rachel, programming in perl by nick. the project was done for launch in october 2003 in a special literary games issue of poems that go.

ten dreamfields are always available; creating a new one overwrites an existing one, just as dreams are easily forgotten.

there is no provision for editing what you have submitted; we are anti-editing. just write what you feel like writing at the moment and throw your words together with someone else's.

there is no randomness within fields of dream itself; we are anti-randomness. or rather, any randomness should come from your mind, not from the server's pseudorandom number generator.

the fields of dream system is available under a creative commons license. in brief, you may install it on your own server, for a noncommercial use, if you credit us as having developed the project. (ask us for permission if you want to install it for commercial use.) you may modify it if you share your changes under the same license. we do not warranty or provide free support for fields of dream. here is the source code and other required files.