alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Choose your own adventure style Presentation
Hello good folks!
So... TL;DR: I find presentations boring. I find Choose your own adventure style books not boring. I married the two. Now, you can have presentations where the people you present two have the ability to choose how your presentation proceeds! And you can construct your presentation using plain markdown, start a server, your audience opens the `/voter` link you open the `/presenter` link and start your presentation. Whenever there is a question, they will choose and the presentation proceeds according to the choice.
Longer version:
In the years I partook on presentations I always liked the ones that are more interactive. Not in a I ask questions and then wait uncomfortably for people to shout out something, no. In a way where I, as a viewer, got something to do! Makes me more interested in the presentation as well, and I'll be learning and remembering things more as well.
I also like choose your own adventure type of books. So I wondered, how could I make these two come together? So I wrote this little tool called adventure-voter. Not a very good name, but meh... The point is that you'll have a backend and a frontend to deal with votes and deal with following forks in your presentation. Going back from a fork if the fork ended up in death or a failed route. ( you procastinated, your backend didn't start, you server didn't come up, etc whatever makes sense as an end in your presentation ). And then you can explore a different route. Imagine, you are presenting something about Kubernetes. And one of the questions is, okay you are now bringing up etcd. How do you configure it? Do you... and the vote begins.
This makes the presentation a little bit more enjoyable I think. Also, the framework is super easy. You have your presentation in Markdown and the frontend is a lightweight parser with tailwind that does things and makes it look relatively nice. ( I'm not a frontend dev, sorry ). And you can link together steps and stories with `next: slide-1b` or whatever.
Granted, you'd have to work a bit more to get a presentation that makes sense, but honestly, I think it will make for a very interesting talk. Something I'm aiming to do on the next KubeCon in Atlanta. I'm going to be using this framework to present something. ( If I get in. :)) )
Lastely, I want the presentation to be enjoyable and not boring. :) And that's my main goal. On KubeCon you sit through presentation after presentation after presentation and hopefully this one will be ( if I get accepted ) something that you enjoy and don't fall asleep on. :)
I hope this is useful. Enjoy folks. :)
Comments
I guess I'd like a bit more explanation on what you envisage. I'm thinking back to presentations I've done, even ones where entertainment was an ancillary goal, but I'm not seeing how this would help?
Obviously there are a bunch of presentations which are dry, and can't really be tweaked. I'm thinking of financial things, income statements etc. They're primarily informational, and we need to see all the slides. Having the audience vote on whether to look at the cash-flow slide, or debtors analysis next seems contrived.
Then I've done presentations to inform. Like say introducing developers to Unicode. That tends to follow a path of knowledge, where one fact or concept builds on previous facts. We can't really discuss string normalization before covering code points and characters etc.
Sales presentations are a bit hit or miss. They can be wildly entertaining, or dreadfully dull. They can certainly be too focused on the product and too unfocused on the specific customer need. But a good one also leads the customer through specific steps (while keeping attention.)
So I'm a bit curious as to the presentations you've experienced where you feel this would have improved things? (Other than the very common "please can we end this presentation already" sentiment which is alas all too common.)
Oh, no way. This is really cool. Anything to make presentations more interactive and interesting. I like the look too.
I’m doing something similar with interactive stories [1] but where multiple trees can happen.
I wonder if you could use AI to let people explore your presentation on their own after (maybe even during the presentation).
Like, explain a slide in more detail. You put a dump of information (death by PowerPoint style stuff) then let it think up questions the guest can explore?
I’m always a huge fan of asymmetrical projects where people connect with their phones to collectively modify a shared state.
Nice idea, good luck!
I noticed you pointed out that the logo was "hand-drawn in Procreate". Is the code the same or were portions of it generated using an LLM (which was almost assuredly trained on lots of copyrighted data without the consent of the original authors and writers)?
I wouldn't have even brought it up if the artisanal declaration hadn't been explicitly called out.
I find the logic of AI art != okay, but AI code == okay, a bit inconsistent.
Former game dev here, drenched in cold sweat! Drop anything you are doing and immediately erase any mention of the 4-letter genre (words 3,4,5,6 in the title of your post). It is trademarked term and the holder goes VERY aggressively after it, including it's 4 letter acronym. I strongly suggest deleting the GitHub repo if it contains that phrase and create new GitHub repo without it. Use something like "interactive adventure" or something like that.