Collaborative Story Writing with Git and GitHub

Welcome to our "Exquisite Corpse" style collaborative story writing game using Git! In this activity, each participant will add to a story with a hint left in the commit message, maintaining the element of surprise.

To avoid participants prematurely seeing the story file and ruining their surprise, we will use the echo command in a Git Bash terminal to add our lines to the story. The -e flag enables interpretation of backslash escapes, so at the end of our addition we can add a \n newline character to keep our story formatting nice and tidy. The >> operator appends the new addition to the file.

Workflow

First Participant

1. Write the first part of the story in story.txt:

   echo -e "Our story is going to be great and stuff is going to happen. Suddenly, something happened... \n" >> story.txt

2. Commit and push:

   git status
   git add story.txt
   git status
   git commit -m "Suddenly, something happened..."
   git status
   git push origin main

Second Participant

1. Pull changes:

   git pull origin main

2. Check the commit message hint:

   git log --oneline -1

   • Suddenly, something happened...

3. Write the next part of the story in story.txt:

   echo -e "Blah blah blah and etc...\n" >> story.txt

4. Commit and push:

   git status
   git add story.txt
   git status
   git commit -m "and etc..."
   git status
   git push origin main

Third Participant

1. Pull changes:

   git pull origin main

2. Check the commit message hint:

   git log --oneline -1

   • and etc...

3. Write the next part of the story in story.txt:

   echo -e "Blah blah blah and etc...\n" >> story.txt

4. Commit and push:

   git status
   git add story.txt
   git status
   git commit -m "and etc..."
   git status
   git push origin main

Final Merge

1. Once every participant has had a couple of turns, we can pull all changes and read the story:

   git pull origin main
   cat story.txt