Lexicon is a writing exercise for several writers. The goal of the exercise is to produce a hypertext in the form of an encyclopedic dictionary. The rules of this exercise were formulated by Neel Krishnaswami and published in The 20’ by 20’ Room.1 He cites The Dictionary of the Khazars as a literary model, although it is the work of a single author. The Encyclopedia of Arda provides a second model, even though it purports to be created from the study of a large body of extent text. And the Encyclopedia Frobozzica may be taken as a comic extreme. Naturally, the shade of Borges and his short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertis gazes benevolently over such an exercise.
Essentially, the rules exist to aid the collaborative production of the hypertext. Each submission must include some number of citations of other articles. Since some of these citations might not (yet) exist as articles in the lexicon, this allows each participant to propose further directions of inquiry into the topic of the exercise. The actual production of submissions is aided by establishing deadlines; one submission from each participant every 3-7 days seems to be a decent pace. An alphabetical progression is applied so that the entries will be distributed evenly throughout the alphabet (although one can imagine cases in which this is not necessarily desired).
Neel Krishnaswami states that he originally formed this exercise to sketch out the background of an RPG he was running. Lexicon has also been used to develop illustration text for the new (forthcoming) edition of the Paranoia RPG.2
1. The 20’ by 20’ Room is a blog about the activity of role-playing gaming. The article that discusses Lexicon appeared there in November 2003. Neel Krishnaswami uses a wiki to moderate a game of the Nobilis RPG titled “Lower than Angels”. <www.20by20room.com/2003/11/lexicon_an_rpg.html>
2. The Toothpaste Disaster was a Lexicon game moderated by Alan Varney, one of the authors working on the Mongoose Publishing’s forthcoming edition of the Paranoia RPG, titled Paranoia XP. <paranoia.allenvarney.com/index.cgi/ParanoiaLexicon>