A lot of the other things I saw at FOO Camp were interesting products that spawned interesting ideas in my head. For example, there’s We Tell Stories. A venture by, of all publishers, stodgy old Penguin Books, We Tell Stories experiments with using a variety of digital media to… Tell stories. Slice and Your Place and Mine were experiments in serial fiction, and thus their experimental quality doesn’t really come across well in archive form. The others are more interesting.
Fairy Tales is a fairy tale that lets the reader “fill in the blanks” as they navigate through the story. It’s a simple use of digital technology, minimally interactive, but still interesting, since it shows just how mutable formerly-fixed things can be on the web. And, now that I think about it, it welcomes user remixing and makes it an inherent part of reading the story. Nifty!
The (Former) General is a Choose Your Own Adventure story… That’s designed to be read the way everyone actually reads Choose Your Own Adventure stories: with a thumb, index finger, middle finger, ring finger, pinky, and nose firmly planted several pages back so you can explore alternate branches if you don’t like the one you’re on. In order to do this, it keeps a map showing you what you’ve read, what you haven’t, and how they connect together. This lets them do all kinds of silly things that would be… Highly frustrating in a normal Choose Your Own Adventure story.
The most interesting of the six is The 21 Steps. This story’s told using Google Maps. The pop-up balloons are used to present the text describing events at a location pin, and an animated Indiana Jones Is Travelling line connects the location pins in chronological order. The structure here is fairly simple, but I think there’s a lot of more elaborate variations that can be built on top of this basic foundation. It’s probably not going to catch fire as a hot new media for telling stories, but I think it could do some cool things.
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