Six to Start: We Tell Stories

What Penguin Books (actually, what Six to Start) has done is re-arrange the expectation of the reader at an even pace to introduce ARG elements in a compelling way. These new forms of stories are coming into their own… and with the looming New Depression, the best place to be in this economy is marketing escapism. It made Hollywood great back then, and it’s going to make this twilight landscape between producerly texts and digital gaming a new kind of institution. So, that’s it then, halfway through the project, and I’m certainly hooked. While, for different reasons, I was less than engaged in each of the stories so far, I’m curious enough to keep coming back. I want to see what the next narrative holds and how it will be presented.

Next week they’ll be presenting “Your Place And Mine” by Nicci French, which promises to be a story written in real time. According to their site:

I for one, will be reading.

This is the end of the third week of Penguin Books
experiment in new ways of telling stories. Six to Start, including puppetmaster
design team members from Mind Candy, the Perplex City ARG creators, are creating some very complex pieces of story.
There are still three weeks to go, meaning three more stories to be told as well as the underlying
story one can puzzle out along the way. The boards are buzzing, as players discuss the puzzles, and I recommend going deeper in that direction if
you’re interested in the game elements.

I’m more fascinated by the ways in which interactivity has been incorporated with each story. With the first week, Charles Cumming’s story
“The 21 Steps” is told via pop-ups on a google map. I suspect that those in the area would have found artifacts and elements of the narrative placed in London and perhaps New York as well in that first week. While the transition between satellite photo and London road map was jarring and
the scroll sequences moved at a frustratingly uniform pace, overall the narrative played nicely with the sequencing. I haven’t read The Thirty-Nine Steps so it’s difficult to say how that book influenced this story, but it did leave me hoping that someday culture will be familiar enough with
the idea of an ARG that puppetmasters won’t need to rely on Alice in Wonderland-based or ‘test the initiate’ plots to get underway.

Toby Litt’s story “Slice” conjured an

accessible entry point for people to create their own fiction, and it will spawn imitators. While this
story was less than satisfying for me, I know that was in part because I caught it after the week had played out rather than catching it from day one and keeping up in an RSS reader. I suspect this story, with email address for the main character in question, was likely a trail head deeper into the narrative.

I also believe that we’ll be presented with many, many more variations of week two’s twitter/web journal-based slice of story written by amateurs and professionals alike–it’s a nice midway point between text and event.

Back to the story… following the daily entry of a troubled young teen’s thoughts and her parents, as well as their photo records, ultimately felt very tame, with half-hearted attempts at being provocative. The house was haunted, a white rabbit, and overtones of something sinister in young Slice’s past… first, because I have no real desire to spend any time sifting through pictures of an abandoned cat and emailing fictional teens,
I found the week one entry much more compelling, even with the slow tracking across street maps from another country. On a side note, I wonder how many readers there actually are for this kind of text. Being able to see real world metrics–like the 111 people following Slice’s twitter–changes the text. Were I to come back to the same page a week from now, and find the counter at 200, or 10,000, I suspect I would have a different reaction to the text–it would have a different meaning.

Week three, a choose-your-own adventure constructed by Kevin Brooks entitled “Fairy Tales.” You can share the story you help write as you read it, and the story itself is embedded with a puzzle (figuring out the puzzle undoubtably unlocks deeper elements of the narrative). Good enough to overlook the fact that this kind of narrative was cutting-edge when people were sharing time on a mainframe, and I’m really feeling the ‘PG’ rating, but it is fun, and does a great job of playing to the traditional fairy tale structure. Again, interesting–and a compelling way to move through text, ala Infocom, only now the text can be emailed on to a friend (a nice trick for email retention.)

All things considered, I’m very much enjoying the production that is going into presenting each story–that alone is enough for me to keep coming back. While I don’t have the time or desire to spend more than a few minutes scanning the boards and reading the stories, I am becoming aware of authors I would otherwise have been unfamiliar and I’m enjoying the variations of presentation. If you haven’t been reading We Tell Stories, you’ve been missing out.