thoughtcrumbs

Storytelling on the web

Last night at CHIFOO, Jim Miller reviewed the nascent genre of web-based storytelling and the collaborative communities that spring up around it. Remember the huge promotion for the A.I. movie a few years ago? Microsoft designed hundreds of fake web sites that, when "read between the lines," revealed a murder mystery that seven thousand people converged on discussion boards to solve.

In 2002, Miller produced his own mystery story/game; he wanted to study its viability as a business model and (more interestingly to me) what happens on the boards. He built four fake sites (for a corporation, an academic research lab, a personal blog, and an activist group) and seeded clues across their pages for five weeks. He even built an Amazon account for the CEO of the fake corporation, with a favorites list full of money laundering books.

A community of puzzle solvers formed on the Alternative Reality Gaming Network (ARGN), trading discoveries and speculations both in-game (what will the protagonist do next?) and out-game (is the server down? what's everyone doing this weekend?). Miller said, "The board was the real game. We created the foundation for a social event that was playing out on the ARGN board."

What happens when the real and virtual worlds collide? Do the story characters know about the ARGN discussion? Of course not. But when the CEO ordered the murder of the research lab director, hundreds of ARGN members emailed the director, begging him not to go out that night. Miller's group decided at the game's outset not to reply to emails for scaling and continuity reasons. But the research director didn't go out that night . . .

Miller ended by pointing out that good general-purpose websites share characteristics with successful game sites: they are interactive and have a strong sense of character. (See my previous posts about businesses revealing personality through tone of voice.)

More about Miller's project is on his site (if you can stomach the overuse of the word "faux-ness.") His analysis is excellent; I can't wait to see what he does next.

Oh, and I won the drawing last night. Finally! After three years of meetings, I got to take home a nifty book: Digital Storytelling.