I was pleased to note that two digital storytelling sites have won SXSW web awards. We Tell Stories, from Penguin, features six stories by six authors experimenting with six different ways of telling stories online. The second, Lost Zombies, is a community generated zombie documentary. Personally, I’m especially fascinated by the community logistics of Lost Zombies. The site appears to me at first glance to be very well organized and very user friendly. It looks like fun to me, and I can see the popular appeal of it right away. How encouraging it should be to all who tell stories on the web, to see that these two sites exist and that they have garnered some notice from the wider web community.

Dreaming Methods features a new work of hypermedia storytelling. Called “The Flat“, it is described as “an atmospheric journey into an abandoned council flat where traces of a narrative formed by its previous inhabitants still lingers”. Done entirely in Flash, it requires a Flash 8 or higher Flash Player. It begins with a dark screen and a vignette of a staricase with a lit doorway at the top. Some words flash on the screen briefly and then fade out. One sentence says, “you were right about me hiding the truth”. The screen goes entirely dark, and there is a rhythmic and pulsing sound for a while. This sound is suddenly punctured by loud knocking. Then the pulsing sounds return. This all begins to seem lame to me, until after being interrupted and coming back to this piece and starting over, I figure out I can click on the lit doorway at the top of the stairs. I click.

I realize that unfolding the story will require clicking. There are more words, and I have to read them quickly to catch them before they fade. “you were always going to do well.” I realize that I am in the role of a snoopy person who knew the person who used to live in the flat, and I have the feeling that the person’s resentful consciousness still lingers in some way, ghost-like, in the flat. The inside of the flat is very dark. It has an unmade bed and a purse in it. There is also a coat. I click on anything clickable, bringing on more mysterious words and winding up going in circles inside the flat. I wonder whether the story will be good enough to justify further effort on my part. continue reading »

Mark Marino has just launched a hypermedia humor e-zine called Bunk Magazine. It looks like it has potential and is worth exploring. I haven’t yet thoroughly checked out the first issue, but I’ve found a few things that made me giggle and smirk, as well as a few things that didn’t. (You’ll have that.) One of the things that did get a giggle from me was the “Y2K Bug Issue”, found under Features. This link brought up a mock circa-1900 newspaper dated January 1, 1900. In this newspaper, you can read about such things as what our future shall bring. Number four on the list is this:

The entire world will be covered by a vast network of wires which will be referred to as the “World Wide Web.” This web will have been woven by gigantical prehistorical arachnids, who will become our leaders after emerging from caverns beneath the earth, where they will have been hiding for 3 millions years.

I think I just like humor that involves wild flights of imagination. continue reading »

A new system, called Literatronic, has been created for hypertext authoring. Rather than using links to connect the passages of their stories, authors can assign numbers to tell Literatronic how much affinity one passage has with another. A reader will be presented with choices of what to read next, based upon these affinities. Once a reader has read a passage, it will not be available again as a choice to read next, unless the reader goes back to the map of already read text and marks the text as unread. The system goes further than this, in that it uses artificial intelligence to adapt to a reader’s previous choices and to use information about them to compute the next set of choices. A much more detailed look at Literatronic, and how it has the potential to change the way the way that hypertext literature is written and read, is available on the WRT blog.

“Hypermedia art seems to follow a trajectory from the salon to the playground,” writes Mark Marino in his March 1st post on the WRT blog. He speculates about the reasons why, at the present time, children tend to comprise the audience that can best appreciate experimental works of hypermedia, digital fiction and poetry. Children are natural interacters. Children like to use all their senses. They like to play. They like to be physical. They are curious. Adults, on the other hand, Marino speculates, have become more accustomed to boredom. We have become accustomed to relatively disembodied and desensualized forms of interaction with the written word.

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