The New Choose-Your-Own-Adventures
Penguin UK launched a digital writing project that married reality games to short story writing. The site is called We Tell Stories and the ambition is to create new forms of the story for the internet age.
I browsed through the site and it’s interesting, but I don’t know about its literary merit. “Fairy Tales” by Kevin Brooks is kind of like an internet version of Mad Libs. You choose the name of the princess and king and what type of characters they come across. This might be fun for grade-school kids.
“The (Former) General In His Labyrinth” by Mohsin Hamid is a very slow-moving choose-your-own-adventure story. And once you go on a tangent, you have to click back (and back and back) in order to get to the original story, which slowed down the action.
I thought that all the interactive clicking bogged down the actual “story” part of the experience, but I think Penguin may just be doing this to launch their contests and push the books they’re selling. I think that this idea could have been executed better, and I’m sure we’ll see more sites like this in the future.
Unfortunately, the contests are only open to residents of the UK (darn!) - but the website is fun games for all.
Popularity: 20% [?]
