We're still in the Kickstarter pre-launch phase for SLEEPY HOLLOW, 1998, a cozy, nostalgic reimagining of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, delivered to your mailbox as letters, sketches, and artifacts. It would really help us if you followed the link above and clicked the Notify Me button. Thanks!

Growing Anti-Social

In 2007, I wrote one of the first Twitter novels. "The Good Captain" was a sci-fi reimagining of Herman Melville's short story "Benito Cereno." I was fascinated with the way Twitter dropped little pieces of information in the middle of a feed of other updates, and wondered if that dynamic could be used to tell a story, little fictional narrative nuggets embedded within the stream of non-fiction social sharing. I adapted to story into several hundred 140-character-sized chunks and manually posted them, about 8-12 posts per day.

The whole run lasted 3-4 months, I think. The response was small but encouraging: I presented it to a room at BarcampLA 4 and met a whole slew of folks I still count as friends today. I took it to an Electronic Literature Organization conference and learned that Electronic Literature was a thing. And I did an interview with New Scientist magazine, where they called me the "Epic Poet of Twitter," which I used to threaten to put on my business cards (never did though.)

Over the next five years, as social media expanded, it became my primary instrument. I made all kinds of stories using individual social platforms, combinations of platforms, using each social media profile as a single voice in an expanding chorus. These experiments culminated in the work I did for The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which remains one of the highlights of my career. Not just for the incredible reception is received, but for the sense that we’d found something, a formula, a format for a new kind of storytelling with an unlimited ceiling.

Alas, it didn’t quite work out that way.

For one thing, the way I used social for storytelling was increasingly out of step with the way the platforms evolved. Individual posts were promoted, not threads or conversations. They valued atomized moments instead of mosaics from multiple sources. When the feed privileges the newest, latest thing, it’s hard to find what happened yesterday, last week, last month. And storytelling - even non-linear, emergent storytelling - relies on the sequence of revealed information to create meaning. Over time, social platforms became more and more hostile to controlling the sequence in which audiences saw posts. Words took a back seat to photos and videos, and then algorithms took over everyone’s experience.

The last ten years have been littered with projects that never came to completion, as adjusting to this ever-more hostile social environment made it harder and harder to design workable models. There was the project I took to the Sundance New Frontier Story Lab, Hashtag Hamlet, which was an attempt to combine the LBD format with streaming television. Digital Detox, a webseries adaptation of "The Yellow Wallpaper" with immersive elements that I made with a group of unbelievably talented collaborators, which we shot before the pandemic but never completed, and which continues to haunt me.

And then, of course, the platforms lost their fucking minds and went full fash. The “Epic Poet of Twitter” quit Twitter altogether. Years and years of work was lost, wiped from the servers. And that may have been the biggest lesson of the social story era, one that continues to hold true: if your rely on a platform where they can make an invisible change on the backend, and it completely destroys your story or your business, then you have nothing. It was a hard lesson, and I had to learn it over and over again. Don’t build on land you don’t own.

And now that the AI companies have taken over from the social platforms in their rapacious drive to capture everything, the same lesson holds — when they inevitably decide to change something you rely on, you risk losing it all. You cannot trust platforms as far as you can throw them.

Last year, I moved this newsletter off of Substack. Their well-document Nazi problem was the main reason, but the other motivating factor was a desire to not be subject to the whims of another platform. Kit, while still a platform, feels like a safer bet. Registering your own website, hosting your own content, owning the ground you build on — or at least renting something that you can easily move somewhere else if necessary, it’s not a perfect metaphor — is the move today.

A Short Discursion on Theory

Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics" is an essential text for understanding how the medium of comics works. One of his most famous insights is about the importance of the gutter, the space in between the panels.

That negative space is where the audience uses their imagination to create action, motion, movement, and meaning. Those images and story beats happen in the reader's mind.

The thing that I stumbled onto, the realization that fueled all of my social projects, was the transmedia storytelling, stories that jumped across platforms, function in essentially the same way. Each individual tweet, blog post, update, or episode is a panel, but it's the space in between those updates where the audience, assembling the pieces together, creates meaning for themselves. And because they are creating that meaning, it feels personal, immediately, like they discovered something.

(This, incidentally, is the same mechanic that QAnon and online conspiracy theorists use to ensnare people. But that's a whole different post.)

So for me, the negative space in between the posts, where the audience inserts themselves and creates the meaning, is the soul of transmedia storytelling. But inside of that is a problem: on the internet, negative space can't be tracked, it can't be monetized. We can't get data about what's happening in people's heads. And because the platforms are so hostile toward each other, it was impossible to prove that the story content on one platform drove people to a different platform.

I suppose, now that I sit here and try to imagine a technology that would let us get data from people's heads, that would be extremely scary and much, much, worse.

Okay, theory time over.

Work-n-Play

I’ve always been an adaptations guy. Maybe it’s because my original degree was in theater. Or maybe it’s my neurodivergent special interest. I have a board full of concepts for reimagining classic, public domain stories in different formats, genres, and time periods. And as social storytelling became more untenable, I’ve been looking for different ways of bringing them to life. Ways that don’t require platforms or large budgets or persuading gatekeepers to think outside the box. Ways to bring a story directly to an audience, to play with the intoxicating blend of reality and fiction..

I’ve also been thinking a lot about what drew me to interactive storytelling in the first place. My Sex-Pistols-in-Manchester moment was playing the first Alternate Reality Game in 2001. (One of the other projects on my board is making a podcast about this experience and how it pointed to so much of what the world has become – for better and for worse.)

As the years went on, and I played in and worked on more ARGs, I found there to be a pretty stark divide between the types of people who gravitated toward them — there were the puzzle solvers, who lived to crack codes and hack websites and participate in challenges. And there were the story people, who were content to let the puzzle solvers do the work and were more interested in consuming the narrative across different platforms and filling the negative space with discussion and speculation; I found myself firmly in the latter camp. And indeed one of the shortcomings of ARGs is that they’ve become synonymous with the puzzles, growing more and more complex, while overshadowing the story experience.

Put simply, games too often feel like work. In spite of all our attempts, ARGs never transcended beyond a niche audience because they’re too difficult for most people to find and participate in.

"The Good Captain" and all those other social storytelling experiments grew out of my wondering how to solve this problem. I started thinking about what an "Alternate Reality Game without the Game" would look like. The answers I found to these questions culminated in the interactive design for Lizzie Bennet Diaries. Simply following the story across multiple platforms, planting negative space for the audience to insert themselves into, created the same kind of intense engagement without putting up barriers.

In the last decade, transmedia has withered away as the buzzword of choice, replaced by “immersive.” (Shouts to the rebel scum at No Proscenium!). But immersive as a term has proved just as divisive a descriptor. (Srsly, check out the glossary.)

And immersive can run into a lot of the same challenges that ARGs did. There's a temptation to design for the expert player, not the novice. Rewarding engagement penalizes people who may not feel comfortable, and it takes a lot of thought and intention to make experiences feel inclusive. (In some future post, I'll tell the story about how immersive theater lead directly to learning about my APD.)

It comes down to the same dynamic — games are work. And sometimes, not always but more often than not, work is the opposite of fun. Or rather, work only becomes fun if the context is right.

When the storyletters concept arrived, I began to see it in the same light as "ARG-without-the-G." Could you take something like a murder mystery puzzle game, with all the upsides of experiencing the story through physical artifacts that you could touch and of assembling the story across the negative space -- but without the labor of solving puzzles or cracking mysteries? Could you have a play-at-home interactive game without the game?

That's what we're going to discover, beginning with "Sleepy Hollow, 1998."

So please click the Notify Me button at the Kickstarter pre-launch page and help us throw a party in the negative space.